Get Cap, Wear Cape …….FLY!!!!

A myriad of emotions and plans run through my head. I am unsure of what is me and real and what is been programmed by my life, culture and beliefs. When preparing to start this venture. It seems that simple, "Get Cape, Wear Cap and FLY", but then my head gets in the way. Fear bubbles up around my ideas. telling me that perhaps there was no place for me here. I would stand amidst a throng of people completely unnoticed and unheard, or worse laughed at while I am opening my heart to the world. My head starts telling me about marketing, about market research, and price comparisons, but my heart sees into the souls of those who I have already had a chance to sit across the table from, listening to them bear their souls and ache for a soothing response. The memories of the smiles and hugs in offering some gentle healing through oils and a listening ear and I wonder, what of price comparisons. How much does my head need to drive this love, and if it drives at the wrong speed or intensity, will it completely shut down my heart? Then I remember a moment a long time ago when I walked into a room and there stood a man. Every part of my heart resonated with him and we could both feel it. There was not a moment of practicality in the room that night. I didn't ask for a list of his qualifications to hold my heart because I could tell he could. Since that night there have been logistical questions about school, careers, children, houses, and homes, life and death, but at the seat of this love rides a resonance that with each logistical question is an answer. There was and is a place that can be heard. It is deeper than the mind and higher than the emotions, it swells and speaks a language that is soft and rich and needs no ears to hear. Sometimes the hardest part is getting in tune………….. When my kids were studying the violin, their teacher showed me what happens when every string is in tune. When I play an A on the G string, the A string vibrates in resonance to the pitch it recognizes. The richness is compounded and the beauty of the instrument cannot fully be appreciated or heard unless each string is tuned to the next, until it rises and swells in completion of the melody it sings each in harmony and movement with each note. As I walked through life with my beloved, whose heart resonated with mine, sometimes the thing to do defied logic, I remember so many of those moments, some were door slamming, some were terrifying, some were heart breaking, but they each contributed to a melody sure and sweet providing healing and richness that I could only have dreamed about the first moment I saw his face. Each moment was as simple as "Get cape, Wear cape and Fly", except what is not shown in the picture is the fear, the not knowing, what it might look like if you fall. So we see people flying and we don't see their fear, the beliefs that have held them fast, the obstacles they have overcome, we only see the flight. To keep it simple, there is a resonance that you felt when you got the cape, when you put it on and that lead you to leap and fly. The fear will always be real, but to fly it is the voice and resonance of your heart that must be heard and heeded above that fearful message of the mind.

Teach your Mind to Listen………….

