But first -

In today’s society, we are bombarded with images of perceived perfect beauty. Just yesterday, I saw a news story about a Lass in the UK who has won a competition for having the most scientifically  measured beauty in Great Britain.

So I got to thinking, what is beauty and why is it that some people can look beautiful on the outside and yet when they speak, they become ugly, while others do not possess obvious good looks, yet when they speak, they light up the room with beauty.

I think Khalil Gibran sums it up beautifully in this extract….

“And a poet said, ‘Speak to us of Beauty.’

And he answered:

‘Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?

Image thanks to neiu.edu

The aggrieved and the injured say, ‘Beauty is kind and gentle.  Like a young mother, half-shy of her own glory, she walks among us.’

And the passionate say, ‘Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.  Like the tempest she shakes the Earth beneath us and the sky above us’

The tired and the weary say, ‘Beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.  Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.’

But the restless say, ‘We have heard her shouting among the mountains, and with her cries came the sound of hoofs and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.’

At night the watchmen of the city say, ‘Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the East.’

And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, ‘We have seen her leaning over the Earth from the windows of the sunset.’

In winter say the snow-bound, ‘She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.’

And in the summer heat the reapers say, ‘We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair’

All these things have you said of beauty,

Yet in truth you spoke not of her, but of needs unsatisfied.

And beauty is not a need, but and ecstasy.  It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretching forth,

But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.  It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,

But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life, when life unveils her holy face.

But YOU are LIFE and YOU are the VEIL.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But YOU are ETERNITY and YOU are the MIRROR.

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Image thanks to virtualtourist.com

Do you ever visit or live in a town with a big artisan population?  I love going to these towns. Just recently, my family and I went up to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland to celebrate my mother’s birthday . We ate some cheese at a boutique cheese factory and enjoyed the views to the ocean from the veranda of the old Mapleton Pub.

The thing that strikes me about artisans is the love they put into their work.  I think it would be a rare artisan who is not in love with their craft.  As we all know, love is so very important in daily life, the expression of love into objects always translates into beauty.  Mother Earth gives us this all the time, with the simplest gifts of flowers and birds, butterflies and beetles.  But humans are also capable of creating love in beauty.

Artisans can teach us so much about working with love. The appreciation for the time they put into their work is unavoidable.  Take a stained glass lamp for example.  The artisan will have stained the glass and sketched a plan, they would have soldered it all together and wired it up.  Time, and love and thought goes into every piece.

How many of you find that this same process goes into your job?  Most of us hate our work and we are only there because it pays the bills.  But what if we were to change our view for just a moment?  What if we were bored out of our brains with our job, but we were to make doing the job a game?  What if we disliked our colleagues, but we were good at our job; couldn’t we play nice and feel the freedom of not being caught up in the office politics?  By putting a little love into our working lives, we too could be like the artisans and find the quality in our work.  You always have a choice and it is your choice to stay in a job that is creating a negative issue in your life.  It is simple to say, ‘no more, I am looking for a new job’. Or, ‘I am going to find out how to learn more, to get into another industry or to climb the corporate ladder’… Or ‘I am going to feel the heart in this job, so I can at least enjoy it while I am here’.

We all have to work, even those who stay at home have to work.  No one gets out of it.  For some of my day I do paid work and for some of my day, I do home duties.  This is because I have kids.  I have to be there for them.  It means I have two jobs.  I am rarely off my feet watching the TV.  Sometimes I hate cooking again or doing the washing again.  But I have chosen to put as much love into the mundane tasks in my day, as the tasks I enjoy.  I love my job, so I put allot of love into that.  I love my family so I put allot of love into the jobs that support them.

Learn from the artisans, work like you love it and love will reward you with beauty. Whatever beauty,  is for you.  Make choices about your work, that suit you and be brave enough to change your attitude to your work.  So as you can begin to love it, until it ends.

I’ll finish this spiritual comment with a quote from my ‘inspirational messages of love cards’

‘Before enlightenment – feed people and wash dishes, after enlightenment – feed people and wash dishes.

The mundane does not have to be dreary, if you put a little love into it.

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We can all say what a good Mother does, but when we look at our own Mothers, I wonder how often we think about who they are?

