I was feeling rather unmotivated this morning, and when I get in this state of mind I find myself seeking inspiration.  I started watching a Napoleon Hill original recording on Cosmic Habit Force.  He had such a way with words, I must say.  He goes over so much information in this short lecture my notes started going off the page.  So I decided to look up some of the concepts he mentioned and came across his approach to strengthening goals through the Master Mind group. 

I have written before on the Power of 8, a group visioning process developed by Lynne McTaggert designed to help with healing.  This has been a dream of mine to create such a group.  
So, I was excited to happen upon Napoleon Hill's Master Mind group, in which a group of people would help energize each others goals.   Check out the blog link here.

This felt particularly relevant this month as we are working together to remove blocks and develop habits of envisioning our own success.  The power of the group cannot be estimated.  So find a supportive group to help you achieve health and wealth through learning to envision what you want instead of what you don't want.

Join us tonight as we share in some practices to Remove Blocks and Envision Success.
Bring your goals so we can energize them together.

​Abigail Larrison is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Removing Blocks_H2Bcr3@tiv32
Time: Apr 12, 2022 05:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

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There are some spiritual practices, that when moving an idea into action, during those early phases, it is said not to speak to anyone about it.  For myself, when I get an inspired idea, I always want to share it.  Inspired ideas just feel good.

So why do we have to keep them to ourselves?  Mainly because most people naturally inject doubt or discouragement.  This can be done for a number of reasons. 

For one, many people live a fear-based life, one in which risks are rare, and the right action is always the safe one.  Creative endeavors usually mean breaking off the beaten path, and stepping out on our own.  They can be risky, so our friends and loved ones who discourage us really think they have our best interests at heart.  However this discouragement can sap our energy and drain the enthusiasm out of our projects.

Another trap is jealousy.  We live in a competitive society.  People are vying for success, and in many people's minds it is a zero sum game, that is if you win, someone else has to lose.  So if you are successful, I am in turn, unsuccessful.  This is a false belief that has to be smashed in all of us.  We have to start living in a cooperative society where we lift each other up and support each others' success.  

This next session we will focus on learning how to create those positive images of our own success, but more importantly, in positively energizing and supporting our peers and neighbors in their own success.  We will learn how to encourage in a healthy way, and how to eliminate jealousy and replace it with loving support and enthusiasm for the success of others.  

Please join us Tuesday April 12th for this second session in our How 2B Cr3@t1v3 mini-course focused on removing blocks so that we can successfully fulfill our creative goals.

I was listening to a podcast the other day talking about achieving our goals, and what blocks us.  One idea that spoke volumes to me, was the concept of The Energy of Incompletion.  This, the speaker explained, was the drag on our energy that unfinished projects carry.  They weigh on us and paralyze us, making it impossible to move forward.   

I looked at my list of hundreds of projects that were in the works.  I tripped over the toilet that was waiting for it's wax ring.  I peered across the table at the lightbulb that I had been intending to replace for weeks now.  Uugh, no wonder I am feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed.  I need to get unstuck! Luckily I have several tools in my spiritual toolbox. 

So let's do some spring cleaning and clear away the blocks so these projects can get done.

What are you wanting to achieve?
What have you been putting off that you desire to create?
What projects are you wanting to bring to completion?
​
This month we will host a series of energy techniques designed to help clear the blocks to achieving success.  Emotional blocks, limiting beliefs, and subconscious fears are very real barriers to our abilities to achieve our goals.  

Sessions will be held online from 5PM to 6PM
Bring your project goals, and or be prepared to write the together with us.

Join us online, or in person at the Community House, 2223 N. Sheridan Rd.  

​Abigail Larrison is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Removing Blocks to Success
Time: Apr 5, 2022 05:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

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For our full moon session, we took the opportunity to examine our hearts desires, how those desires reflected our values.  Finally, we looked at our goals, focusing on a challenging goals that seemed blocked.  We examined how this goal and actions were in alignment with our values.  

My personal experience bumped up against one area of the Community House project that has been particularly stubborn in its emergence has been the First Apprentice program.   The session gave me new insights and created a breakthrough in my thinking.  I am now moving forward with the project in a new way, one that is in integrity with the entire approach of the Community House project--one of emergence, and co-creation.  You can see our progress here.

Perhaps the questions shared by Carissa can help you with your stubborn blocks as well.

The first question asked to consider what I desired in my life, to tune into desire, I used attraction.  So ask yourself...

Question 1.  What Are My Desires?
What am I drawn towards, what pulls me in, what am I attracted to? These can be real or imagined. It could be a loving relationship, a fancy house, a successful career, lots of money, a passport full of stamps. It could be an aspect of someone's personality.