Teach you mind to listen…………….. I remember having this epiphany years ago about the importance of listening to my body. REcognizing that discomfort had a meaning and if I stopped to look closely at it I could extract the message of transformation from the experience. I was most proud of the great clarity and felt myself perhaps wiser than others who did not recognize the importance of looking at what was happening in their bodies. I took pride in understanding this from avery physical perspective, not realizing that I was leaving out some vital information. So, I spent years analyzing the reactions of food, medication and other such stimulus upon my body. I was very good at depriving myself of the things I perceived were toxic to my physicality. I got sicker, still proud of myself, not fully understanding the reasons for my demise. Life in all of its beauty and intensity handed my a package that left my spirit in turmoil and suddenly then I began to see there was a significant part of the equation that I had been missing. As I began to try and unravel the message from my spirit, I began to recognize there was a synergetic link between my spirits responses and my body's responses. Many of the things that I had determined to hold and withhold from myself physically were not the cause of the pain, nor of the relief. My pride was gone, left in its wake was the clear understanding that I had no idea of how to listen to anyone, least of all myself. I had built walls of faulty beliefs and all listening and hearing was filtered through lies in my own mind. But, I had no idea what was real, except what I had convinced myself was. How was I to know the real from the pretenses? The listening started with both the beliefs, and with my emotions. First I had to grieve, but I also had to learn. I had no idea what I was grieving for, the obvious had opened the flood gates to experiences and a lostness that I would never had acknowledged without the initiating factors. I cried so many tears I thought there was nothing left, this opened the way for, fear, for regret and then for anger. The learning was an interesting process, for what I needed to learn came as water in a drought. I could not get enough, when in my grief and sadness I could do nothing else, I saturated myself with the filling waters of the knowledge I had been seeking. Concurrently, as the level of consciousness in my mind was being raised, the grief began to ebb from my soul, giving way to other emotions that I had kept locked tightly under the lid of control and beliefs. The patterns of self deception began to give way to a desire, to know, know of life, know of myself, know of the goodness I had been aching for- but most of all for honesty. How deeply I wanted to question when there was one, to stop when I felt I couldn't move any further and ask for what i needed when I had a need. All of these I had deprived myself of, in the construct of my beliefs about who I was and what I could ask for or even want. At the core of the questions being asked and the answers being received was and is the question of what is mine? What can I hold? When do I need help with and what does that help look like? The essence of what each soul is must be understood to be able to teach any mind to listen. The essence of each soul being filled with a unique confluence of desire and contribution to the world. A special place, where you bring the questions and seek the answers that have never been asked in quite the same way under quite the same circumstances, creating a completely unique combination of need and contribution to the world. Finding who you need, it is a question of the heart and the experience. Perhaps the need is to urge you to love and believe in yourself like you never have, perhaps the impetus is a damaging relationship, perhaps a loss or heartache. Finding what you need , well is kind of the same. We learn to hear because things hurt, not because what we hope for lines up. It cannot line up if we have faulty beliefs in the way of our reception of our desires, or if perhaps what we think we want is actually formed from the constructs of a culture that is defining us, into a slow death. Then what we need takes us closer to death, so that we might seek more deeply for life. The answers to the teaching, and the listening come from a place, that defies logic.It holds us so completely without any outward manifestation of truth, that regardless of the response of others, that this deep knowing is felt through every part of our being. We become one and alive in our knowing. Lest this sounds too simple, there is still the noise of the fear, the sadness, regret and anger all happening at the same time, which we must see, and hear and gracefully honor and understand. Without reaching into those places, our mind cannot hear the desire. Without proper processing of the rage, the pleasure and desire are unfelt and confusion holds us and spins us around and around, through and in and out of the emotions again and again until we hold ourselves gracefully respecting our own pain and rage. So, teaching our minds to listen opens ourself up to every possibility, until we are willing to assume we may be out of tune with truth, we can never recognize the resonance of truth that the body and spirit without bias are speaking…………………..

