In this edition of Mystical Scuttlebutt

• New Product
• A Practical Tip
• Dilemma Of The Month
• Reflection
• Clues For When You’re Stressing Out
• Testimonial

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!  **NEW**  2008 CALENDAR IS NOW AVAILABLE

The Dazzling Dance of Duality -  Beautiful images combined with original sweet sharings from Ragini’s personality as she continues to practice the steps in this extraordinary dance of duality. Designed for an acrylic or plastic stand-up picture holder. Works best if printed out on heavy card stock and cut down to 8 by 10 size.  A nice gift for a fellow traveler who may be discovering they are also a Marketplace Mystic.  Enjoy -  and may each of the days to come be filled with awareness, increasing inner peace, and many moments of joy.  To purchase and download The Dazzling Dance of Duality, please click here.     

As this Holiday Season unfolds you will inevitably find yourself tired and stressed.  Being overwhelmed by the outside world signals the need to go to the inside world, if only for a moment. So close  your eyes and move your attention to that now familiar experience of a deep breath.  Here is where the taste of what the Holiday Season is all about quietly rests, undisturbed and nestled in the stillness that emerges just between your inhalation and your exhalation.  In the midst of the Holiday hustle and bustle, these moments of stillness can help you remember the fundamental joy of Being, always right there, just a breath away.
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During this Holiday Season, your desire to feel joy and celebration can often be accompanied by a nagging sense that you should be feeling that way. This is, after all, the season of giving, kindness, and caring, and spotlights your capacity to be nice, gentle, thoughtful and considerate.  Even when you are feeling stressed and exhausted, you are urged to put those feelings aside and behave compassionately by being agreeable, pleasing, and friendly.  Congeniality, good cheer, and good humor are highly valued and when you’re not behaving this way, you and others may place you in the category of a grinch. This is the time for benevolent, humane acts of kindness.  

But as the stress and exhaustion builds, our more pleasant desires can be challenged by the emergence of seemingly opposing desires to express thoughts and feelings that are short, terse, and often truly mean and nasty.  We can all get a bit surly and unpleasant, and even hostile and spiteful when our level of frustration soars too high.  This tug of war between the two kinds of feelings and thoughts can even become the primary experience of the season, leaving us almost dreading a time of year that is intended to be a time of celebration, peace, and love.

Managing The Dilemma

Once again, we can draw upon the guidance of our mystical wisdom.  In this dualistic dimension of body/mind,  thoughts and emotions travel in pairs.  With kindness arrives the presence of cruelty.  With love and joy arrives the presence of hate and sorrow.  Understanding this “facticity” relieves the tension of trying to always feel kind and loving so you will be a good person and never feeling cruel and hateful which would make you a bad person. 

Realizing that thoughts and emotions are forces that come and go, in pairs, releases your ability to relax with the actual flow of your inner life and accept “what is” actually arising in each moment..  Recognizing this dynamic frees you to allow both the sweet and sour aspects of your personality their time. By perceiving emotions and thoughts in this way, you are free to acknowledge their presence and simultaneously free to decide whether to let them pass or express them in action. This shift in the way you are relating to the forces of thought and emotion opens the door to an inner joy and celebration that can then move with you into your daily stream of activities.  

I invite you to explore approaching your negative and unpleasant thoughts and feelings as just the other side of the coin.  Watch these forces flow back and forth throughout the day, leaving you feeling kind one moment and perhaps, not to nice in the next.  The question is not the content of your feelings and thoughts, but the way you respond to them – with denial and rejection, or with a loving embrace and welcome as a passing guest in your home. 

May your holiday season be full of the Love and Grace that brings the wonder of this existence into the foreground of your awareness.    Happy Holidays!

 
To visit this month’s new Reflection highlighting Albert Schweitzer, please click here. 

 
1. You are feeling hateful toward the world and everyone in it. 
2. You are disappointed or disgusted with yourself.
3. You are feeling alone, isolated, and abandoned.

Remedy:

Whenever you feel hateful, disgusted with yourself, isolated, or abandoned, take a breath and allow these feelings to be there. Allow yourself to be wherever you are.  With your awareness, relax into the possibility  that there is nothing wrong with you.  You are simply experiencing the dance of opposites, like the comings and goings of the waves upon the shore.

You can allow a sense of curiosity to arise about the fleeting nature of these experiences as you come to understand that the nature of the world we live in is dualistic.  Experiences come in opposite pairs - up and down, inner and outer, joy and sorrow, love and hate.  First joy and then sorrow, and then a joy comes again on the heels of sorrow.  Like the waves that crash into the shore and then go out again, emotions come and they go.  The waves that hurtle onto the shore don’t belong to the shore, just as the emotions that move through you are not yours.  They do not define who you are. They are human experiences that we all have living in this dualistic reality.  They are not personal to you.

So the next time you find yourself feeling hateful, isolated or filled with disgust, take a big breath in and then out.  Notice that there is something larger out of which the breath arises, like the vastness from which the waves arise.  The vastness that is you can allow the dance to continue, breath and wave moment to moment. Your mystical birthright is to rest in that vastness with a deep sense of relaxation and peace with what is.

“Before the Facticity work, I experienced a split between my human self (messy, dramatic, intense) and my spiritual self (calm, connected, in-sync).  I learned how to connect my human self and my spiritual self, and that I am, paradoxically, both unfolding at the same time.” 
                                                                                       Sondra Kornblatt, Author & Free Lance Writer

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All material (C) 2007 Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, www.facticity.com or ragini@facticity.com