New Mantra

I've got a new mantra to replace one I've been reciting for 13 years. This is the old one:

I, Connie, have complete and total fatih in the universe
to provide me with all that I need for a full and happy
life. Thank you God for my life.

My new one;

I, Connie, have complete and total faith that the
universe is conspiring to shower me with blessings.
For this I am truly grateful.

Namaste`

Letting my mother go

Christmas was a hellacious journey of intolerance with my 68 year old mother, whom I'd invited to spend Christmas with us in Virginia. Spending time with my mother is about as much fun as five days with a petulant 14 year old. My mother is not a mature person. My mother is not an intelligent person. My mother is not a nurturing person, a generous person, a spiritual person or capable of love in any form that I can recognize. We bring out the worst in one another and bicker back and forth. But because I know I am smarter than she is, I have the upper hand. So, when she returned home after the visit, the emails started and she told me exactly what she thinks is wrong with me and why we don't get along and you know what??? I DON"T CARE! I don't respect my mother or the choices she's made with her life. I hate that she is 68 and still chasing after men. It embarrasses me and I just want to tell her to grow up and get a life and stop reliving her abandonment issues over and over and over again! So I've decided to stop banging my head against this particular wall and just let go of the fact that I have a mother who is still living.

The Thought

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.

So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
---- The Buddha

Xena on Board

"Warriorship is a continual journey. To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life."
Shambala the Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa


I was in Xena mode yesterday. Ever since I had the dream where she got out of my car, put her hands on her hips and telepathically asked me what needed to be done, I've been doing the work of owning the warrior energy that I have actually spent a good portion of my life avoiding, ignoring or simply disempowering through the skewed thinking of the tribal culture that says women are weaker than men.

My experience of the past year has taught me that very few men even exist out there. Most males I encounter are just little boys playing at trying to figure out what the hell it means to be a man. I have spent so much of my life within the illusion that men were the prize, when in truth, self-respect is the only true prize and when that gets bartered away in the battle of the sexes, it sometimes feels as though there isn't much lower to go.

I never watched Xena, Warrior Princess on television. What little knowledge I have of her came from cruising the internet for about 1/2 an hour on Saturday before my dinner party to honor her. But when a warrior princess comes to you in a dream and let's you know that she is fully on board, it's certainly time to do a little research, don't you think?

What I learned about her is that she is a fictional creation of someone's mind. She herself does not appear in the actual mythological stories her character interacts with, but her archetype is that of the Amazon warrior woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons

Amazon warriors were known for cutting off one of their breasts to improve their bow and arrow skills. How pragmatic can you get? And hasn't breast cancer become the new age intitiation into the tribe of current day Amazonians who battled the cancer beast and won? This isn't to say that all breast cancer survivors have transmuted their cancer into warrior energy, but I suspect that if we polled a great many of them, we would find an incredible cadre` of women with tremendous personal power, resources and strength.


What saddens me is the pain created through that initiation, but then, in my experience, pain is a great teacher and for some people, pain is the only lesson left before a higher consciousness can be achieved. So what do you do? You go through it! You stare it down, you look it in the eye and you tell it the get the hell out of the way and when it doesn't you step on it or over it or pass through it. Cancer as the great gatekeeper to the next level of acsension? Sure, why not? What is clear is that cancer is a modern day epidemic and thanks to men and women of science, whose life mission includes the challenge to create treatment and cure, the epidemic is being beat on a regular basis.

But back to Xena, and yesterday. You know, I am such a two sided coin of loving-kindness on one side and take no prisoners or bullshit on the other. My loving kindness self is forever collecting the broken and the scarred, the down and out and the lost in the woods people who cross my path. The pattern that I have continued to enter into is this need to fix and heal which lands me in the unpleasant position of being needed too much, or hounded too much for that which I so generously gave initially.

Like LaMont, the guy on Colley Ave who I employed to wash my car back in November. Now he behaves like he's on my payroll. I don't mind paying people for their work but I do mind when that also becomes a strain on my time and energy resources. On Christmas eve I gave him $20 and he promised to come back the following Sat. at 2pm and wash my car. Saturday came and no LaMont, and my thought is, great, now I'm rid of him. But he came back yesterday, at his convenience and I didn't answer the door, just stayed here doing what I was doing which is this: writing. I refused to get pulled into his drama and I refused to be interrupted from work that I truly wanted to be doing so that he could give me excuses for why he didn't show up. It's bullshit, and WHO NEEDS IT?

One of my resolutions this year is to not involve myself in the life and affairs of toxic people. That includes my mother, my friend and people like LaMont. I have become very selfish with my precious energy because I finally get just how powerful it is when it isn't a source for the likes of unconscious people who play at life. Don't get me wrong, I can pray for those people and prayer, in a pure form, is an awesome power to behold. But I can't continue to be drained by those without their own power source. If we can exchange energy, great, but anything else just isn't gonna serve my higher purpose for this year which is to inspire others to do what they love.

Xena lives.