To Trust

To stand as an individual and to hold something unique, yourself is amazing and beautiful. There is nothing or no one that holds any more authority than you do on your needs, experiences dreams, hopes and future. To stand where you have stood is sacred and has never been duplicated in this life by anyone. So it holds true that you are the personal authority on you. Now, as my own personal authority I have learned that there is a lot I do not know and many more things that even if I know them I do not fully understand their applicability in my life. There are others who have gone before that have experienced similar and have insight that may give perspective to my story. But even at that, it still comes down to me. So how do we hold something that has never been held previously in the history of this world?………successfully? What is the foundation that we can trust? Since our experiences not only reflect an outer experience, but also an inner life response to those outer experiences the answer to that question cannot be either an inner action nor an outer action only, but reflect an experience that creates both an inner and an outer representation. Without both we are not whole, nor has our voice really been heard. What are we going to trust to find that ? I want to share some of my experiences around trust to illustrate my thoughts on how I have come to understand this. This is my experience and is uniquely personal, as are my conclusions to those experiences . In my growing up, the culture, both family and church that I experienced did what any organization, or family ought to for young children, they taught about external actions. Hoping that with that knowledge, I would also experience an internal experience that would ground me for life. Young children do need to be taught, they operate on an internal feeling mode without being able to put what they want to do together with an understanding of consequence, delayed gratification, or work as opposed to play. So, it is important to teach things to children that will guide their lives towards being able to achieve their potential, educationally, emotionally, socially and intellectually. As children grow it becomes important for them to use their growing intellectual, physical, spiritual and emotional capacities, much like an musician studying an instrument, as they move over and over again in the same manner they begin to discover what it looks like, feels like and sounds like to master their study. Much the same way a child needs to fall down, make mistakes and experience failure to fully understand the way to success. IT is through their own feeling, their way through these experiences that they become more competent to do it alone. Now here is where the challenge lies. There is a moment in time when it is necessary to step away and change your relationship with the child to friend or mentor, whom they may seek out when they need to. This is where things went awry. In a culture where you as an individual are never trusted, no matter what responsibility you are given there is someone there telling you how to "get it right", because the outer result, and authority is the most important. Appearance trumps everything in this culture. We talk about the internal, with assumption that if you get the outside right the inside will be a given, but when there is a challenge it is the outside we are looking at. And over and over again, little by little the inside trust of oneself, one's inner needs, desires and knowing are eroded. For there is always an outer source for the answer, and even if we use the "feeling", it is not yours, but belongs to God, or a higher power that knows better than you. I have watched the fear over and over again. Sometimes it is easier to see in others than myself. Mostly because seeing it in myself is so painful. I recognize what I am seeing because of my own experience. I hear the fear of not being sure if you got right what Heavenly FAther was telling you, or the other one God told me to do something the I really don't want to do, but I will submit, as though God cares nothing for those desires he put in your heart. Then we get into denying yourself of "all ungodliness", but culturally that has turned into everything that you might want or feel. Someone else for sure knows better than you. because we talk about how the "natural man is an enemy to God". The problem then becomes that anything you want or feel becomes the enemy and you have very succinctly and subtly learned to never trust yourself. From side to side reeling to and fro in fear we struggle to find answers because if they are internal, someone else had to have given it to you. Why did God put desires in our hearts? Why did he make some to love flowers and colors and others to love the science of the sky or earth? So that he could take us all down and put us all into the same mold, wearing our pastels and khakis??? Trust comes from trusting ourselves. Like being a musician comes from practicing. I spent my life being told how my roles should look my clothing, my marriage, my children (, remember the talk "Women Who know"). Inside the sadness built up, until I was lost. I loved my children, my marriage felt marginal and I for sure had nothing to look forward to as a person. The opportunities to choose were around: when I would go visiting teaching, clean my house and do service. I ached to study, to work, but not like I was told that I could. My children didn't want to fit the mold, maybe I had purposely taught them they didn't have to. Life started to unravel from every perspective and there was not one place that I could get right. Many I just didn't have the strength to do anymore. I was so tired, so unengaged in my own life. The last straw happened for me when our daughter's temple marriage ended in divorce. I know that happens, but the circumstances around this happening were betrayal, appearances, abuse,and broken trust and it felt so familiar that I could not wrap my mind around the grief and why it hurt so much. I watched her suffer and suffered with her and finally understood this was all about trust. In order to choose what is best for your growth and potential, your hopes dreams and goals, you need to choose it. You can't choose it with someone in the background, holding more cards than you do. It has to be your desire, your heart your life I realized through this experience and some others that I won't share here that, here I stood having no idea what I could do. I was waiting for the voice of permission by the culture that what I desired fit into the roles, the ideology that someone else had determined for me and that I had trusted, with my whole heart. Not only had I trusted them, but my worth was built upon fitting into the culture. It was clear that I was good enough when……………… and the list is very long, not only is it long, but it never ends. There is an allotted time for grief, if you need one, but if you are not done and need something outside of that, the disapproval was keenly felt. I have personally been pained by hearing a leader criticize those who asked for a release when they felt they could no longer serve. No essence of trusting their soul, but a solid wall of " the man who knows it all" The crowning blow came when I found out the lies that permeated through that culture, they had been told in veiled truths hidden from plain view. And then I felt betrayed, like my daughter. I had trusted that what someone said they were is what they were. I recognized that lies cannot stand upon lies and that truth is built upon a foundation of truth Trusting has to start with truth. Learning to trust myself after all of these years of delegating it to an someone else is challenging. IT requires me to think and feel and discern my own soul. I have to build upon truth. Truth is built upon love, life and light. How can I know, how can I trust myself? Truth is the answer. I am practicing trusting myself and guardedly trusting others. I have days where I feel so afraid, like I am free falling. I am learning a new instrument. I am learning how to listen and to play with with my heart, and my desires. I have moments when I feel so free, like a child, all the parameters of fear gone. And others where I wish to fall into someone holding all of this, but I don't really want that. Learning to trust is new. It has created delightful resonance in my marriage. So amazing to trust like this, the fear gone, the judgement gone, just delight in each other. And with myself, I am amazed at who I actually am. So many things I didn't know, they were all hidden in fear and despair and have now been given new life. So, this is what trust feels like. I am still new at this and am cautious and guarded, like I am playing a little haltingly on my newly acquired instrument, but delighted by the sounds and gratefully looking forward to the potential of the beautiful music to be made.

