If we really care about each other, and I know we deeply, deeply do, this needs to be said.
As much as we may groove with an enchanting romantic spell now and again, the ones that conceal our view of the absolute truth must in good faith be broken.
So as unromantic as that sounds . . . let’s just get about it, shall we?
Okay, here goes:
If you (or your friend / lover / yoga instructor with the sexy solar plexus chakra) think meditation is in any way supposed to be easily peaceful, that you will somehow be miraculously absorbed by an orgasmic explosion of light or mysteriously levitated above your living room ottoman. you have been fed a grave and serious amount of bullshit, my gorgeous love.
Quite possibly on multiple occasions.
Also quite possibly, incense or magic carpets or chickens or late night credit card payments or yoke-less eggs were involved.
I don’t tell everyone about this because I do it secretly . . . but it has never once failed me.
This simple tool immediately brings calm to any situation that threatens to shred my nerves.
Waaaait. A. Minute. Allison lose her cool?! I hear you exclaim. :)
Yes, babes. Oh, hell yes.
It happens, right. No matter how ‘spiritual’ you think you are or how hardcore your practice or how eloquently you can rattle off the Rumi quotes – you will be tested. We are all tested.
That’s why learning this powerful tool – one that can be done silently, imperceptibly, and in less than 5 seconds – is absolutely life-transforming.
Listen in and let me know if this hits home for you:
Never, ever would I share a tool or practice with you that I have not already tried and accepted into my own life. This one is huge.
I can’t even begin to tell you guys how many arguments didn’t happen, how many misunderstandings didn’t happen, how many cruel words were not said because I took hold of the moment and became fully mindful of my intention to become the peace.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if this has served you well, I invite you to share this post with a friend or loved one who may find it useful.
The more of us practicing peace the better, right. :)
Sending so much peace and light to you, beautiful, beautiful souls.
With biggest love, always,
Allison Marie Xx
P.S. Do you enjoy the spiritual stuff like I do? I post a LOT of inspirational goodness on Instagram (at least once a day – sometimes three times a day if I’m on a roll). All photography and posts are my own. Check it out @glorybegin and let me know what you think!
In today’s new video blog, I share a fresh way of thinking about our true work in the world as so vastly much more than just some 9-to-5 gig.
I firmly believe that we are here to be Love and we were designed to teach Love in every possible way. In fact, that is THE entire reason I created Glory Begin.
As I began to explore what it means to be a teacher, it became more and more apparent that we are all teachers all the time. We teach through our words, our actions, and even through the thoughts we think. All of these things affect the energy of the universe.
One of the greatest ‘teachers of teachers’ is the beautiful soul known as Yogi Bhajan, who introduced the technology of Kundalini Yoga to the U.S. in the 1970’s as a way of heightening awareness of – and connection to – our spiritual selves.
In this video, I share one of Yogi Bhajan’s most uplifting lessons about the real reason why we put our most inspired work out there into the world. This lesson went straight to my soul.
Listen in and let know if this hits home for you:
Are there ways in which you feel called to share inspiration in the world that maybe you haven’t explored yet? Don’t worry about your title or your day job or any kind of label society may place on you. What is the beautiful creative love work you desire to do?
Your intuition is always pointing you toward your highest work, beloved. Follow your joy.
We are all teachers, all the time. And the greatest demonstration of love is just to begin to share it in the best way we know how.
So much peace and light to you, beautiful, beautiful souls.
Thank you for your presence, your creativity, your warmth, and your voice.
With biggest love, always,
Allison Marie Xx
~ ~ ~
P.S. As promised, here is the link to Yogi Bhajan’s lesson (and plenty more) mentioned in the video.
Last time we were together we talked about daily rituals and how they help to nestle us into our days. As fate – and the damn fine Universe – would have it, I recently came across a beautiful bedtime ritual that I now refuse to do without.
This simple, mindful ritual is a gorgeous way to surrender to divine guidance each night before my (sometimes wild and exhausted) head hits the pillow. This practice has totally transformed my energy and opened me up to receiving the loving messages the Universe has in store.
I am hopeful it will do the very same for you.
Check out my first video blog and let me know if this hits home for you:
Is it tough for you to wind down at night? Is it helpful for you to have a special practice or prayer to center you into peace?
Until now I can honestly say that I didn’t fully appreciate the incredible difference a nighttime surrender practice could make in my spiritual life. By letting go at night, I wake up much more positive, energized and inspired in the morning.
Let’s riff in the comments. I learn so much when I hear from you and I’m always, always deeply grateful for it.
So much love to you, beautiful, beautiful souls.
Thank you for your presence and light,
Allison Marie Xx
~ ~ ~
P.S. As promised, here is the link to Jordan’s prayer mentioned in the video.
No? Okay . . . how about stretching, perhaps? Yoga? Running?
Alright, I give up. Tell me, do you have a morning routine? Something – or set of things – you do to get yourself ready for the day? (If it’s running I applaud you, by the way.)
Rituals can be a brilliantly centering, comforting and steadying thing. We commit to them repeatedly until it no longer feels like a commitment, it just feels like ‘the thing I always do.’
We sort of nestle ourselves into them. We rely on them to feel like who we are.
Feeling a little punchy, right? A little bit restless? Kinda like you should be someplace . . . else. Doing something . . . else. Working on anything . . . else.
Worried that you should be a little bit farther along, maybe? Because here – wherever here is – is just not cutting it. Here seems like it’s not enough.