My Mother has a name, she is named after her Aunt, but that is not who she is.  Who she is, is a good, kind generous person, who has a practical nature and a sharp and intelligent mind.  She is someone who will help a friend and a stranger, if they are in need, she is someone who loves craft and music and who bakes a mean lasagna.  She is a person who likes to travel and explore, who has fun because she got lost, and has fun finding her way back.

She is all these things, but what does she do in the world?

Well my Mum is a triple certificated Registered Nurse and Midwife.  She helped thousands of women become Mothers over her 40 year career in the UK and here in Australia.  She has delivered thousands of babies and nurtured thousands of new borns in the  humidy cribs, too sick to stay with their Mothers in the first fragile days of life.  She has educated Indigenous People about health matters and travelled to remote townships to live with them, when she taught them this vital work.  She has vaccinated thousands of children, saving their lives from the tyranny of disease.

So I know who she is and what she did, but how does she now spend her days?  Well now she is retired, she spends her days creating amazing quilts and items of clothing, by sewing and knitting.  She sells them and she gives them away.  Each piece gives her so much pleasure that she is always planning ahead to the next.  When she is not doing this, she is making music on her Piano or her Guitar.  She sometimes watches Agatha Christie murder mysteries on the TV while she sews and she loves to watch Shakespearian plays and Opera.

But when is she happiest?

I think she is happiest when she is with the people who love her most.  When she is with her family.  When she is with the people she feels most at ease with, her people.  The ones who love her back unconditionally.  She is happy when she is with her friends; she has a group of friends all who graduated Nursing at the same time, still all alive and living near each other.  These women have seen each other through life’s triumphs and tragedies and yet, they remain close and supportive of each other as they have come to the retirement years of their lives.

And so why am I telling you this?  Because I took the time to get to know my Mother.  To learn that she is not a 1 dimensional person.   She is my Mum, the one I think of when I am in distress and the one I think to call on to tell my good news to first.  She is the one person who I feel I can hold onto no matter what, she is my soft place to fall.  But she is not just that.  She didn’t just raise  my brothers and I, she also had a career and friends and interests.  She continued to learn and gain Degrees and Certifications long into her 50’s.

Sometimes it’s easy to categorise a person, in what they do for us, and to see little of whom they are apart from that.  This Mothers Day, I hope that you can see your Mother for all of her self and no matter what your relationship may be with her at this time in your lives, be grateful that she gave you the gift of life.  For the greatest gift we children can give to our Mothers, is to use the life we have been given, well and to make them proud.  For Motherhood is full of self-sacrifice for the sake of seeing your child live and thrive.  Make that sacrifice count.

I love you Mum, happy birthday.

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You’ll be glad you did.

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Of course later on, you may need to vent. You may need to re-group and you may need to even cry. But don’t let that attitude of conceit affect you in the moment that it hits. This is an attitude that is projected by people who don’t understand or havn’t taken the time to learn. They feel something inside themselves that is inadequate and they need to project that onto you.

Image thanks to theglamlife.net

You are perfect in this moment and in this moment; you are the person with the power of you. Don’t let anyone else affect you. …… Continue on your path of self evolution and believe in your rightful place on this earth.

Bella was a little Dog with a big heart, but she was more than a dog, she was family.

As Humans, sometimes we can forget that the other life forms on this planet are just as important as us, we can forget that they love and that they have emotions, thoughts and capabilities that can go beyond our bodies own capacities.

Animals may not occupy a Human form, but this makes them no lesser than us.  In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’ve met some very upstanding citizens who occupy animal bodies, who could put some Humans to shame in their expression of who they are and what their values in life are for them.

Getting back to families, I have a big family, but only 4 of the members of my family are human kind.  The other family members are Fish kind, Feline kind, K9 kind, Bird kind and reptile kind.  This is an inter-species family and I know my family is not the only one. Many homes throughout the world have animals who are daughters and sons to the human parents also.  This is no more apparent than when you have a Dog.  The pup needs toilet trained, disciplined and taught manners, it needs to be trained commands and how to play nicely.  The dog needs most of all love.  And I think this is for me, the biggest gift  any of my non-human family members have for me.  Love, unconditional love.  It is oozing out of them.  They want for nothing but food, shelter and love.  They don’t care about the latest gadgets, who’s on TV or what you are wearing.  I think they probably think we look a bit strange because we don’t have any fur or feathers and have so much more work to keep ourselves clean and clothed than they do.  But they don’t care, they just want to love us anyway.  Because to them, we humans are their pack, their flock, their school, we are their pride.  We are their family, so why do so many people forget that and think of themselves as higher up than the animals who are in their homes?  Why do they think of them as outside of their families?  Why?  I don’t understand why, because to me, it’s obvious that they have just as much right to be here as me, they have just as much of a beautiful heart and mind as any of my Human children and they have just as active a mind and feelings as any Human I know.