Separate and Distinct

One of the doctrines that we are proudest of in the church has been the doctrine of the Godhead containing three separate and distinct beings. We pride ourselves on creating something that soothes the intellect's need to understand from a material level God. But, I started wondering about that. I have studied, permaculture, organic gardening, aromatherapy, homeopathy, the philosophy of Romantic science and more. The thing that fascinated me about it all was the connections. Everything is connected. I was so delighted to learn about mycorrhizal fungi, the fungi that connects roots of plants into systems of immune support, that we cannot see and have little understanding of from a surface perspective. When we look at patterns, fractal patterns and how things are created in patterns that are like archetypes connected by virtue of patterning, the whole world is connected through a giant archetypal pattern. Then there is quantum physics and the waves. I don't know all that much, about this, this this is my summary of what would take me a lot more time and study to really understand. Everything is connected by way of energy and how the energy responds depends upon the type of energy that is connects with it, so a like energy builds and dissonant energy breaks something down, really indicating connections everywhere at every level that we cannot even begin to understand on a material level. But if we stop for a minute and are present with ourself, we can feel it. We feel it in a place above our intellectual mind and there is no way to "prove" this on a material level, but it is something we just "know" . When we meet a person that you have a feeling that you knew before, where does that come from. It speaks to energy, the energy they bring and when it meets with yours it builds. Hmmm it feels kind of beautiful and simple when you are looking for something. Now back to separate and distinct, here in lies the problem. The connection of our souls and our energy is totally disregarded in this space. God becomes something outside of us, whose influence we cannot bring in except through our outer action, completely removing our inner heart from the equation. Now, when I say that I mean that the heart is not the source of the connection to the outer, an outer source is the connection to the action. To try and make sense we say words, like " An outer manifestation of an inward commitment". But how is the inner fully manifested? Only by a certain set of parameters that look a little like a successful business executive: driven, hardworking , goal oriented, appearance, numbers and results focused. Go through the actions required for a person to connect to this separate and distinct God. We pray, we read, we serve, we visit, we keep commandments, we go to the temple and the list could go on. A list driven and determined by an external source and a lot of fear. One of the things that I wondered is why the Bible talks about three in one when it talks about the Godhead. One of the other things I have been studying has been the translation issues with the Bible. I have looked at how we take the English version of the Bible, written in the 1500's and completely overlay our understanding of English to the translation that was done hundreds of years ago. Now anyone who has read Shaekespeare, Chaucer, Austen, and I could go on know that the English language was much different, much more complex than it is now. Words have changed meanings and the literality of things has also changed. Now, take that a step further and look at the meaning of some of the passages that we assume we know the meaning of, in Greek or Aramaic, or Hebrew. As I have studied the beginning of the Old Testment in Hebrew, it has blown my mind. What we are assuming is literal, Adam, Eve, man woman, Garden etc, could not possibly be literal when we look at the Hebrew work, especially when we add in an understanding of the consciousness of the people writing this book and their way of communicating through stories. They spoke in parables, or myths. What we are assuming as literal is not likely literal. So, back to the Godhead as three in one, What were they really saying? From what very little that I know of this subject, it seems to me that we must go back to connections, patterns that makes sense to this intuitive place in us. Everything is connected and in patterns and impacts everything else without reservation, no matter how much we will it to be otherwise. So, God, Jesus and the holy spirit, their connection has to be in us. Three in one in our soul, their influence whether that be through quantum energies that we do not understand, or something else, there is that intuitive place in me that knows that when I open to my own soul, my own heart to the world, to desire, to a spiritual space that cannot be explained with words, I find God, all of him, not outside, but inside. I was taught that I must perform in order to have God's grace. In order to be truly connected to my family there is a place I must go, a physical place and physical things that I must do or the connection is lost. It has bred fear and shame in me my whole life. Fear of losing what I love the most. That fear drove me to try and control them the way I was controlled. "Please, jump through these hoops or we won't be enough to be connected forever" What I discovered when I stepped a way from the fear and frantic driving, results , and the appearance focused nature of the church is the beautiful place of connection, one that is just waiting for me to see it. It is this quiet place, where I need not try to convince another of my knowing, so they too can be connected, but a personal place of deep resonant understanding that is quiet. For me many things have changed, prayer for example has become quiet, when I am so busy trying to be heard and get my point across, make sure I am asking for the right things, and the right people and the right experiences, my mind gets caught up in the "rightness" of it all and I become separate from the very source of the power that I am seeking. Prayer has become hearing, hearing the resonant energy in my heart. The list can go on…………….. What I have really learned is that God, Jesus and his spirit are in me, just like my kids have complete access to both my husband's and my DNA and with that they become complete, they are three in one. It is kind of beautiful. They never have to look to find that part of me that they want or need and it becomes an amazing beautiful discovery of me through them. What I have given to them is beautiful and unique. They will each in combination of what they have with their own unique desires and perceptions become someone so totally different, but I can see me in them, like I can see my parents in me. So, in the beginning in Hebrew the Name for God had the meaning of a being discovering himself. Now I understand why. I discover him and he discovers himself through my quiet understanding of who I am, my desires, my heart, the places and people and calling that is resonant only to me in this perfectly unique way. I never want to be separate and distinct again. I want to be connected by every particle of energy and of light and every force that God has created that we do not understand. I am OK with knowing that there are many things that I do not understand. But I know God is in me and I know that He is love and that love does guide us to all truth, all light, all connection, for now and forever. I love being able to let my fear go with this beautiful understanding, the importance of my heart to really understanding love and connection to God, to the world and to everything here. We do know, all of the truth of God and the whole universe is in potentiality within us, our learning is to listen and to hear. The voice is our own heart.