Not enough by a long shot.
Yeah, I totally get that. I often feel that way myself. Despite my otherwise pulled-together, elegant exterior (no really, I swear) in the privacy of my own mind I can be fairly damn pushy.
The good news, though, is that you needn’t feel this wretched friction. And I needn’t feel this wretched friction either. In eight simple words, we can release ourselves from all of this murkiness and get about our days (lives) with peace and confidence.
After it was over, all I could see was light. All I could feel was light. All I could be was light.
She was pure love energy, radiant fascinating white, like staring directly into the center of a star without the sting. My eyes were closed.
I could make out just enough of her: the gentleness along the curve of her back as she knelt before me. The giant fluid outline of what could have been the perfect wings. Her hands held mine as my arms were spread open in meditation.
In one weightless, slender movement both of her thumbs slid down the length of the inside of my willing arms, elbow to wrist, opening me up. As the white of my skin parted into the white of her glow she poured cascades of endless light like tranquil liquid pools into me.
It can be tough sometimes to nail down the exact beginning of a thing.
The beginning of a relationship, for instance, (did it begin when you first saw him? when you first touched her? when you suddenly realized you couldn’t stop thinking about him? on a date? in a fight?) or when you first began to enjoy decidedly grown up stuff like I don’t know . . . coffee. Or the opera. Or beets.
That’s why it’s fairly surprising to me that over the past three weeks I have come to discover not only the beginning of the stuff that’s hard to pin down but the beginning of everything.
One of the most life-giving, healing and beautiful skills daily meditation has taught me is not only to align consciously with peace energy for a set period of time but also how to stop filling in the blanks with insanity throughout the day.
You know: the blanks.
The blanks we don’t even realize exist because we bulldoze right on over them, filling them in with judgments, grizzly speculations and attack thoughts.
For the most part, we are not conscious of the blanks which is a damn shame because if we don’t see them, we can’t use them to our advantage.
Without realizing these little pockets of welcome exist, these moment to moment opportunities for healing and growth, we allow the ego to fill them in with the negative stuff we say to ourselves constantly, incessantly.
Enchanting as it may sound to be on a quest of sorts, in one very particular (sometimes frustrating, sometimes lonely, sometimes disorienting) way, calling our spiritual journey a ‘journey’ is radically deceptive.
The thing about a journey is it implies that we are headed toward a particular destination and that getting ‘there’ takes some amount of time.
Probably a long time.
Like the excruciating amount of time it would take to – oh, say – walk barefoot across a barren desert or grow a beard down to your ankles.
One of the biggest keys to receiving spiritual guidance is getting out of your own way in order to allow the universe’s message to come through.
Too often we are so obsessed with getting to the ‘right’ answer that we attempt to force it or try to concentrate on dragging it forward.
Even with good intentions (we do, in our blessed heart of hearts, really want peace), we let our chatty, chomping thoughts trample all over the beautiful silence with our own messy projections, judgments, cares, worries and imagined fears.
This is not guidance, of course.
This is madness.
Loving guidance will not feel strained. It is not about having to be in control. It is not a cosmic race to get to the answer first or fastest. Love waits on welcome, not on time.
I knew it was time in the way time stopped and reality sucked the air from me . . . and I willingly gave it up.
“You have come far enough along the way to alter time sufficiently to rise above its laws, and walk into eternity a while. From this day forth, your ministry takes on a genuine devotion and a glow that travels from your fingertips to those you touch, and blesses those you look upon.”
I don’t always wake up tremendously happy. Really. Not even.
The minute my eyes click open my mind speeds off in about five thousand directions, none of which are particularly blissful or peaceful or calm. It could quite honestly be described as unbridled madness.
In fact, it’s taken me a good deal of practice to be able to choose my mind resolutelyenough to change the course of my mornings, my days and my entire life.
I used to figure (upon opening my eyes, I swear, no kidding) I had to battle up, get ready to make a thousand choices and decisions in order to quiet a mind that was tangled with a thousand rabid thoughts – one by one I’d try to stalk them, clutch them and kill them off.
Wait, hold up – if you aren’t sure how you want to answer that just yet, let me roll this out another way:
I have the weirdest thing for wires right now. As in: power lines. (Barbed wire, too, but that’s probably another conversation.)
I keep snapping pictures of them. I know it’s springtime and the thing to do would be to photograph flowers but for me, for some reason, it’s wires. They fascinate me.
“So you ask for a hotter fire, a fiercer confrontation. Even though this is often painful rather than pleasurable, it’s all right, for you are reaching toward that freedom which lies beyond pleasure and pain. When you want to burn away the grip of your ego on your awareness you’ll endure whatever is needed to clean up your life.” – Ram Dass
A spiritual journey gets hardcore when your commitment to it rises above all else. As you come to realize that everything is a spiritual experience – every encounter, every relationship, every problem, every joy – you are inevitably confronted with the heavy stuff, the seedy stuff you need to fundamentally change about the way you view the world and your role in it.
Sometimes I wonder if creating art is more about asking questions than telling stories.
Can I look at this another way?
How does this change when you . . . ?
Do you see what I see?
What if we . . . ?
In a way, it takes some guts to ask questions, right. To raise a hand, to investigate, to interrupt the regularly scheduled program. So few people do anymore. Everyone seems to have “the” answer nailed down, figured out.
Googled.
But what about the questions that can’t be researched, they have to be experienced? What about our incredible capacity to invent, create, bend, innovate? Make stuff up?
