• I Need a Sign

    • May 16, 2023 9:00 pm
    Dearest Readers,

    Last week, a client of mine said, “I need a sign!” They were feeling stuck in a pattern and looking for a way out.

    Being a person who looks for signs and spiritual messages when things are tough, I could relate. I’m also someone who’s received signs and spiritual messages without looking and I wrote about this in the last Healing Journey Letter.

    At the very beginning of my own healing journey, it was suggested that I “look for the coincidences” as evidence that a Higher Power was at work in my life. Nearly 25 years later, I’m still taking this suggestion.

    One of my most faithful sign-bringers is Woodpecker and I’ve written several times about how this comical bird’s coincidental materialization reassures me that I Am Known.

    On a retreat I was leading last month, I shared with the group that I’d had yet another woodpecker encounter  the week before and one of the women spoke up, pointing to the window excitedly and proclaiming, “There was a woodpecker right out there this morning!”

    Since then, I have literally been bombarded by woodpeckers. (Okay, not literally.)

    For many mornings in the last few weeks, I’ve been waking up to the bird’s percussive hammering. I leave the house and hear the rat-a-tat-tat echoing in the neighbourhood. I arrive home and the rhythmic patter is again sounding somewhere in the nearby trees. On several occasions, the bird has been close enough to see, making its way around a nearby trunk or flying from one tree to another in our yard.

    A few days ago, not one but two woodpeckers were pecking at the trees right outside the kitchen window. I felt like my “sign” had become a Times Square billboard.

    I watched in awe as the pair jabbed at rotten bark and darker crevices. I marveled at the precision of their work and the singular markings on their feathers.

    My heart felt happy and my day got better.

    *

    After I wrote the above sentence yesterday, I saved the Letter and went to work.

    On the way home from work, I stopped and got gas.

    Later, after an evening walk, I noticed the fuel door was still open and the gas cap was missing. Ooops! I had forgotten to close the fuel door and I’d driven away with the cap on top of the car.

    I got in the car and drove slowly back to the gas station, looking for the gas cap on the road.

    I spotted it, pulled over, got out, picked it up.

    A man, mowing his lawn, saw me and shrugged, puzzled by my action.

    “It’s my gas cap!” I shouted above the mower.

    He couldn’t hear, turned the mower off and walked over. I repeated what I’d said.

    “That’s funny. The same thing happened to my wife this afternoon.”

    “What?!”

    “Yeah. She left the fuel door open, gas cap dangling. Some guy flashed his lights to indicate for her to stop.”

    “That just happened to your wife today?” I asked.

    “Yup.”

    Okay, seriously. What are the chances that my gas cap falls off the car in front of the house of a guy who just happens to be outside when I come by and whose wife had the exact same thing happen to her on that day?

    In a world that sometimes seems to have gone completely mad, when the cauldron of human hatred and fear seems ever closer to boiling over, I look for the coincidences to land me back in the joyful notion that We Are Known.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Animal Medicine

    • February 28, 2023 2:36 pm
    Dearest Readers,

    Since publishing my memoir, I’ve been taking time to discern my next creative project. Write something new? What about all the stories that didn’t make it into the book? I have a mountain of them.

    I thought maybe I could publish the occasional piece here. The story below, about an encounter with a beaver, got cut out of the memoir because one of the editors said, “Too many animals!”

    There were a lot of animal stories. Encounters with woodpeckers and bears and deer and armadillos and beavers have always made me feel as though the Cosmos is conscious of me. When I am at my lowest, animals show up, and it always feels like I’m being reassured by a Loving Force.

    Here is the story of The Beaver:

    Have you seen the TV movie adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge? The Mayor, played by Ciarán Hinds, has made some terrible decisions, most of them while drinking. His protégé, Donald Farfrae, on the other hand, is a more saintly man, with very few troubles or fears.

    One evening, the Mayor confides in Farfrae and shares honestly with the young man about his despair. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

    “… I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from … when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.”