Experiencing Life with Completeness

I have been noticing particularly on Facebook a trend toward intellectualizing our personal emotional experiences. So when I go on Facebook, for example I recently saw a blog post written about a girl's experiences with sexuality. They weren't what a person might hope that a young girl going into marriage would experience. Here is where I thought it was interesting, in her blog post she shared her experience, but not really, because she tied it to a philosophical idea that she related as the cause of her experience. This set off a number of deeply heated debates on the issue, everyone moralizing what was right and what was wrong. To be fair, that was the tone of the blog,( I thought I did something right, but now I think it was wrong.) I am not writing to debate what was right or wrong. I think that is far to black and white, what I am here to talk about is why do we have to filter our experiences through a philosophical idea? Is there a reason that we need an external already recognized ideology to experience our emotions and give validity to our pain. Does this give back the control and create understanding and suddenly aha everything becomes right and my pain is eased? It may be that I want to focus on Going back in time and doing this differently. Or I may feel that I am so angry that this happened that I am going to criticize anything that comes anywhere near what I am assuming is why I am hurting. One of the things I have come to understand in my own life is the process of grief. Anger and regret are part of that, so it becomes clear to me that what becomes a huge angry debate is touching on the grief processes that we are all going through. One of the saddest things that I have observed in the last few years in this culture is the discomfort we have with the grief of others. It seems that angry debates are far more acceptable and comfortable than a person writing a blog filled with honest emotion, particularly sadness and fear about whatever the event may be, In this case sexuality gone awry, but that could be betrayal, religion, lost opportunities, death, health problems, rejection and the list goes on. Any of these are painful experiences, and when we talk about sexuality in this list it is probably one of the most painful ways that we as people can be injured. It is so innate to who we are, that when not understood, distorted or used for another's gain, we are injured deeply. How sad is it in that injury that the real sadness and fear that haunts a person is the part of the experience that cannot be shared. We become "stupid" in the face of the sadness and fear of others. Often there is a timeline given for how long you should feel sad, which is really only given if the loss is considered "legitimate" , but if the loss is less understood, like the loss the girl described in her blog, or divorce, or betrayal of some kind, the sympathy, (notice I said sympathy, not empathy here) is weak and short and people fear themselves going to that place of loss and listening and most of us are left alone to hold our own pain. So, it becomes simple. The best way to talk about your pain without it being rejected is to make it into a ideological question, instead of just an experience that needs to be honored, respected and held gently, by ourselves and those around us. It seems to me that intellectualizing is easier than feeling. So, in an honest effort to be real and give those around me permission to do so. I myself am struggling still with losses that leave me sometimes catching my breathe and trying not to cry. The betrayal of people that I have trusted, hopes lost in a child's death and pain and suffering of the people I love the most, but simply have to watch. I know that sometime the sadness will get better, it does some days, and others it is loud and I feel vulnerable. Watching my children harmed by those who should have loved and protected them still leaves me sometimes angry, sometimes heart broken. And I wonder what to trust in when the things that I thought I could trust………………