You know, not all Humans can be themselves all day, every day, un ashamedly…Animals can.

My animal children have taught me about love, humility, friendship, death,  kindness and compassion.   My house is no home without them and my life would simply be incomplete without the love of my family.  Tonight, my friends grieve for their Dog Daughter Bella.  She couldn’t live as long as them, but her life was so significant, that she has enriched them in ways they cannot explain and she has touched the hearts of all who knew her.  How many animal children do you know who are in your family or the family of someone you know?  Love knows no boundaries, no one body type has the monopoly on it and love and life are the most precious gifts we have for each other, in whatever body we occupy at the time.

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This situation of values and morals was no more evident to me, than during a week of back to back Funerals and memorial services, that I performed.  During this week, I met three families, all from diverse backgrounds.  One had a father who had passed away in a far off town and the children couldn’t get to him for the funeral, so they held a memorial service for him.  The next was a family who lost a middle aged daughter to the complications of diabetes.  The third was a club of Bikies, who lost a brother in arms to a brain tumour.

Of the three services I did that week, who would you think showed the most respect to their fallen loved one?  The children with the memorial, the family with the diabetic daughter, or the Bikies with their brother in arms?

Most people would point a finger and say ‘the children didn’t even get up to say goodbye to their Dad, they must have been rude and hard to deal with’, or they may think  the Bikies are often organised crime people, so they would have been drunk or on illicit drugs.  Well would it surprise you to know that in fact the Bikie funeral was the biggest of the three services and it was the one that was treated with the most respect?  All the people there were dressed in their finery and they were all sombre and respectful the staff conducting the service, including me and to their lost brother.    By contrast, the family who lost their daughter to diabetes, were rude and loud.  With people in the back row of the chapel calling out and disrupting the service.  Many of them arrived  in the clothes they slept in, with stains and crinkles on their shirts.

The memorial service, was a quiet affair, with the adult children dressed appropriately and the mood was of laughter and tears, as a good memorial or funeral should be.

That week in my life, showed me that you cannot ever judge a book by its cover.  Bikies get a lot of bad press, but when it comes to the rites of passage in life and in death, they uphold the highest of morals and values.  Children who cannot make it to their Father’s graveside, still love their Father and choose to remember him well, but families who never held much respect for themselves and their own, will always show that side to themselves when the time comes to say goodbye.

Funerals are about the living, in as much as, the living are the ones left behind.  They are about honouring the life well lived and the person who was living that life.  They are a time to remember yourself and keep your values and morals in check.  Many family arguments erupt around the time of the passing of a loved one.  Should you find yourself involved in this situation, ask yourself, would my deceased loved one want this to be happening?

We all must face this passage, be it to farewell another or to be farewelled, how you conduct yourself is not about your socio economic status, your religion or your culture, it is about your personal values and your morals, inside of you.  And believe me; they will be on display for all to see.

So what is enlightenment?  It is the illumination of the heart and mind to new information and to understanding.  It is the knowledge of facts and of truths that give us new perspective and allow us to advance either as individuals or as a species.

Through the ages there have been different stages of enlightenment.  In Scotland there was an enlightenment period, where people realised that education should be for all the citizens and that it was no longer in the best interest of the people to persecute others who questioned religion.  People began to grow in their minds and hearts, because they were educated, and this is one of the reasons, so many engineers came out of Scotland.

France too went through a period of enlightenment, Europe as a whole had the Renaissance Period & in the 20^th Century, the advancement of technology saw us launch into the 21^st century, out of the industrial age and into the information age.  This time in our history, is an exciting time to be alive, because humans are en-mass seeking more and more enlightenment.  As we grow in knowledge, as we continue to educate our children and as we are able to heal the sick and wounded and move away from war, we are coming into the time when we will no longer just dominate the planet, but we as a species may even dominate our galaxy.  What then?  Where will we go?  How do we get there?

