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In This Edition Of Mystical Scuttlebutt:
Upcoming Events
Practical Tip
Dilemma Of The Month
Reflection Of The Month
Clues For When You're Stressing Out
Testimonial
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Faith's Dilemma: Should I Follow My Trusting Heart Or My Doubting Mind? This one day workshop enriches and enlivens your faith by illuminating the deep partnership between trust and doubt. You discover how this dynamic unfolds inside of you on a day to day basis. Following the guidance of Mystic Wisdom, you learn why it is not only ok, but desirable, to relax into your doubt as well as your trust. And, you are taught precisely how to do so. Staying true to the Facticity vision of creating genuine behavioral change, you gain knowledge of how to install this new awareness and pattern of understanding into your actual brain using a simple, and scientifically sound method. Date: October 14th - Time: 9 to 4:15 - Location: Seattle, WA - Fee: $160 - Early Bird Discount: $140 if paid in full by September 20th. Register Online.
“This perspective allowed me to move away from my scientific background and gain a radically different relationship to doubt. I became free to step out of my skepticism into a deeper understanding of faith that allows the unknowable to exist. My faith now rests in the realization that all is not knowable from the intellecutal or mental frame. By allowing trust and doubt to exist together, trusting no longer seems foolish, but simply a natural condition of Being. Wonderful work!” Valerie Loebs, Physicist
The Enneagram From A Paradoxical Perspective
This two day seminar deepens your ability to explore the age-old puzzlement of how to be both human and divine. With a mindful eye and a compassionate heart, you discover how to recognize and embrace this paradoxical sense of Identity. You learn how to surf the interface between your human personality and your divine essential self with a fascinating and straightforward approach. At the end of the workshop, you have a deeper understanding of how to better navigate the ancient and profound question of “Who Am I?” on a practical, daily basis. Requires a fundamental grasp of the Enneagram of Personality. Date: November 3rd and 4th - Time: Sat. 10:15 to 5:30, Sun. 9:00 to 4:30 - Location: Seattle, WA - Fee: $295 - Early Bird Discount: $265 if paid in full by October 10th. Register Online
"Over the years of my spiritual journey, I had very masterfully, without conscious awareness, created a hierarchy that placed The Divine over Personality. Ragini's work is sheer genius! With the skill of a surgeon, and with the integrity of the heart, she assisted me to see that by not making a difference between either, I began to dance with both. I now receive the benefit of both, allowing me to realize I am much more.” Gene Mecka – Life Mentor
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When you are feeling sad, lonely, uncared for, abandoned, or any other number of unpleasant or debilitating states of mind, take a breath (as always) and shift your focus to what is going right in your life. It is the old adage of seeing the glass half-empty or glass half-full. It is not an easy shift to make, but the effort pays off as you begin to re-cognize the beauty of life and how it is interwoven into the fabric of your journey.
As Hafiz, the 13th Century Sufi poet once said,
“ If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world,
because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty of time and space
cannot endure very long.”
Don’t miss the beauty by focusing too long on the cruelty. Both are everywhere. What you perceive can be up to you. Give it a try and you may find the beauty of life’s awe and wonder hidden just behind the oh so obvious harshness, unkindness, and loneliness of our daily world.
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Dilemma of the Month: Beginnings Vs. Endings
Everyday, each one of us expends energy cleaning up, tidying up, sorting out, arranging, putting away, and a variety of other names for ordering the chaos of our lives. Straightening up the kitchen, hanging up your clothes, putting away the groceries, picking up the living room, scheduling your days and weeks in appointment books or calendars, sequencing your goals and strategies, organizing your paperwork and bills, looking in the TV Guide to determine how to arrange your evening, sorting out what you have and what you need for the next week’s meals, etc.. In today’s world, there is so much to put into place, that you may have begun to acclimate to the idea that feeling overwhelmed is now a daily visitor knocking on your door. This leads to a sense of impending chaos, a tightening of control, and often fear of losing your way and thus, losing sight of your purpose for doing it all in the first place.
In this state of frustration, exhaustion, and fear, you may find yourself scrambling even more to get your life in order – once and for all! At often breakneck speed, you can find yourself running from one task to another, hurrying to out run the ever encroaching chaos so you can keep your life from falling into a complete uproar of bedlam, pandemonium, and madness. This, of course, causes immense stress, decreases the effectiveness of the immune system, extends a less than polite but continual invitation for exhaustion and illness, and usually closes the door for good communication, clear thinking, and compassion for yourself and others. To sum it all up, you may actually feel like a hamster running round and round on that ever turning wheel having forgotten why you’re doing it and what your life is actually all about.