The Whole or the Parts………..?

I work backwards, probably why people may not understand my process. If you break it down into a whole bunch of pieces and want to understand the pieces, I can't. I work exactly to opposite. I take out the pieces, put together the whole picture and then the pieces unfold. SO, the Law of Moses was all about all of the details, do this, don't do this, but when Christ came he brought a higher law, the law of love, he brought and identified the whole, the driving force, the foundations of everything. So, it is simple for me. If I live the law of Love basing my relationship on Christ, then all of the right things will follow. So, there is little for me to profess, mostly because the picture has to become clear before the details are known. They become born out of an understanding of myself and his love and his invitation for me to see and know specific things. I don't feel like the details can be as important as just being at one with him. It is funny because I have been working on some soap making, some aromatherapy, lotions, body mist, bath oils etc. I have had people who wanted me to bring them some, so they could sell it, but the whole picture was not formed in my mind and even though I had some products they were not part of something I could see as a whole and therefor could not present. And then one day, I could simply see the pieces and started putting them together for a purpose. I was participating in a craft sale, a fundraiser for Lindi's class at school, for their trip to Drumheller in May. I was doing it because I knew I could and that I wanted to and that it would help me see. It literally just opened up and I could see, how to name and label and mix and present. And then we did the sale and it was amazing and I learned just a little bit more about what mattered, so I could really see what the lines of products and the labeling details were. I am sure that as I continue the process will be the same. At each moment when I am emotionally ready to see the insight comes. The labeling was particularly difficult for me to wrap my head around. I worked and worked for two days and nothing was resonating as, this is it. Computers and I are not the best of companions when it comes to something like that, so I finally got super frustrated and was crying and all of a sudden I knew why and it had nothing to do with what I was working on. As soon as I understood I sat down and within a few minutes had it planned and finished. IT has amazed me at every turn how my readiness is the key to my understanding. I have personally felt based on the issues of comparison and the issues of Mom's needs being more important than our own process that what the real issue is here is that I have never been able to create a whole for myself. The parts were driven so deeply without mercy or thought about understanding and though my head was spinning and I tried to get the parts, all I wanted was for the whole to be driving the parts. This is why I am challenged with church history. See the difficulty of the whole thing for me is in the patterns, in the whole that has been created, not in the individual pieces, they add up to something and it isn't looking like what we say that it is, to me. The whole is the problem. We can apologize for the parts and make excuses, that would not be an issue for me, but when the whole created is fear , shame and performance based, it tells me something is wrong. That does not fit into the law of Love at all. How can that be rectified? For me right now, I am putting the whole of what matters together. I am listening and trusting the Saviour's way of showing me. I know he knows that nothing works for me without the whole understanding, the whole of being able to participate with resonance that this is the whole. It isn't there. I have jumped through everyone else's hops doing it there way all of my life. I cannot any more. I have nothing left for pretense, if it is not real and resonant and whole and complete there can be no place for it, until such a time as my readiness leaves a place for understanding. If it what we claim that it is, the law of love will prevail. At this point in time based on my experiences, I do not feel that is the case, but I also know that the only way that I will truly understand anything is to simply be open to God and hear his movings and whispering in my life. I have full confidence that anyone who follows the Saviour will find their way to a place of wholeness. Maybe it doesn't matter to some people, they can break things apart and make sense of each piece, but me and my family all work the same way. The reason Shae landed where she did. Now there is a space for all of us to create a whole with Christ, because he is what we value. I am not letting go, I am only holding on to what I really know, the rest will sort itself out.