In the spiritual comment I made on Armistice Day, last year, I mentioned that the human beings today would look like Gods and Goddesses to the human beings of 500 years ago, in this same vein, the human beings today would view the human beings of 500 years in the future, as gods and goddesses if we were to meet them now.  We are headed to some amazing and mind boggling advancement.

But everything comes with a cost.  We have a choice and that choice is to either embrace one another as brothers and sisters or to continue to fight amongst ourselves.  You see, we will never advance into our potential if we continue to fight.  We will never see what we can be.  We must sacrifice our habit of negativity toward one another, or we will go the way of so many lost civilizations in the past.

Enlightenment is a growth process and in this growth process, we must hit stages of critical mass in thinking, recognition and understanding.  I will talk about individual enlightenment in a minute, however, as a species; I feel we are beginning to see the critical mass stage coming into fruition.  More and more people are embracing the differences in others and less and less people are driven by fear.  If we are to heal the hurts of the middle east for example, we must look at the hurts face on, we must take them out and shine a light on them, know them and take responsibility for them.  We must do this as a total human race and not just look to one section of the human society to do this.  It must be everyone.  Because, if i were to have a DNA sample taken and the origins of my bloodline traced, I would find I  have Middle Eastern blood, North American blood, Asian blood, European blood, Australian Aboriginal blood, African blood, I would find that I have blood lines from all corners of the Earth, just as you do, because we are all one human family.

As individuals, enlightenment can only begin as we shine knowledge into our souls.  Knowledge from education and spiritual growth, and the knowledge of our hurts.  We must unveil the truth of the darkness and boot it out of our minds and hearts.  There needs to be time with people trained to help us go through this, but it is important not to bury your hurts any longer, spread light over them.  Do not keep them a secret anymore, because just like a leaky pipe in a building, quietly and secretly dripping water every day and night, that hurt will soon create a big mess that you have to find a way to clean up.  That hurt may lead you to places you never imagined you’d ever be.  That hurt could lead you to make decisions you never imagined you’d find yourself doing. And the longer that hurt stays in the dark, dripping it’s acid into your soul, the longer you remain undermined by it.

Ask yourself, what would it take to uncover all my hurts and for me to deal with them, overcome them and leave them behind in the past forever?  What would it take for me to deal with hurts as they face me in my life and deal with them in the moment, so I don’t ever find myself burying them inside of me again?  What would it take for me to release all my negative attachments?  Because once those negative attachments are released, I will become a fully enlightened being.  I will spend each and every day and night in a state of love.  I will be able to reach my full potential.  I will be able to lead others to enlightenment also and together, as a human race, we will reach critical mass with enlightened individuals and we will take the next step to becoming the future gods and goddesses, our present day selves can only dream of.

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TO CONTEMPLATION : Photo of Tom taken by Brenda : God Rest Her Soul. (Photo credit: tommypatto ~ IMAGINE.)

Spiritual growth is important for all of us and a major part of spiritual growth involves the simple act of contemplation.  Contemplation is the time we spend in reflection or silent observation, when we deeply consider a situation, an action or words of wisdom.  There have been many hours in my life, when I have naturally fallen into contemplation.  Sometimes, it was because people were doing hurtful things to me and I needed to have time to think.  Sometimes I was going through a period of rapid spiritual growth and through the act of contemplation, I would have a series of revelations.
Contemplation is a form of meditation, because you still your mind upon a subject, a one line or a moment in time and instead of running your mind over all the actions and words and people that surround it, you quite simply step out of the situation and observe it from the third person.  This may seem difficult if you find yourself in a situation like I did at 23 with key people betraying me and conversations that hurt me hitting my mind.  But in taking that time to use the power of my mind to sit quietly and step back away from the situation and see everyone in it as actors on a stage, I was able to see the motives behind other people’s actions and the answers to what was going on, became clearer.  At 23,I was in possession of a, not yet mature brain, so I still made mistakes, but this act of contemplation served me well, because it helped me to, not fly off the handle or say things I’d regret.

Contemplation has given me a series of revelations or epiphanies too.  It is simple and easy to spend time in contemplation and here is a little two sentence contemplation I have for you today, from my deck of ‘Inspirational Messages of Love’ cards…

‘Don’t love your suffering and hurts only.  Love the moment when everything is all right.’

I’ll leave you to contemplate that one and to consider it, allow yourself to feel the truth within it and the deeper message about being in the moment.