If you get stuck. You can try asking yourself any of these questions:
Are there any achievements that you wish you’ve attained? What?
Anyone you look up too? Why? 
Anyone you're jealous of? Why? 

Remember, no judging yourself, don’t worry if it seems shallow or egotistical etc, no right or wrong answers

Question 2.  Now Go Deeper
Ask Yourself:
If you had that which you are drawn to or desire, what would that mean? What would that look like? 
What would your life look like?  What would you get out of this?  

Question 3.  Next Layer Down
If you got all those "results" what would that mean? What would that look like?

These questions are meant to connect you to the things you value.  Look for the themes, for example, I identified Freedom, Fulfillment, and Flexibility.  I would underline those words.
I’m also scanning and taking a mental note of any patterns and and any priorities emerging. I've identified being with loved ones and meaningful experiences.

FInal Question and Goal Challenge

Ok, so lets take a minute and briefly write down a life goal that you currently have, big or little. A goal that just won’t seem to budge, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to make progress with this goal.

Below the goal you've written down, write out the list of the words you've underlined from the previous journal question along with any themes you identified.
For example: Freedom, Fulfillment, Flexibility, Being with loved ones and Meaningful experiences

Are these goals in alignment with your values? With what lights you up? 

Ask yourself:
-If they are in alignment, has there been any areas where you might have thwarted the progression of this goal? And if you are sabotaging that goal what can you do differently? If you are not sabotaging that goal is there another way to get these values and desires in your life fulfilled? Is there another way? What is it?

-If they are not in alignment then what are some goals that you’d like to set right now that incorporate the desires you’ve identified today?

I hope you will join us for our next new moon session with Susan Worrell.  I am looking forward to more insights and breakthroughs with you.  Living a life in alignment with my values means living my best life.  This is the type of work that makes all the difference.  So join us in learning to live your best life.

One of the elements of our session this month is right speech.  Am I saying what I need to say?  Am I in integrity in my speech?

This resonated for me throughout this past week, and perhaps it will for you as you  pick up this practice of becoming aware of how your speech aligns with your intentions and values.

Here are the questions from last weeks session.  Please enjoy the practice of becoming aware of speech.

Contemplate each and then journal.  Do this with a friend and share your insights for a deeper experience.

Question 1.
What do I WANT to say when someone asks me how I’m doing/what’s new/etc.?
-What do I ACTUALLY say when someone asks me how I’m doing/what’s new/etc?
*Are there any patterns? Are there any patterns with a particular person or a specific type of person?

Question 2.
How do I feel WHILE I'm interacting with others? Physically, Spiritually, Emotionally
Are you fully engaged and hanging on their every word or are you checked out? Is your mind racing with thoughts? Are there any common themes about where your mind and thoughts go? Are there particular people you tend to “check out” with or be more present with?

How do I feel AFTER I've interacted with others? Physically, Spiritually, Emotionally 
What are the a patterns here? 

​Question 3.
What topics are generally discussed when I’m interacting with others? Is there a theme in conversation?  What do I really want to talk about versus what I am talking about?  
Consider the form of the conversation. 

Question 4.
Where might you be engaging in ways that are out of integrity.  What are your recurring patterns
-Not voicing opinions/not letting others voice their opinions
-Interrupting/being interrupted
-Saying things you don't mean and/or white lies
-Saying yes when you want to say no
-Saying no when you want to say yes
- Being intimidated/Intimidating others
-Apologizing when not necessary
-Not setting boundaries/violating others boundaries
-Name-calling/bulling
-Raising your voice
-Shutting down/stonewalling
-Closed off body language
-“Punishing” others indirectly instead of verbally addressing a problem/concern
-Expecting others to read your mind
-Laughing at jokes you don't understand
-Accepting responsibility for mistakes that are not your own
-Accepting praise or credit for for someone else's “work” or full credit for a collaboration

​​Our final exercise led by Carissa was to examine a situation, starting with just one, in which you have been out of integrity in your speech and consider how to become in greater alignment with what you truly want and believe.

In choosing the situation consider one in which you have a difficult time being your most authentic self.  Now, imagine yourself being in full integrity the next time you interact with the person.  What would that look like?  What would that feel like?  Allow yourself to experience this before you have the next interaction, and see if anything changes.

Finally, create an authenticity related mantra or self affirming statement.

How do habits of mind become formed.  It is a developmental neural process based on repeated experience, repeated thought patterns, and repeated actions.  All of this is tied in to the natural processes of neural plasticity.

One thing I find fascinating in my experience studying the brain, is how attention is a key component in the process of creating the networks.  When we pay attention, we are actually shifting the blood flow in our own brain.  We are causing neurite outgrowth, the formation of new neural connections.  We are changing our brain based on what we pay attention to.