As you seek to create this orderliness, you are also seeking to create a sense of peace, harmony, and security. However, the result of this modern-day love of speeding toward “ever faster”, and “more” without the inconvenience of having “less”, is actually confusion, turmoil, and insecurity. If you find yourself lacking clarity and feeling wobbly about what you’re doing in your life, where you’re going with it, and who you think you are, you may want to stop a moment and realize you are in the grips of yet another Unresolvable Dilemma. Emerging Marketplace Mystics are learning that Unresolvable Dilemmas call for a different approach and an altogether different strategy.
Managing The Dilemma
You may recall an Unresolvable Dilemma is defined by the presence of an interdependent polar pair of opposites. Because Order and Chaos actually define one another, they cannot be separated and thus are interdependent. So, the easiest way to manage this Unresolvable Dilemma is to understand the dynamic unfolding between the two options. Chaos is pulled into being by a force of life that moves to destabilize any steady state. Order is pulled into being by a force of life that moves to stabilize any changing state. Scientifically, these two paradoxical life forces are called entropy and neguentrophy. When these two forces are free to engage in the continual process of re-balancing, creativity arises out of the rhythmic movement between the two. Creativity can be described as a gap in a habitual thinking or perceptual patterning. The creative act has been defined as the defeat of habit by originality (George Lois). In order for creativity to arise, any stable state will have to be disrupted to allow a new pattern to arise. And, the disrupted state will have to be stabilized for the new pattern to arise and be perceived. This means disruption and stability are two sides of the same coin. A creative act unleashes the joy of human expression. Whether we call this learning, discovering, growing, or awakening, it is dependent on the deep partnership between Chaos and Order.
So, the more appropriate strategy here is to relax in the presence of both Chaos and Order. Too much Chaos results in anarchy and pandemonium. Too much Order results in rigidity and fixation. Just the right amount of balance between the two allows creativity to arise. In this gap of possibility, the new thought, insight, feeling, discovery, innovation or invention, becomes free to emerge.
Life is a creative process unfolding. Understanding Chaos and Order from a paradoxical perspective allows you to be privy to the nature of creativity itself – and thus the freedom to become immersed in its arising and embraced by its joy. Creativity rearranges old learnings, in a new way. When a new pattern of perception arises, it expresses the creation of a new dimension of your potential - guided as always by the hand of the unknown Mysteries all around. Enjoy discovering how this creative dance frees the magic of your own creativity to unfold.
"Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without,
but an equilibrium which is set up from within"
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mirabeau and Politics, 1927
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To visit this month’s new Reflection highlighting Stephen and Ondrea Levine, please click here.
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When you’re feeling tense and unwilling to share what you have with others – be it information, food, money, or time.
When you’re feeling angry because someone else has gotten something that you want and feel you deserve.
When you begin to see things as unfair because people are getting things you don’t think they deserve.
Remedy:
These are the moments when greed, jealousy, and envy are in the driver’s seat. As you become aware of their presence, breath into the sensations in your body and welcome these pesky visitors (yes - that’s right – welcome them) with a sense of understanding that they are a part of the rhythm of life that brings you to generosity, sympathetic joy, and kindheartedness. Using your paradoxical eye, you can determine that giving and receiving are, once again, an interdependent polar pair. Because they define each other, you cannot have one without the other. Jealousy, envy, and greed arise when you neglect either the joys of giving, or the joys of receiving. Happily, both giving and receiving evoke the delights of sympathetic joy kindheartedness, and generosity.
You can begin this exploration by noting what it is you do have, what it is you do value, and what it is that brings meaning to your life. Perhaps the “things” that you do or don’t have hint at something deeper. By relaxing into whatever arises, jealousy or sympathetic joy, you can begin navigating the richness of your journey. As a human divine being, you can experience the breadth of possibilities in the paradoxical dance between the two. The mark of the Marketplace Mystic is awareness of, and relaxation with “what is”, along with a sense of peacefulness and calm - regardless of the content of each moment as it arises and passes away.
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"Discovering the Facticity work was a radical re-orientation for me personally. The dark areas of my life that had once seemed so bad, have simply become ‘the way it is’ and not much of a relevant statement about me and who I am.”
Kirk VandenBerghe, Entrepreneur, Coach and owner of askalana.com, Hawaii
To visit this month’s new Reflection, please click here.
To visit our On-Line Store, please click here.
All material (C) 2007 Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, www.facticity.com or ragini@facticity.com
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