I remember when I first heard this concept:  Chaos precedes and follows all real change.

It made sense to me, on a certain level.  I thought about the big changes I had made in my life.  Selling a home and moving.  Entering a new relationship or ending one. Changing careers.  Each time there was a period of tumult to arrive at a decision to make change, and then a chaotic period of adjustment. And though my logical mind can understand why chaos is necessary, it still feels scary.  Depending on the size of the change, the chaos can range from mild feelings of doubt and uncertainty to the quaking terror of a complete loss of identity.

The world is now in the process of fundamental change.  We see evidence of the chaos that must accompany the powerful evolutionary shift of consciousness happening on our planet. There is widespread uncertainty, as old structures crumble and old strategies fail.  The seduction to fear is strong, leading many into states of powerlessness.

We cannot begin to comprehend the magnitude of this change.  On an individual level, it requires us to set down old images, habits and patterns of the past.  It calls us to dream and vision a future that is filled with light and love, a future of conscious, loving humanity that has never been experienced before.  We must stretch our imaginations to dream it, and yet be open to the possibility that it will far surpass anything we can currently imagine.  And then we must hope.   We must allow ourselves to trust the process of our evolution and believe that the future can be beautiful, and then genuinely expect that it will be.

It seems radical to step away from fear and engage hope and trust as the world appears to crumble.  You might call it a leap of faith, but it does not have to be blind faith.  The more we understand the metaphysical underpinnings of the change process, the better we are able to face this challenge with genuine courage.  It will still be scary, but we can rise to meet it.

As directors of Lucid Living, Jeanine and I are constantly exploring the mechanics of change.   We are finding our way through the changes in our own lives and developing maps we can use for ourselves and offer to our students.  We feel like pioneers in an uncharted landscape.  Some days we are awed by our discoveries.  Other days we plop down in the middle of our trail and just laugh, or stand as a supportive witness for each other when we cry.

It brings us back to the foundation of Lucid Living: Spiritual awakening is an emotional process.  As we allow an uninhibited flow of emotion, the journey can be an adventure and we can find our way.  We can honor our fear by fully experiencing it, but then choose to stand in hope. To consciously generate states of happiness, trust, gratitude and excitement about a virgin future of luminous possibilities.  We can be the visionaries of a new age.

One-Day Workshop

Last month, in response to the growing chaos, we decided to craft a new workshop to offer new perspectives and practical tools for monumental change.  It is the first time in our ten year history that we are offering a one-day workshop, and it is available to anyone.

Chaos, Courage and Change will be offered in Northern California on February 18th, 2010.  The room will be filled with people who are new to Lucid Living as well as long-time graduates of our programs. It will be an opportunity to explore the big picture of global change, to engage new perspectives and take a very personal look at the force of change in your life.  It will also be a time to connect to the presence of your Soul and lean in to its wisdom and power, to let it show you a way through the chaos far more effective than your ego’s attempts to control.

At the time of this posting, there are just a few spaces left in the February 18 workshop.  We plan to offer it again in Atlanta and Minneapolis later this year. We look forward to a potent and magical day with all of you who will be there.

For those who cannot, we encourage you to move through your resistance, encounter your fear and experience it.  Separate the experience of the fear from your stories about it. Find the wellspring of peace on the other side of fear, where you are one with all that is Divine and you are safe.  Then consciously turn up the light of hope and trust.  Be courageous and confident. Connect to your positive future and let yourself dream.  Invite your Soul to guide you and practice surrender.

Chaos is just one component of this powerful year ahead.  Learning to navigate chaos and engage your courage can open up extraordinary possibilities of positive change. Enjoy the adventure!

It’s the middle of August and Jeanine and I  just returned from Santa Barbara where we led the Secrets of Happiness Retreat.  It was a brand new retreat for Lucid Living, the fifth in the series, attended by many of the “Elders” in our community.   This is not an exclusive group by any means, but merely designated by the number of years we have been sharing Lucid Living workshops and retreats together.  Many in this group have been working with Jeanine and me for more than ten years, as students and private coaching clients.  There is an intimacy borne of repeated, courageous vulnerability shared in service of a burning hunger to grow.  It is stunning to witness.

One of our students remarked, “This group is amazing.  You tell us to spend thirty minutes imagining our worst fears and feeling them with intensity, and we actually go off and do it!”  We all had a good laugh at our willingness to plumb the depths of emotion in search of a higher truth.

Right about now, this happiness retreat may not be sounding so happy.  You may wonder, “What does conjuring and feeling my worst fears have to do with being happy?”  To which I say, “Plenty!”