Something that the neuroscience community talks less about, is who or what is directing the attention?  That is where the concepts of a higher self become points of scientific inquiry.  Here we start to tread new ground in neuroscience and enter into the arena of consciousness studies. 

During our second session of the SYC course, we focused on becoming aware of how we were exerting our mental energy.  Knowing that this is a powerful and valuable asset.  Our attention is being vied for, it is actually being paid for by advertisers and social media outlets.  Why is it so precious?  Clearly, it is the essence of our power.   What I am paying attention to is shaping my brain and my reality?

We then talked about aligning our thinking with our core values.  This is a lot harder than you might think.  The problem for most of us is that we have incredibly bad habits of mind.  Our thinking goes straight to the negative.  We have repeatedly created blocks to accessing our own power.

How do I begin to turn my ship towards my deep inner vision?  Well, at first you might just start a process I call doggie training.  Just like training a dog, you repeat a new thought over and over.  Repeating phrases will lay down tracts in your brain that can help you to start to choose what you want.

Here is one I suggest you can begin with:

"Is this thought aligned with my core values?"

Try this for a week.  Keep repeating this phrase throughout the day as you notice your thoughts.  Then you may find that as you see a thought not aligned with your values, you can choose to let it go, or even ask yourself the next question.  

"What more helpful thought is there for me to be in alignment?"

Wait and see what shows up.  Enjoy exploring your thinking landscape my friends!

We have been working with conflicting beliefs and trying to focus in on those beliefs that we want to nurture.  The importance here is to remember our thoughts matter, but we are not victim to them.  

In his seminar, discussing conflicting thoughts, Eckart Tolle gives a nice description of how the inner voice is a thought that lives as a tiny field of energy that we can either feed with our attention, or simply let pass.

The (inner) voice is thought formations. These are energy. Every thought is an energy field, and each thought formation wants to draw your attention, suck it up into itself. 
"Come here," and the other [thought] says, "No, come here."
It may sound a little spooky, but it is not spooky,  You can regard a thought almost as an entity,   Not a physical entity, but an energetic entity.
That lives there, it has a life span, and some thoughts persist for a long time,  and certain thought patterns are also entities that can shift and take on one form, and then another form.
So every thought is a little entity or energy field.
[When you identify with it it draws your focus] It wants to draw all your attention in, because the more attention it can draw in, the more it grows.  It wants to grow. Like everything, it doesn’t want to disappear.  It is for you to know, when this happens. 
Who am I? Are you this voice or that voice? No, I am aware of these voices.

So when we become aware we have distance from our thoughts and can chose which thoughts to energize as they support our goals and healthy beliefs.

I was listening to Abraham Hicks, and she briefly talked about the difference in energy in a belief versus when you just "know" something.  

She states:

Knowing has less resistance than belief.
Doubt has a lot of resistance, belief still has sometimes, some particles of resistance, but knowing has no resistance.

So how do we know something.  It isn't a mental thing, it is the connection to our core, our higher self.  It is connected to our purpose, and when we know there is no alternate.

Eckhart Tolle talks about the conflicting inner voices, versus knowing here.  It is a very interesting experience, in that when he has the experience of knowing there is no conflicting voice present.  It simply is there calling him to do this.

"What am I supposed to do in life?  What is my real life mission?  Sometimes you get paralyzed and then the mind comes up with all the reasons not to try something..
Instead of looking for the answer through the movement of thought-- there is never any real answer you arrive at through the movement of thought.
You must first become present. then at some point, a thought may come that has a different energy field to it. A thought that you feel, yes, that’s it.  There is a certain realization that comes that may finally take the form of a thought, for example when I was living in Europe and I had the thought, I have to leave.  THere wasn’t another thought that said, “No I should stay”. So the question is, what really matters here is realizing that you are not this voice or that voice, you are something deeper, you are the awareness of the presence.
Watch the full conversation here.  
https://youtu.be/QpBOcw5WQPg

Listening to this reminded me of my own experience with starting the Community House.  I had been thinking of what I could do with the  money from my inheritance, and an idea would come, and I would say inwardly,

"I could do this....with the money."
and then the inner voice would say,
"What else are you going to do with the money?"
and then I would agree,
"Right, what else am I going to do with the money?"

So this went on several times, with fleeting ideas, and then the Community House became available.  Again my head created the phrase, "What else are you going to do with the money!"  And this time there was no response.  Why?  Because the Community House was the true option.

​One of the favorite things of many that Mary Sise shared in the presentation on EFT (or Tapping) was that when we clean up our beliefs we can be more effective in our lives.