    “Ah, now, I never feel like it,” said Farfrae.

    “Then pray to God that you never may, young man.”

    When I was watching this scene in the film, I fully expected the young man to say, “Ah, yes, I understand.” But he says the opposite. This dropped my jaw.

    You mean there are actually people out there who have no idea what that kind of hopelessness feels like?

    Those of us who do understand these black, gloomy fits know well how hard it is to cope with them. Sometimes there is no remedy but to ride them out.

    On a day when I was in the kind of despair that the Mayor described, I walked to the Yukon River for relief. Nature is often one of the surest ways to lift the blackness of hell and I knew being outside would help.

    I found a bench by a bend in the river and began to pray. I remember saying the words, “Take me, God, I am willing to die.”

    SLAP!

    I opened my eyes. A beaver was in the water right in front of me.

    SPLASH!

    It dove underwater and I watched it resurface a few feet further upriver.

    Suddenly, my self-pity evaporated. The Beaver had woken me up.

    In that moment, it was as though I’d swallowed a fast-acting miracle. I became willing to live.

    —

    That’s a super-abridged version of the story but you get the idea. Reflecting on it now, I am again struck by what I call Impeccable Timing. The slap of the beaver’s tail at the instant when I “cursed the day that gave me birth.” I wasn’t alone, I was known.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Un-Mask the Fear

    • August 13, 2020 12:24 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    The last Healing Journey letter was written at the end of March when the idea of wearing masks in public was unthinkable. Now we are in August and saying, “Nice mask!” to each other and comparing fabric and patterns. Humans are, if nothing else, pretty adaptable creatures, no?

    I’ve noticed that the lockdown has divided some of us into two camps: one, for whom the isolation is anxiety-producing, and the other for whom it is a relief.

    I tend to fall mostly into the second camp.

    Not that I’ve been isolated very much. I was in self-isolation for three weeks when I thought I had the virus but after I finally tested negative (way back in April when it took 9 days to get results), I was able to go back to work at the long-term care home and have been around people pretty much every day since then.

    Those three weeks in isolation were very healing. The everyday anxiousness I feel at just having to participate in life went away. I don’t have to go anywhere? Do anything? Ahhhhh….

    I’ve been hearing from some of you that you feel the same way: the forced isolation has relieved your own felt-sense of a pressurized world.

    And then there are those of you who are really feeling the loneliness. The lack of social connection has been getting to you and you feel like you’re climbing the walls. It’s been all you can do to stay sane in a situation some of you have likened to being in prison.

    (There might actually be a third camp: those of you who live alone and are retired and life hasn’t changed much for you. Regardless, it’s a time of change for everyone, whether personally or globally.)

    There was a time in my life when I didn’t even know I felt anxious about day-to-day living. The anxiousness was masked behind overachieving and pushing myself. It was only when I began to do inner work that I realized my insides are often churning. About what? Oh, you name it. Just about anything and everything.

    Ironically, the more conscious I’ve become and the more healing I’ve experienced, the more the anxious state has been exposed. It’s probably not the best advertisement for waking up, is it? ‘Get on the spiritual journey, folks, and you will discover how neurotic you really are!’

    But ‘un-masking’ the fear has been a life-saver.

    The literal masks we’re now wearing are also life-savers but they are a nuisance and, for some, a source of stress. Despite the attempt at making them fashionable, masks hide our smiles and facial expressions, which connect us to one another in important ways. (On the plus side, masks hide yawns and spinach in your teeth.)

    Like the virus-prevention mask hiding the smile and the yawn (and the spinach), the masks of overachieving and ‘pushing through it’ can be hiding an anxious or a fearful part of the self. When I removed these protective outer masks, i.e. when I began to slow down, get quiet and ‘check in’, I began to discover what was really going on inside of me.

