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Emergence

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Emergence — what’s coming into view?

Emergence, noun

  1. the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed.
  2. the process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent.

Something’s breaking open after a tough winter.

The magnolias bloom really early in northern California (not in April, like they do in New York City). This year I saw a few first blooms at Thanksgiving. I love watching them emerge when it’s cold and dreary, one of the first signs of softening and growth. Of new life. Of emergence.

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Return to love — new beginnings at the New Moon

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I marched with my daughter and tens of thousands of other women and men this weekend.

I appreciated the shit out of the witty, fierce, snarky signs and slogans I saw everywhere I looked.

I even posted a few of the most amazing and sassy photos on Facebook.

But after only 24 hours, I stopped posting those pix. I stopped talking about them. I heeded the call to return to love instead. That’s why instead of me including some of the march pix here I’m sharing other images with you today. Read on to find out what they’re about.

As a Priestess who means business, I remember my purpose and my commitment. Every thought, word, and action is the most effective when it comes from love. And when I find that I’ve drifted off into negativity and in-your-face divisiveness, I return to love, return to love, return to love.
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Precious one, you don’t have to do this alone

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The Full Moon in Cancer is a great time to think about what you are planning for in 2014.

Before I go more into the details of this in the Moon Astrology analysis for your business, below, I’d like to share an important theme that I want to plan into my year, and yours if you so desire it!

I have yet one more theme for 2014…

…and that theme is — You don’t have to do this alone

And isn’t that a relief? You crave community, don’t you? I talk to so many passionate women in business, changemakers and healers, who are eager for community, support, and connection. I think it’s a culture-wide craving, as we do more and more of our connecting online and less and less in person.

I know for me that I am so nurtured and nourished by my support systems. My family and friends. My healers. My business coach. My teachers. My Possibility Posse mastermind. I get so much pleasure from the reminders to smile, stay connected to the divine and to my heart, and focus on the good when I am being held by the loving support of others committed to the same thing.

So I’m adding this theme — You don’t have to do this alone — to my 2014 theme of Service, as I wrote about just before the New Year here.

In support of this theme, there are two special offers I would like to share with you.

1. Sister Circle coaching

An opportunity to work with a friend  (of yours) and a mentor (me) at a reduced fee

2. Share Your Magic

Free calls.

Let me tell you about them…

 

Introducing Sister Circle coaching

stonewomenPerhaps you know someone…a sister in business.

If you and one or more other women are ready to sign up for three months (or more) of individual coaching, and you sign up at the same time, here’s what you’ll get:

  • Targeted individual coaching as described in my Share Your Magic program
  • A private Facebook page for you and your sister(s) and me so that you can get even more support than you get from me alone as you work through your powerful transformations
  • A 10% discount for each of you off your chosen package fee

I know the power of women’s circles

I know from years of working in groups of all kinds how the potency of one’s intentions and actions gets magnified and multiplied by group energy.

When we cast our circle, in our sacred space, your sacred intentions and actions are fed and watered in the most powerful way.

I can’t wait to get on Zoom or on the phone with you so we can look together and see what is meant to be for you and your beautiful business! The call is free and here’s the link to schedule it.

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It’s all about gratitude

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I am grateful today

I get asked: What’s the point of centering everything — my business development, my sales, my branding work, my coaching practice — in gratitude? That question’s too small. Ask me this instead: What’s the point of grounding my entire life, every moment, in gratitude? Now we have something to talk about!

I ground my life in gratitude.

Look. Here. It’s simple. I’ve changed a lot since I started expressing gratitude for everything on a regular basis over ten years ago. That’s what a gratitude practice does. It changes you. On the outside, circumstances have changed (that’s what they do, yo). But on the inside, I have changed (and everyone I know is so relieved!) — I have learned how to dwell in stillness, respond from love, and be generous. So much more useful and tolerable than the years I led with the napalm, moved through life with my own personal black cloud over my head, and stood with one leg regretting the past and the other leg fearing the future. Which left me pissing all over the present moment.

Exactly.

thankyouheartToday I’m going to share some gratitude with you, from a few of the areas of my life.

Here goes.

  • I am grateful that I have a 7/8 full coaching practice today. I have seven coaching clients, for the first time. For a few years after I started my practice ten years ago, I had just one coaching client. I knew every thing about her and I am certain that I was way too invested in the details of her life. The poor woman! And she’s my client still. That’s a miracle in itself. But the gratitude I’m feeling right now is that I have had a wish fulfilled. I used to wish that someday I’d have enough clients that I wouldn’t have the particulars of their lives at my fingertips. And that’s the case now. In fact, the client notes spreadsheet I started keeping a couple of years ago holds the details I need to go back to when I’m in conversation with each client. And the rest of the time I’m freed to hold their highest good in my heart when I think of them and send energy their way, a prayer that really has nothing to do with facts and circumstances.

  • I am grateful for learning what was an elusive lesson for me: to appreciate what I have in this now moment. I am that woman, the one who turned to a beloved friend at a birthday party I threw for myself, in a house full of 20 or so women, each of whom had shown up for me, and said with a sigh, “Nobody came.” The look on her face, complete with eyeroll, preceded a deserved response, “What am I, chopped liver?”

