Remember the Force.

Every where, in every way life force is pulsing, beaming, streaming. It is our fuel and it is our driver. Plug in to the flow with attention and intention and enjoy the ride.

One Love Nuggets. Mmm mmm good. Find more here.

Be The Big Love

"Creating an extraordinary existence depends upon the energy that we select to weave into the fabric of our life.... the continual attraction and encompassing of higher energy that increases the vitality of our life."
Rudi–Behind the Cosmic Curtain

As I sit down to write today, I am feeling the metaphoric power of life in the desert. Sometimes our inner and outer teachings get so hot! The heat of the fire is searing, "beastly," (as a visitor to Tucson once remarked). It is at this point some say, "I am outta' here." We bail on a relationship or challenging situation just when staying in the fire would bring break through into new beauty and power. If we allow it, the heat can quicken us; the burn, enlighten us - transmute us. Is it any wonder that fire is cross culturally an element of transformation?

July in Tucson reflects this energy. If we are willing to stick around and keep showing up (just when we think it could not get any hotter), the monsoons arrive - quenching the thirsty earth. Monsoons are glorious. Cacti fruit and bloom in bright, amazing colors, rainbow sunsets delight, creeks flow again and the golden twilight opens portals into new dimensions...

It is from this beautifully satiated, hot, breakthrough place, that I bring you The Big Love.

Disclaimer: As usual, do not believe a word I say. Feel what rings true in your heart. The Big Love is not gushy, mushy, woo woo. It is not always comfortable, or enjoyable. It can get hot, even intolerable to the parts of us that need to burn and die, to the egoic cling-on hold to all that does not serve our evolution.

The Big Love is a growing machine. It wants our Big Life, our Divine Life, our most ALIVE LIVING. It is not for the faint of heart or multi-dimensionally lazy.

Over the past few weeks, the Big Love has been the recurring theme-thread that wove through over a dozen intuitive sessions in my work as well as many personal conversations. The cultural Dreaming clear, the message so strong; shown to me over and over again; "Be the Big Love". While the applications were different, the remedy was the same: "Be the Big Love."

Everybody wants a lived experience of being the Big Love. And why not? The Big Love is our natural state. It is what we are born for, wired for...it's what we belong to and where we belong. It's our most primal existence. It is a relaxation in our nervous systems, where we are at rest, at home in the Source. Being the Big Love creates a state of presence in the play of consciousness where the mind and senses, in full color and flavor, bloom as servants of the heart. The Big Love is the current of grace we ride through the sea of intuition and universal love.

Does this sound too "touchy feely?" You bet. The Big Love is about touching and being touched by life! It is about feeling fully alive, feeling truth, feeling inspired, and feeling life pulse in every cell.

Disclaimer #2, Even when it does not feel "good," it is still possible to feel fully alive.

Tap the God of your understanding and ask to be guided to living the Big Love! What does this look like for you? What does the Big Love want from you? What gifts does it offer you?

Ask these questions and then allow this free flow of Big Love energy to guide you in the improvisation of life. Be spontaneous, fresh and unrehearsed. Be unleashed freedom with sacred containment. Delight in this. Savor it. Be awed by all that arises, and falls within it.

BIG LOVE ACTIVATION!

• Extend Radical Forgiveness. Yes, forgive everything.
• Extend Radical Self Permission. Allow full access and expression to your whole being.
  
• Be Vulnerable. Reveal. Admit. Show your true colors, full spectrum, full chakra.
  
• Be Lived. Delight, savor, relish, bask, luxuriate in the Divine, as you understand it.
• Be Held in the God of Your Heart. Source your living from this place.
  
• Distill Wisdom from the wounds of your history, transmute poisons into medicine.
  
• Liberate Attention once stuck in the past. The present moment thrives on your free attention; it uses it as building material for magic and miracles.
• Follow the Dreaming and Mystical Realms.
• Maintain a Supple, Healthy Body.
• Surround Yourself in Beauty.
• Surround Yourself in Love.
• Tell Yourself the Truth.
  
• Sing Your Soul Song. Chant, Vocalize.
  