    Becoming conscious of the fear actually enabled me to attend to what was underneath it: a desire for reassurance, support and self-acceptance. At one time, I would have died before admitting that I was afraid of life but admitting to the fearand exposing it continues to reduce the power it holds over me and provides me with an ongoing source of courage.

    When I leave the long-term care home after hours of wearing a mask and finally get to pull it off as I cross the parking lot, I cannot tell you how liberating it feels. The fresh air on my face is like a kiss from God. When I remove the mask of ‘having it all together’ and share the fear, I feel a similar kind of freedom. The relief is like a Cosmic Thumbs-up.

    So let’s keep our masks on to prevent the spread of the virus and let’s keep un-masking to discover ourselves. Sometimes what’s hiding underneath is actually what connects us to one another.

    Keep G(r)o(w)ing

    • August 7, 2020 1:36 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    How are you doing? Really, how are you? My own emotions have been on a rollercoaster ride, mostly stabilized in the last week, but definitely up and down. When I am up, I wonder about you, how you’re feeling about the changes in your personal life and in the world, how you’re coping with it all.

    When I have these moments, when I wonder about you and if you’re okay, my own fear and anxiety decrease. Thinking of others is such a healing practice. So is caring for others. As the spiritual care worker in a long-term care facility, I am considered an ‘essential service’, and when I am with a resident, there is no thought of myself. The fearful, anxious thoughts disappear.

    Deep Presence brings relief.

    If you read the last Letter, you will remember my account of the Woodpecker, appearing at just the right moments in time to remind me that the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It. Three days ago, I arrived back at the house after an endorphin-producing run to the rat-a-tat-tat of the Woodpecker. She was in the tree above our driveway and I stood and watched her hammer her head into the trunk at rapid-fire speed.

    Impeccable Timing brings relief.

    The above photograph of the snowdrops is evidence of a miracle, really, since the entire front garden of our house was dug up last fall to fix a leaky basement. All of the soil was removed, creating a 6-or-7-foot trench around the wall of the house. The dirt that had been removed was then dumped back in the trench to re-fill it. The result was a big, uneven pile of mud. Now, after a long winter, those snowdrops you see in the photo pushed up through the disturbed ground in the exact same spot as they always do, year-after-year. How?

    Life Finds a Way.

    In times of crisis, in times of despair, in times of great fear and crippling anxiety, I look to these experiences of Deep Presence, Impeccable Timing and the Unstoppable Life-Force Energy to keep me going and to keep me growing.

    And I think of you, and hope that you are accessing your own inner resources and outer practices to keep going and growing, one moment at a time.

    From the Fires of Love,

    Celia

    We Are Known

    • March 25, 2020 9:57 am


     Dearest Readers,

    I would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year. Can you believe it’s been twenty years since Y2K? Astonishing.

    Maybe I’m slow but it only occurred to me very recently that 2020 is a play on ’20/20′.

    ’20/20 vision’ and ‘hindsight is 20/20’ bring to mind a more clear way of seeing. How could we move into this new decade with a new kind of clarity? Perhaps by seeing ourselves not simply as individuals but as component parts of a Cosmic Oneness. Whether you are religious and believe that we are all Children of God or spiritual and believe that we are All One or secular/scientific and understand that we all share the same DNA, the fact remains: we are all intimately connected. We are not separate from one another.

    This fact was brought home to me again and again when I attended an amazing conference in San Jose, CA called Science and Non-Duality (SAND) this past October 2019. The organizers of the conference are a dynamic couple who had a desire to share with others their mutual love of science and mysticism and set about creating a conference where folks could come together to celebrate the mysteries and wonders of both.

    The pairing of science, with its fact-based approach, and spirituality, with its wisdom-based knowing, excites me almost like nothing else. When I was very little, I used to fall asleep by pressing my fists into my eyes so that I could view the kaleidoscope of colours that the pressure produced. When I did this, I somehow felt not only that I was seeing God but that God was living inside of me. In other words, my very first experience of God looked something like this:

    A number of the guest speakers at the SAND conference were scientists who spend their research time asking the question ‘Is the Universe conscious?’ In other words, does that kaleidoscope of colours have a consciousness? Does it know itself? Does it know me? Does it know, period?