    Yup. That was a turning point for me (about sixteen years ago, I am such a slow learner!). Since then, I have adopted a new radical way of being, and it has a motto: Thrive where you’re planted. Which means letting go of my deathgrip on the yearning for what I don’t have, letting go long enough to foster appreciation for that which has been gifted to me. This. Now. This now moment is my gift. It is what I have been given to experience. Learning to like and appreciate what is changes everything. Thrive where you’re planted has turned me into a person who accepts invitations and shows up to them. This is different. It’s different from angling for invitations and then not going, because why would I go anywhere where I was wanted? If you want me, you deserve the contempt in which I held myself. Oy!

    Another big difference goes back to that party. I have learned how to actively love and appreciate the people who are here, present, with me now. Instead of kicking them to the curb so I could yearn in painful solitude for the unavailable one or ones. How it went, for so many years, and two marriages: If you are available to me, you’re toast. Instead I shone my love light into the sector where the attractive-simply-because-they’re-not-available folk hang out. Pitiful. And still painful to reveal this, but hey, as my mother always said as she was brushing out the tangles in my hair, “It hurts to be beautiful.”

  • I am very grateful for the ease and love of my birthday getaway. I invited my daughter and she brought three friends. My sister and a friend of mine came. We went to Harbin Hot Springs where clothing is most definitely optional. I could have worried a lot about how the younger of us (the four in their 20s) would deal with my nudity, and the nudity all around them. I could have started tripping about my sister and my friend and how they’d get along. I didn’t.

    Wait. I’m lying a little bit. I did in fact worry. But I didn’t get stuck there. Instead I was able to turn away from my mind and my thoughts. (Yes it’s true, just as they taught me in Brooklyn early in my 12-step recovery. When you’re alone with your mind, you’re in a bad fucking neighborhood.) I’ve learned how to escape from that neighborhood by sinking into my heart, by opening my heart in humble invitation, by allowing myself to connect to the always present love and mercy and compassion and insight and clarity of the Divine. By claiming trust, and love, and joy. Grabbing on to these attributes pushes the fear and resentment to the side, making room for what I really really want in the first place.

    I had a wonderful time. From what I could see, so did everyone else. Yay for getting out of the way of the good.

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Ancestors, gratitude, and an offer. Or two…

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Are you hearing, feeling, remembering your ancestors?

Lately I’ve been feeling the presence of my departed parents. Very closely. I dreamt this morning, just before dawn, of my father. In my dream, I was packing up to leave. Emotionally wrought. And, in a way that rarely happened in our lives together, my dad came up to me and handed me some things I might need to take with me. In loving silence.

I am cloaked in this feeling of my father’s love now in the early morning as I write this.

dancingcalaveraWe’re coming up on Beltaine—the first of May—the pagan festival that honors new life and growth. It’s said that the veils between the worlds are thinnest around Beltaine, just as they are at Samhain time at the end of October. (We’re more used to thinking of our beloved dead at Samhain time, with all its attendant symbols of skulls, and skeletons, and coffins, but here at the opposite spot on the Wheel of the Year, the veils thin again.)

Celebrate the thinning of the veils.

Spend some time at your ancestors altar, or create one. Display some photographs. Eat a meal, listen to music, that they loved. Talk to people you know who also remember them. Sink into your gratitude. What is remembered, lives.

How do you honor your ancestors, precious? Join the conversation in the comments.

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How do you cleanse, dedicate and renew? How do you love without grasping?

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Full Moon at 6º Libra

Wednesday 3/27, 2:27 am Pacific

I’ve been thinking about this upcoming Full Moon, and while a Libra lunation might be seen as something peaceful and balanced, we get to also fold in the awareness of all this Aries energy going on. Especially Venus in Aries.

They say that Venus in Aries is at her detriment, and to watch out for a tendency to be overly aggressive, out of balance (hmmm, that Libra thing again), to be driven by so much rush to accomplish, accumulate, achieve, that you can rush right by the opportunity to savor this now moment, and the next.

So the opening here, this coming week, is to continue to breathe, and to experience this moment of accomplishment, or this moment on the way to accomplishment. To appreciate this awareness of increase. To allow appreciation for every facet of your achievements.

This Full Moon comes the day after Passover (Pesach) begins, as it always does, since Jewish legend decrees that Passover begins the night of the Full Moon that occurs after the Spring Equinox. Observant Jews will be in Pesach mode, having cleansed their homes of leavened bread in all its forms, put away the usual kitchenware and brought out the “for Pesach” sets, and feasted at Seder and retold the Exodus story in this sacred reenactment of an ancient Spring festival.

What I take away from this tradition of my birth is that this time of year is an invitation formatzobrei cleansing, dedication and renewal. Not to mention a great time to gather with loved ones and eat matzo brei.

Three suggestions for a Full Moon working, for your business, for your body, for your soul

Take some time, as close to the actual Full Moon as you can to do this work. (Any time in the three-day-window of Tuesday 2/26 to Thursday 3/28 will work just fine.) You can work at your altar, or be outside, or any place you feel connected to Spirit.