There is a great misunderstanding perpetuated by some purveyors of personal growth.  It begins with the idea that by focusing only on high frequency emotions, you will attract more of what you want into your life.  It is based in the law of attraction, a sound, metaphysical principle that speaks to the fact that what you give attention tends to be what you manifest. Where the idea becomes simplistic and breaks down is in the belief that this means it is best to avoid “negative” or what we call “constricting” emotion.

It is true that dwelling in anger, fear, blame, pity, hurt and loneliness, to name a few, will attract negativity into your life.  But it is also true that the AVOIDANCE of these emotions is also a way of giving attention, and therefore attracting negativity.  I find such absurdity and sadness in so many people trying to find happiness by avoiding a portion of their life experience, as if the anger, pain and fear were toxic.  They only become toxic when they are repressed.

So much of the foundation of the Lucid Living work is to come into right relationship with your emotional body, to reclaim a full range of emotions and learn how to feel and release emotions appropriately.  A key distinction is that expressing emotion is not the same as communicating emotion.  I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard students say, “But if I express my anger, my husband will be upset/my boss will fire me/my mother will be hurt/people will reject me.”  Who said anything about sharing those emotions with others? Expressing your emotions is a private affair.  Your thoughts and feelings are nobody else’s business, unless you choose to make them so.  This is an entirely separate discussion, when to share emotions and getting squeaky clean about your motivations for doing so.

Expressing emotions is the act of honoring them simply because you have them and they are real.  It is an act of self-respect, a process of getting to know yourself and ultimately learning from the emotions you have so you can change the fundamental beliefs and choices that are generating your emotions.

Notice that I said it is your beliefs and choices that are generating your emotions.  I did not say your circumstances generate your emotions.  This one perspective shift can change your life, if you let it.  You see, if you believe that your emotions are created by your circumstances, you will spend your life trying to control your circumstances to feel better.  If instead, you understand that your emotions are generated by your beliefs and choices (and then triggered by the circumstances those beliefs and choices attract), you can stop controlling circumstances and instead spend your time feeling honestly to uncover the true root of your emotions.  No one but you has authority over your beliefs.  No one but you makes your choices.  As you take responsibility for your beliefs and choices, you shift your emotional landscape from the inside out, not by avoiding “unpleasant” emotion.  In fact, you will welcome those pockets of rage or sadness when they surface, because they are leading you to more of yourself.

So, yes, delving into the experience of your worst fears can be a path to happiness if you will feel and release those fears, moving beyond them to find the beliefs at their core.  If you believe you are unlovable, that belief will cause you pain and unhappiness.  No amount of avoiding unpleasant feelings will change the unhappiness caused by your very own (faulty) belief.  You can, however, take back your power from this fear, feel it and let it go, change your belief and stand firmly in the experience that you are endlessly lovable.  I promise you, this new belief will begin to generate greater happiness.

Sometimes in our year-long program when our students begin to get the full implication of this work, there is a moment of clarity.  They sometimes comment, “This Lucid Living work is not for (the faint of heart).”  They tend to use more colorful language.  It is one of the things I love best about getting to lead this work, witnessing acts of courage when the wimpy path calls so seductively. The beauty of people!  Breathtaking.

Which brings me back to happiness.  After spending the last seven months writing and delivering the happiness retreat, I’ve learned more than I thought I would about happiness. Generating happiness and bringing it to everything in my life is transforming my life. More than just the feeling of happiness, the resonance of happiness is a potent energy.  I’ve learned a lot about it from Lazaris, how it is created as we meet certain criteria.  The first step is to meet my own needs.  Well, we could just pause on that one for a while!

We spent a whole day looking deeply into what it means to meet your needs, what your needs are, how we confuse needs and preferences in order to manipulate, and the profound amount of personal suffering that is caused in the futile attempt to get others/the world to meet your needs.  The co-dependence is so widespread and part of our cultural sense of entitlement, it takes some time to sort it out and take power back.  This is a bigger discussion than we can fully honor in this post, but I can tell you that many people at the retreat had their world view turned on its ear.  In a good way.

Turns out, we’ve been sold a bill of goods to think our needs are something we don’t have and must go get from the world.  While all the time, our needs have been these reservoirs of internal resources available to us in abundance. Security, belonging, value, love, knowing, beauty, spirituality.  All of these are internal resources, but we’ve not been taught how to access them and let them be real.  We search instead for money to feel secure or valued, we get face lifts and go on diets to know a sense of beauty, we perform and hide our true selves to feel we belong.  It’s tragic.