    For me, the answer to these questions is a roof-top shouting ‘YES’. For how can the Mechanism Behind Consciousness not have consciousness itself? (The ancient yogis believe that ‘God’ is Consciousness itself.)


    Science cannot yet explain consciousness (why we have it, where it comes from, what it even is) and so it remains the greatest mystery. Religion and spirituality fill in the answers. We get to decide for ourselves.

    Einstein supposedly said something like, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” To that end, either everything has consciousness or nothing does. Either the Universe is conscious (of itself, of me and you and all that is) or it’s not.

    Living life as though the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It makes life pretty interesting. It also addresses existential loneliness or the feeling that I am alone and unloved.

    On an evening walk some years ago, I was stopped short by a large scattering of wood chips on the sidewalk. I looked up to see what had caused the mess and saw perfect, round holes in the tree, as if a large drill-bit had punched in and out of the bark. The very next day, when I passed the same tree I saw a woodpecker hammering its head in and out of the tree at rapid speed. I actually laughed out loud. No wonder an animation artist had invented Woody the Woodpecker, a comical, ridiculous bird!

    I don’t know how long I watched that woodpecker. It had me completely mesmerized. I was transported by the power it had in its little head to bore holes in trees, by its determination to feed itself, by the absolute phenomenon of its being. By simply by observing the humble woodpecker, I had been awakened to something far greater than my own self-centered thoughts.

    The amazing thing is, Woodpecker has continued to show up in my life, seemingly just when I need it. On more than one occasion, when I’ve been in a funk, the bird appears. Just this past July, when I was feeling despair at the state of the world, criticizing myself for being imperfect, tired of life in general, Woodpecker stopped me as I walked through a ravine to get to my destination. I first heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the beak-against-trunk and then saw it, high in a branch of an old maple. “I’m here,” it said. 

    I wrote the above paragraph about five days ago. Two days ago, I was walking on the grey streets of the town where I live, feeling extremely melancholy. My mood had dipped, as it does, and I was heading to the shores of Lake Ontario for a boost. I caught a flash of a bird flying by and looked to the tree where I saw it land. Woodpecker. “I’m here,” it said.

    Call these encounters coincidence. Call them nothing at all. Or call them a form of conscious contact from a Conscious Universe. When I choose the latter way of seeing I am bolstered by the notion that every conceivable thing is fused with Knowing. That means that I am Known. And You are Known. And We are Known. Kind of radical, know?

    May this Knowing be the foundation of our 20/20 vision.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    The Return

    • February 18, 2018 10:48 am

    Dearest Readers,

    Resisting Love, the last blog post, elicited a number of heartfelt responses. One woman’s comment struck me as particularly pressing.

    She wrote:

    “I appreciate the message of acceptance and I have to admit I was left wanting more….more about how….how to accept…how to stay open…..how to live and trust and evolve….”

    Isn’t this the million dollar question for all of us? How? How? How do we do it? How do we really live? Not just cope or get by or survive the daily struggle but really embrace Life fully and joyfully, living as though each day were our very last?

    There is no One Manual. There are many manuals to choose from to help guide us but despite being given great wisdom from the sacred scriptures of our ancient cultures and having multiple modern-day self-help books from which to choose, none of us really knows what we’re doing. We are all just figuring it out as we go.

    This is really something, isn’t it? We are all trying so hard to get this Life Thing right. And it isn’t easy! Being human is very confusing. Why did that happen? What am I supposed to do about this? What do I do with all of these thoughts? How do I handle my emotions? Am I doing enough?

    Without an Instruction Booklet we pretty much just carry on the best we can. And we really are all doing the best we can. It might not seem that way sometimes and yet this is where ‘how to accept’ comes in. How would it be for me to accept that we are all doing the best we can with what we’ve got?