The Real Gift

The Real Gift………. I have had occasion over the past year and a half to study aromatherapy. It is a beautiful and fascinating field of study. Plants have always captivated me since I was a child, trying to grow my own . As I studied and made blends I developed some favorites. I think which ones I love depend upon the day and my need. I remember one day feeling really sad and kind of despondent and had some house cleaning to do. I got out my cleaner, made with orange and some other citrus fruits. Now for those who don't know , citrus is particularly uplifting, helps depressions and sadness. I wasn't really thinking about that, just needed to clean. Well, by the time I was done cleaning, I felt amazing. What a beautiful lift, just what I needed. One of things that I found so interesting when creating blends for people is the unique response each person has to the same oils. For example, I was blending for two women, they each were struggling with the same emotional challenges that we were blending for. I sat with each one, individually and opened the bottles so that they could get a sense of the resonance of the oil for them. What really felt uplifting and healing to one, the other had total disdain for. It became apparent how incredibly individual we are from how our emotions impact our bodies, to what creates a healing space in them. One of those young ladies particularly loved the oil spikenard. I used it in a number of her blends and I grew to love it myself. In using it I became aware of the special properties of spikenard, and maybe some of the reasons that I loved it. Spikenard is a very calming and grounding oil. IT helps one connect to themselves. It lifts the heart when experiencing deep sadness. It calms the heart, the mind and the thoughts. It has anti-inflammatory properties and is of special value with difficult skin conditions. I have another friend who has struggled with some very serious mental illness and have made some blends for her to provide emotional support and stability. She called me today to tell me how much she appreciated the spikenard blend that I had made for her. As I listened, I was taken back in time to the story of the woman anointing the feet of the Saviour with the oil of Spikenard. I recall that in the story she offered him something that the hosts of the house did not. And when she in her total offering not just of her oil, but the manner in which she knelt and anointed his feet and then as though she had nothing else she wiped his feet clean with her hair and tears. While offering this beautiful gift, the significance was totally lost on those also present. The murmured and talked of the waste. They missed the beauty of the love offering, that would bathe his feet in tears, wiping the oil, whose properties would be to give him comfort in sadness, provide healing to his feet and to calm his heart as he offered his perfect love to all mankind. While they were carefully preparing their outward vessels to fullness of hypocrisy, self interest and greed. She wept at his love and offered in the deepest humility not just a precious oil, but her heart. What I realized after my friend called me was the impact this would have had on her. Oils can be most powerful in a huge does like that. I once while working in a store broke a bottle of Japanese mint oil. I had a sinus problem at the time and the effect was HUGE, the amazing opening of the space that was congested and the lift. I felt it all night and still the next day when I went back to work and that oil was not on my body, only in the air. So, imagine the woman, who knows what her life was, but she was touched by the Saviour, by his love and was seeking relationship and healing from him. I don't know her story, but I do know that if she loved that oil enough to anoint his feet and offer it to him in a gesture of love she had felt the healing properties herself, both of the oil and of him. As a woman I suspect she also realized that perhaps he could use that healing lift. While anointing his feet and using her hair and tears to dry them she would have been covered herself in that beautiful aromatic oil. It would have stayed with her. Her hair would have held that healing lifting power for days upon end and the sweet memory of him as well. Could it be that the real offering of a gift is one that will also heal you, bring you closer to the Saviour. The pharisees mocked her gift, but the Saviour was and is less concerned with our outward manifestations, but what the real gift is…………..it is the one that is unique and individual in the giving and holds your desire, your ideas, your love, your healing and your heart. There is no design as to how that should look. I cannot make a successful aromatherapy blend without understanding the resonance that is in the body and soul of the person I am blending for, neither can a gift to the Savoiur be offered designed by someone else, or offered to be like everyone else, whether in your own mind or to be seen of men. The only real gift we bring resonates to bring healing and love to us, first, and then to the world. WE can and will be misunderstood as we follow the Saviour, but to know and to feel how your offering resonates with both him and you that is the real gift. That will bring real healing and real love to the world.