Let me be very clear.  There’s nothing wrong with changing your circumstances to meet your preferences in life.  If you want to create more money or lose weight or change your appearance, do so.  But if you are doing it because you feel insecure or cannot see your own beauty, then, Houston, we have a problem.

It’s one thing to be told, “True happiness is found within.”  But how often have we been given good maps for finding that inner happiness?

A group of pioneers went to the Four Seasons Resort in Santa Barbara for five days and we made some thrilling new maps to happiness.  We made individual discoveries which we shared, helping each other to fill in our maps and find more of the buried treasure.  We had candle-lit dinners by the ocean and shared happy memories of the past.  We laughed and created games where we shared happy memories of the future.  We lifted each other to new heights of vision and relaxed into our successes.  We leaned on the substance of our  Souls and followed the light of our Spirits seeking greater freedom and self-determination.  We had a grand time.

In just a week since we’ve been back, my deeper foundation of happiness is rippling into my life in countless ways.  I am deeply grateful to our Lucid Living community for the tremendous gift and honor of working with you, each and all.  I invite all of us to continue to pioneer new frontiers of happiness.  As we change, so changes the world.

It’s April 2009.  My senses are flooded with a particularly magnificent springtime in Marin County, California.  At the same time, Lucid Living is bursting with new life.

It’s almost hard to believe we are in our 10th year. Reflecting on all we have created propels me to a deep sense of gratitude.  I want to begin this, my first blog, by speaking directly to the Lucid Living students who have made these ten years possible.  This blog will be longer than normal, but I have much to say (what a surprise!).

I find myself thinking of all the fun we have had together on our sacred journey, how much we have learned, and how we have truly changed.  Your willingness to pioneer a new, living spirituality motivates me every day.  You have chosen to look beyond the illusion to seek genuine responsibility for all of your reality.  Especially in these times, where the illusion of the physical world can seduce you to shrink and make choices from fear, you are courageously crafting a luminous future and trusting yourselves to make it real.  You inspire me!

Thank you so much for the opportunity to love you.  It is a privilege to participate in your growth, to get to serve you on your spiritual path.  It allows me to express my deepest passions of teaching, healing, loving and exploring the deep mysteries of the sacred.  Together we are co-creating something magnificent, the impact of which we may never fully know.  But we will feel it and it will be real.

I also want to thank my beautiful partner, Jeanine Mancusi.  At some point I will write about our journey of co-creating Lucid Living.  For now, I will simply say that Jeanine was my very first student. Along with dear Keri and Rick, she asked me to create a pilot program to share the metaphysics I knew to support their coaching work.  That little teleclass was the beginning of Lucid Living.  Two years later, Jeanine became my full partner in this business.  For the last eight years, we have created and led programs together.  It has been joyful every step of the way.

Lucid Living is a celebration of the magic and power of choosing a path of love.  It has taken us places we could never have imagined.

As we pause to celebrate how far we have come, we are ready to take another giant step into the Unknown.  Lucid Living is on the verge of exciting growth and change.  At this pivotal time in our collective spiritual awakening, we want to respond to the world’s hunger for understanding and for tools that actually work.  We’re excited to share our plans for expansion and invite you to be a part of it.

Here’s what we have planned:

1.  We are creating a new web site.  Beyond the description of our programs and services, we will offer an interactive place to work magic. It will be a touchstone for connecting with the More Real, and a place to lift your resonance.  Also, in addition to a lot of free recordings and samples, you will have a student ID with special access to additional materials based on the products and classes you have previously taken.  It will be like having your own “Magic Locker” on our virtual campus.

2.  We are launching web-based programs for people who want to study with Lucid Living without attending classes.  We know there are many people interested in doing this work who cannot travel to California for five weekends in one year.  We will offer a catalogue of downloadable recordings and workbooks to cover the core content and special coaching programs to support our “independent study” participants.

3. As previously announced, fabulous new leaders will be teaching the in-person Lucid Living Program in 2010 as Jeanine and I focus on these programs and designing new residential retreats.  We will also be expanding the leaders for teleclasses and group coaching programs.

4.  This blog will be a place to catch up on the latest news from Lucid Living and hear our perspective on events in the world so you can elegantly navigate the chaos as our world is changing.  We invite your comments so we may engage in juicy discussions together.

It’s a really exciting time for us as we grow to meet the future we envision.  Many of you will be eager to participate in this expansion, and we will be in touch soon about ways to get involved.

Thank you for your personal commitment to your spiritual path and your passion for Lucid Living.  I’m thrilled to be on this extraordinary adventure with all of you.