    The inner perfectionist balks. Are you kidding me? she says. He is not doing his best and she could be doing way better.

    There is no Acceptance when I am expecting everyone to be operating at a perfect level of human awareness and behaviour. Acceptance requires that I let go of unrealistic expectations and remember that just like me that person is trying to figure out how to live.

    ‘How to stay open’ is just as challenging. Staying open means leaving myself vulnerable to being rejected and getting hurt. Staying open means I will not be in control of the situation. This is unthinkable. The inner protector says, It is better to armour up and shut down. But being numb doesn’t actually feel all that great. What to do?

    The ‘How’ of anything always starts with a conscious decision. I am deciding to practice staying open even though I am afraid to let go of my desire for control. Once we make the decision, it then becomes a little bit easier to take the necessary action, in this case welcoming the fear of rejection.

    That sounds really unpleasant. Welcome the fear of rejection? Are you nuts?

    The only way I can possibly welcome anything this uncomfortable is by cultivating a Deeper Understanding of Who I Am. This is where ‘how to live and trust and evolve’ comes in.

    If I am 100% identified with my temporary nature, my little finite human life, then I will experience all hurt and rejection as being about me, about my person, as my fault. This misguided identification will then result in shameful feelings, which, in turn, produce the controlling, perfectionist, armoured-up person living in fear and anxiety.

    Cultivating a Deeper Understanding of Who I Am involves dis-identifying with what I think and feel and desire. Take note, I did not say annihilate. Thoughts and feelings and desires are natural, human, and necessary and I am not trying to get rid of them (and believe me, I have tried).

    I am simply trying overcome the false notion that my thoughts, feelings and desires are the sum total of my being because when I mistake these instincts for my True Identity, I suffer.

    But if I am not what I think, feel and desire then who am I? What is my True Identity?

    As I wrote in the last post, Who We Are is nothing less than The Evolving Manifestation of the Mysterious Energy Creating and Sustaining All Things at Every Conceivable Level of Physical and Non-Physical Reality (aka ‘God’).

    The human challenge is that we cannot Know This with our intellect. This Knowing comes from a place in us that is beyond the intellectual mind and it is only by cultivating This Knowing through formal or informal practices like prayer and meditation (in any and all forms) that This Knowing becomes intuitive (oh, and studying astrophysics helps, too).

    Once this intuitive connection happens, the How is more readily accessible because there remains only one, simple action left to take: The Return.

    The Action of Returning is key to accepting, staying open, living, trusting and evolving. And it’s not too difficult, though it does require vigilance. Every single time I realize that I’ve forgotten Who I Really Am, that I’ve become identified with my thoughts, feelings and desires, I return to the Deeper Understanding of My Being, my True Identity.

    How often do I practice The Return? A hundred million times a day.

    Whenever I realize I’ve disappeared, forgotten, resisted, distracted, escaped, left the building, I return, return, return.

    To what am I returning? To That Which I Already Am.

    Yes, my anger, fear, self-loathing, doubt, insecurity, jealousy, resentment is still there. This is my humanness and I will never outrun it (and I do still try). But what we are returning to is far deeper than our humanness, it is That Which Makes Us Human.

    From the fires of Love,

    Celia

    I am

    • June 19, 2010 9:39 am

    Dearest Readers,

    Here on the ashram life is quite simple.  Waken early, meditate, chant, practice yoga for the body, eat, do service, study, more yoga, eat again, meditate again, study some more and bed. Nothing complicated about that.

    But the study, well, I wouldn’t say it’s complicated, rather it is decidedly simple but it is not easy. For here we study the Ultimate Reality and becoming that which we already are: the manifestation of Pure Consciousness.

    Yup, told ya it was simple.

    Inspiring Message of the Day:     Who am I really? I am a human being, yes, and I, too, am a part of the Great I Am, the Power of Oneness Back of All Things. When I remember this my fear is relinquished.