“The work is to figure out what the [source of the negative emotional] energy is in there…often times where it’s stuck, just shows us…like if you were bullied, you would be triggered by bullies today…and you can clear that up…but that doesn’t mean that a bully will be your best friend, it is just that you won’t react.  You will be able to take [the right] action.  And when you do take action it will not seem too intense to the rest of the world.  It will be soul action rather than reaction out of your wound action.

“And that is why you become more powerful on the planet, because people can hear it in a different way.  And you watch, your influence will shift.

“I know who you are, I know your light, I know your divinity in form.  Because I know that about me. , and I know that about everyone…and I know bad things happened, and it wasn’t great, but let’s get it cleaned up so that all of you can be here. So you can be the light that you came here to be.

“You clean up all your stuff, you just have to walk on this planet, and you will make a difference…a big difference!”
 
Truly when we are talking our talk (and that is our inner talk here) we are in integrity, and therefore can communicate more clearly.  We are speaking not just what we think others want to hear, but what we truly believe.

The negative beliefs are so sneaky, and we rarely allow ourselves time to really be aware of what they are saying.  The first step is bringing all the beliefs into the light.  We did that by starting a list.  We can do that daily as we notice fearful beliefs starting to surface.

What we want to do is to replace our fearful beliefs with the joyful beliefs aligned with our desires.  We want to focus on deep desires, desires of the higher aspects of the self, not just material desires.  When we are focused on those “heart centered” desires, we will have loads of support from the universe.  We will be working with the quantum aspect of the world.
  
Excerpt From: Free Will, Quantum Science, Heart Consciousness, and Creativity
By Amit Goswami, PhD

In Order to Change Your Life
If you want to change your life today—to make it radically different tomorrow—you must engage in the creative process. This process requires the ability to respond without sifting through past memories. It also requires cohesiveness of intention, and purposefulness. You really have to wake up to the fact that you are not a machine randomly responding to chance events in the world. You are actually a purposeful, embodied consciousness.

The universe has a purpose; it evolves in order to make better and better representations of love, beauty, justice, truth, good­ness—all those things that Plato called archetypes. When you wake up to this purposefulness, you become focused.
If you don’t tune in to the purposefulness of the universe, it all seems meaningless and you risk becoming hedonistic—you explore things that are pleasurable and avoid things that are painful. Your life will be driven by ordinary dreams—a big house, an expensive car, and other physical and material pleasures. But the real American Dream is about the pursuit of happiness, not pleasure. What’s the difference? Too much pleasure always ends up in pain. But have you ever had too much happiness?


https://drive.google.com/file/d/15cVPArOGxlV5PRUnNTCAuzWgthEPyY6P/view?usp=sharing
​ 

Today's first introductory session to our course Strengthening the Spiritual Core presented the main components of our next three months of self-exploration: the three aspects of the human being - the Intellectual Life, or mental life - the Feeling Life, the heart center - and the life of the Will, the act of creating.

Our first month is focused on the mental life.  This is the realm of beliefs and values.  We started our session by looking at some of the beliefs we hold about ourselves and others, and also beliefs about the world.  We looked at where these beliefs were not supporting our best interest.  It is interesting to see how our own inner beliefs can be in conflict with each other.  

This first month we will do some work to try to identify and strengthen our healthy beliefs and core values.  This is such important work.

I was looking over some of my notes from earlier on this topic, and came across an article on Brene Brown from Forbes magazine.  One of her core factors for being a leader is based on this same idea.  She writes:

​Living Your Values (Rather Than Simply Professing Them)
Get clear on what you believe and check that your intentions, words, thoughts and behaviors align with your beliefs. Name your values by writing them down. Then identify core behaviors that represent how you might live those values. And, what are the behaviors that tell you that you’re off course?
Courageous leaders who live their values instead of just talking about them are never silent about hard things. For example, courageous leaders do not partake in willful blindness. As a leader, you must be aware of what is going on around you. You must realize when to act and know that sometimes you need to act in difficult situations. It takes courage to recognize these opportunities for leadership and to set an example for your team. Making decisions that honor your values will be tough because doing the right thing is rarely easy.

We are all leaders in our own lives.  We become leaders when I recognize what we want and move towards it.  When we use our own inner compass to guide our decisions and actions rather than relying on on others to decide for us.

We hope you can  join us for our continuing conversation on how to connect to our deep inner purpose through strengthening our connection to who we truly are and who we want to be in the world.

Please Join us Tuesday January 4th at 7PM CST. 

Abigail Larrison is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Abigail Larrison's Zoom Meeting
Time: Jan 4, 2022 07:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

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