Use these suggestions to tap into the energy of this Full Moon.

  • Consciously connect with your tribe: your family, your friends, your loved ones, your clients. Venus in Aries promotes the idea of the community of friendship. Make an action plan for showing up from love in all your communities. And do it.
  • Cleanse, dedicate, and renew. Take some time to “zhuzh” your personal altar space. To dedicate to your existing spiritual practice. Or add something new to it. Plant seeds — spiritual seeds, seeds for actions you will take for your business, seeds of wellness, seeds of love — that will take root now and bear fruit for you in this coming growing season.
  • Let your big loving heart be expressed in everything you do and say. Soften inside yourself, know you are safe and blessed, and let that passionate, steady flame of Aries love be apparent in everything you think, every word you say, and everything you do.

I’d love to know how this Full Moon glows for you. Please leave a comment and let me know what actions you are taking; how you are cleansing, dedicating and renewing; and how you are expressing your beautiful loving heart.

 

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Once in a Blue Moon

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I’m starting an experiment.

You see, I pay close attention to the cycles of the Moon. I notice energetic shifts that correspond with where we are in the Moon’s monthly journey. One example is how the Dark Moon time lends itself to introspection while the Full Moon time lends itself to more activity.

The experiment: A blogpost about each New Moon and Full Moon, right before they hit. I’m hoping you’ll find something useful in what’s going on in the heavens, something that might help you focus your own work, your planning of beginnings and endings, your intentions of when to act and when to hold off for a bit.

In each 28-day cycle of the Moon, the energy and promise of the Full Moon is one of completion and culmination, the fulfillment of whatever it is you began at the New Moon, two weeks before. Rinse and repeat.

The Full Moon is always an invitation to examine the balance (or lack of balance) in our lives between the energy represented by the Sun and the energy in opposition to that, represented by the Moon, which is big and full in the sky, reflecting the light of the Sun.

Please let me know (in the comments, in email) what’s useful in these articles, and what’s not. I promise not to get too astro-geeky on you!

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Decluttering as spiritual practice—how to get unstuck

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From the archives: This post was originally published on May 12, 2011. Since it’s proved so popular, and since I’m in the midst of a fierce passionate round of decluttering myself, I thought I’d update this story and send it out again for those of you who might not have seen it yet.
—Love and light, Sue

What’s spiritual about decluttering, anyway?

Yes, decluttering as spiritual practice is a thing!

There’s a tangible relationship between decluttering and manifesting the life we desire. When we’re blocked by too much *stuff* we get stuck. Ideas and visions remain wishful and theoretical. We can’t see a clear path to what we want. We may not even be able to clearly define what we want, let alone go after it. Decluttering—cleaning up our act physically, mentally, and emotionally—frees us from those stuck places and helps us get into action.

Maybe you think clutter is just the physical things that pile up around us. It’s more than that. The *stuff* is simply the external, easy-to-see manifestation of how we’ve become cluttered in other areas of life.

What else can clutter look like?

  • projects and dreams swirling about in your head, unstarted or incomplete
  • tolerations in your life (a promotion promised and postponed, a leaky faucet, physical pain…)
  • unhealthy, unfulfilling relationships
  • addictive behaviors
  • victim thoughts and mental chaos

clutterClutter, in any of its manifestations, has a negative impact on our energy, our attitude and our effectiveness. Piled-up desks, closets full of clothes you don’t wear, an unsatisfying career, unopened mail and unpaid bills—all of these create blockages that keep us from living into our greatness.

In my personal practice and with my clients, I’ve seen amazing results from regular decluttering; it’s a delicious way to accelerate the change you want in your life. I have also found that releasing clutter is a powerful invitation to what’s needed. I don’t know if it’s true that nature abhors a vacuum (there are plenty of empty spaces in our universe, after all, and nature seems to be just fine with them). But .

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Self-love coaching, a new targeted program for women…

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Update February 19, 2013

Self-love coaching has been replaced by my new Share Your Magic coaching for passionate women in business. Please check it out right here.

Hello, beautiful women!

Inspired by our recent Love Letter teleclass, I’m offering a new coaching package, just for you women who want more support for self-love, the love that provides the foundation for being heart-centered in everything you do: your business, your personal life, your wellness, your spiritual life, your relationships with your loved ones.

The Self-love coaching program is especially for women who are having an inconsistent or challenging relationship with self-love. If you (secretly?) crave support for the audacious goal of having every dream and vision fully expressed in your life, this could be for you. I know what it’s like to see and name and express your beautiful, powerful visions, and yet experience a big disconnect that blocks you from making progress in the direction of these, your most juicy dreams.

Perhaps, like many women, you’ve been in an inspired loving place before, inspired by some powerful work you’ve done, or class you’ve taken, but you’ve felt the energy dissipate as time went on.

  • You may have taken spiritually inspiring teleclasses or read uplifting books
  • You may have joined a spiritual group or a congregation
  • You may have changed location, or job, or lover
  • You may have joined a gym
  • You may have colored your hair

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