• Embrace Tears and Laughter equally and unconditionally.
  
• Play. Be Silly, Goof.
• Touch and Be Touched.
  
• Live in a State of Gratitude.
• Choose Big Love. Don't wait for some one or some thing outside of you to show up first. You be it. You choose it.
• Remember the Big Love - ReActivate if life feels shrunken, dull or stuck.
• Let Everything Drink of the Big Love.
  

Practice this, as I am, and witness a recalibration of your life.

You are the Big Love. Get it while it's Hot!

Welcome to Your Vast, Miraculous Life!

“We do not practice zazen to attain enlightenment, but rather to express our true nature.”

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Shtick"1. A characteristic attribute, talent, or trait that is helpful in securing recognition or attention". In Yiddish, this funny little word means "a piece". When someone gives you their "shtick", you get just that, only a piece of who they really are. I want the real deal, the whole person, front, back and everything in between, not a crafty, charismatic, maybe funny, maybe predictable, caricature of who they believe they are or who they want me to see.

Most all of us can relate to having had a shtick at some point along our journey. You know, a mannerism or tendency we've used, that got us the acknowledgment, praise or comfort we were after. It can be a way of being in the world that through it's repetition, dulls our evolving edge and diminishes our authentic spark. A shtick can be a survival mechanism, one that allows us to form some pretense of control in a totally out of control, unknown Universe. My point, and I do have one, are that shticks are a cop out. They deny us (internally and externally) of the full potentiality of what it is to be multidimensional beings in an ever changing evolutionary process (not unlike the expanding Universe, in which we live).

Do you ever find yourself saying the same old comments, speaking or thinking the same old beliefs or ideas about how you've decided life is, reality IS? I am inviting you to think again; think something new...or maybe think about something old in a new way. Or better yet, stop thinking and just be available to sense the present moment.

According to Lee Lozowick, (as brought to me by soul brother, Darren Rhodes) " ...when, we get out of our own way, out of the way of the dominating life-script that runs our psychology, our personalities...out of the way of the ego that has convinced us that it is who we are, that this vast, broad and deep territory, this immense storehouse of wealth, will prove to be completely available, accessible. And what then? Each of us...will need to choose to bring this gusher to life."

Now that, is living in the shtickless! It is the greatest improvisation of all. Dwelling in the radiant present moment...raw, unrehearsed and humbly aware is an art. It is a practice, and, it is our natural state, by divine birthright. Sourcing life from this fertile, infinite place, we realize we are no-thing and everything. In this space, we have full access. All we need to say, know, see, do and not do immediately drops into awareness.

Here's a couple of Shtickless goodies I have for you to grock and ponder.

• The first, a recent Blog post by one of my fave Zen writers, Karen Maezen Miller, Who Turns?. I love how she masterfully simplifies perceptual and perspective reality shifts.
  
• Another shtickless wonder,The Universe, ancient, ever fresh, spontaneous and unrehearsed. I *LOVE* the Universe. Here's an amazing wee video on the Deep Field as seen through the eyes of the Hubble Telescope. Watch it and Marvel.
  
• And how about Mother Nature- Quite miraculous. Schtickless factor HIGH. No need to hook you up with You Tube here. Just go outside. Take an hour or even 5 minutes and let the natural world show you what it is to be real...unrehearsed, fresh in your response to the present moment.

As I was running the other day, I came across a glowing, bright green, robust sprout against the backdrop of mountains and brilliant blue sky. There it was unpretentiously growing out of wet black asphalt. It stopped me in my tracks. This little bold being got my heart. Nothing to prove, (as it burst through the thick asphalt, far from its brethren on the sides of the road), just life, living...and thriving in fact.

Shtickless.

The art of living in the shtickless means being as we were intended to. We are coded and wired for being vibrantly alive and present. We are lived by the flow of raw life force. It naturally floods a current of grace into all that will hold it. How juicy is that? Straight from the heart of the Universe, a mystery, a miracle, each and every ONE. As you are, as it is, no shtick necessary.

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
Thich Nhat Hanh