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Image thanks to deafpagancrossroads.com

State of mind is such a powerful thing.  I was at a life coaching seminar one year and they were teaching us about state of mind, they just called it ‘state’.  They fired us all up and got us pumped with high energy music and dancing and a feel good atmosphere and then they produced a 3cm thick board and they told us to hit the board and break it in half.  Now I’d only ever seen this done by black belt karate dudes on TV, so I certainly didn’t think someone like me could smash a board, but you know, in that state of mind, I put my fist through it like it was just a flimsy piece of plastic.  Then they pulled out an arrow and held it to the little dint in our throat, you know the vulnerable windpipe spot?  We got mega pumped and they told us to walk our bodies into the arrow and break it.  It took me a few goes, because the fact was it intimidated me to do this insane thing. But I just went to the back of the line and jumped around like a little kid and got even more fired up and then I found myself in this mind set where I could actually see flames in my inner eye. In that state of mind I just walked through the arrow and snapped it – falling onto the poor lady holding it up!  Then I went off, jumping around like a jack in the box even more because I did it!

That seminar taught me that I could do whatever I had to,  to get the job done.  It told me to focus and create a headspace that was for winning and then go for whatever I wanted because I can.  I have to say, I was on an absolute high for a week after that weekend, I loved it.  If you can get yourself to a life coaching seminar, I fully recommend it.

But we aren’t talking about seminars here; we are talking about state of mind.  I’ve met quite a few people of late who are stuck in a victim mentality.  You know it, we’ve all been there, the poor me, everyone hurts me, I’m always last, I can’t love myself, I don’t know how.  Everything bad always happens to me, I am not worth it, I have nothing to show for my life, I hate my job, everyone at work hates me…yada yada yada…yep, it’s a toxic combination and it can be addictive.  Silly how things that make you feel really bad, can be addictive, hey?  At first, you are genuinely the victim, you’ve been hurt by someone significant or been in a situation of trauma, but it never really resolves itself and you spiral into a mud puddle in your mind.

The body, as we all know is made up of 70% water and as we all know water holds emotions.  Well those emotions poison that water in your body, if they vibrate at the energy of unhappy for too long.  Especially if your mind is cut off from your feelings and the emotions are stored inside, without the flow of tears to release those emotions and feelings, your appearance will prune up.  Soon you’ll be 40 looking 50!  Don’t do it to yourself, people who genuinely care, will find it hard to be around you.  It’s not good.  Counselling and working through it are the best ways.  For me, I found doing martial arts forced me to hit some major emotional barriers.  Because when I had to do kata’s in sequence with others, it transported my mind back to when I was 13 and all the kids were laughing at me in Physical education class because I couldn’t do a task.  I hadn’t even thought about it, all these years, until that moment when I suddenly felt the emotions wrap me up and squeeze the tears out.  I had to go to the loos, so embarrassing.  But it’s better out than in.  You know?

How are you feeling?  Is there some issue that is affecting your state of mind?  It’s a process of peeling the emotional onion to get the core of those emotions and set yourself free.  I think that at that point, you will feel the freedom of enlightenment, because in my mind, enlightenment is when you no longer have emotional attachments to negative experiences or people and therefore, you no longer have a vulnerability to  negative state of mind.

State of mind can be changed with determination, just by putting on a funny movie, or getting in some exercise, playing with a loving animal or doing something creative.  You are never going to change your state of mind, by doing a task that is ho hum and boring like the laundry, unless you love laundry that is, believe it or not I have met people who love to wash clothes!

Be aware of your state of mind.  Be aware of the things you say about yourself and to others.  Catch yourself saying negatives about yourself or about life.  Write down what those catch phrases are, it may be a phrase like…’it makes me feel angry when’, or ‘I can’t’, or ’ I don’t’ think I can’, or ‘I never get what I want’… whatever the catch phrase is, it’s time to name and shame that little sucker, because it’s sucking the life right out of you.

People, who live in a positive state of mind, sometimes have to work hard to stay up there.  No one said being positive all the time is easy and if we were all bouncing around like I was at the seminar, well we’d all be locked up in the insanity ward.  But it is easy to make it a conscious habit of saying to yourself, I am worthy.  I am happy, I am good enough, I am kind, I am a person who has a purpose and a reason for living.  I am loved.

Say it to yourself until you believe it and it becomes a habit to say these positives about you and your life. Then and only then, will you come to the realisation that you have achieved a new, happier state of mind.

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