Your spirit is connected to all that is even if you don’t remember this. You knew this as an infant, as a child and you can know this again.
Painted lady butterfly on red zinnia
Your spirit is the great receiver of inspiration, the great channeler of divine energies. What you see smell touch taste, hear is information needed to live successfully in your body on your chosen planet.
Your body is the how of survival on Earth. Your spirit is the why of your life, gives your life meaning.
Balance between your body and spirit ensures that you live a full life, receiving divine inspiration and guidance through the spirit, living fully in the body, grounded and anchored energetically to the earth, keeping your body healthy and vibrant.
You are a being with access to your full power when you live in harmony with all of life.
Black and white butterfly on red flower
You receive inspiration and guidance through the spirit. You use these inspirations as fuel to create and act and build your life through the vehicle of your body.
Time to take stock: Do you use your powers for the betterment, the uplifting of our earth and her creatures? Do you use your powers to shine your own light in this world?
Grandmother Cottonwood
When a human uses their power to hurt and abuse others, to destroy with wanton disregard for the sacredness of each individual, they cause the web of life to tear. This skews the amazingly intricate and beautiful patterns of love and connection that support us all.
In this way, patterns of abuse and ugly behavior are passed down in families and communities.
The fabric of a once beautiful tapestry becomes torn and tattered and more so over time. Make no mistake, this damage will be reflected somehow in the lives of those who hurt and abuse and know they are causing pain.
They cannot escape from the consequences of their actions. All the money in the universe will not rescue one who hurts others from their karma.
Grandmother Cottonwood
If you are causing pain to others, or thinking about it, please ask for help from a therapist, clergy, or healer.
You do not have to repeat the hurtful behavior of your family or ancestors… Find some way to heal your spirit, your thinking, your feeling, your beliefs, so that you can become a builder of the web; one who strengthens the connections between all things.
Those of you adults who witness or know of abuse must stand in your power, gather your courage and do whatever you safely can to get help, to make it stop!
In this way, using your power wisely, you help to reweave the web of life on this earth into the beautiful patterns of love and connection that are meant to be.
Healing means a change, a movement toward wholeness in your life. Healing means letting go of old stale harmful beliefs, self harming thoughts, energy patterns that no longer keep you safe or comfortable.
Healing means trusting and stepping into the unknown from the well-worn, the comfort zone, the tried and tired old ways of being.
Painted lady butterfly on red zinnia
Healing means gathering your courage, looking honestly at your life and facing facts, then realizing you can transcend and grow and release what seems to hold you back, what seems a bedrock fact of your life.
You can hold a vision for what you want your life to become and begin your movement toward that, one step at a time. There is no need to rush! Hold your vision to your heart. No one can take it from you!
Healing is letting go, healing is allowing yourself to open to new possibilities and ideas and visions that harmonize with the core of who you really are. Healing brings your true self into focus.
Healing is not the same as curing. They are two separate things. Curing means the abolishment, the erasing of illness or disease. Healing is the movement of your spirit, heart, and mind toward your own clarity and light.
Healing is a gentle opening to your
wise and true self, a letting go of all that blocks your spirit. If
you are alive on this planet, in a body, you can heal.
First, gently allow your body and mind to relax, breathing deeply, letting yourself sink comfortably into your chair or bed or mat…
Now, imagine the crown chakra at the top of your head, gently opening and beautiful liquid-like golden light from the divine pouring into and through you like water.
Grandmother Cottonwood
Feel it pouring down through the energy center, filling every cell of your body, every organ, every nerve and blood vessel, every bone and muscle, every ligament, every skin cell…every microscopic connection between cells… Imagine the beautiful light filling them all effortlessly with its cleansing healing power.
Imagine and see and know this amazing healing light filling you from head to toe displacing and sending all heavier energies away, letting them drain through your feet into the Earth for recycling.
Now when light reaches your feet, pause a moment to enjoy the feeling. Then let it begin to fill your aura from your feet to your head, permeating every particle of your energy with liquid golden light.
Allow this light to assist in weaving your aura together in a beautiful tapestry that draws in life affirming energies and filters out all incompatible energies and those that belong to others.
Now, sit with this light and let it circulate from your head to your toes slowly and thoroughly throughout your entire body, then from your feet to your crown through your aura.
This is the light of the divine. Feel it, know it, experience it. Let it heal you and bring you peace.
Grandmother Cottonwood, summer moss
When you feel complete with this practice, give thanks, then tap your cheekbones, the center of your chest and rub the bottom center of your feet near the big toe joint. Let yourself come back to the here and now.
Like a tree you can send down your roots and draw energy and nourishment from the earth, trusting in your ability to feed your body, live in the light, and anchor your spirit.
Like a tree, you can grow toward the light, straight and true, with no deviation to the left or right, trusting in the life-giving light of your true purpose to guide you and inform your growth.
Like a tree, you can reach out toward the heavens, connecting with all that is, trusting that you are one with all things, trusting that your roots will hold you.
Like a tree, you can send out new growth, trusting in the process of life to bring you energy, creativity, and soaking in the sustenance of light that is your birthright.
Like a tree, you can develop your seeds for the future and scatter them when they’re ready. Trust that these seeds of love, kindness, connection, hope, seeds of possibility and creativity and ongoing life will take root and grow where they are most needed.
Maple seeds
Like a tree, you can experience seasons of rest, seasons of regeneration and growth, seasons of letting go, trusting in the great rhythms of nature, trusting you are where you need to be.
Do you allow yourself to make the kind gesture, let yourself reach out to others when that is your first impulse?
Do you stop yourself from creating new friendships, visiting family members, having friends over when deep down you know you would thrive on the connection?
Pair of wild geese in evening light
Some day, dear ones, your friend may move many hundreds of miles away, your family member may fall ill, your loved one may die. Your life in thisbody is limited and finite so you must make the most of each moment.
(Please remember – the life of your spirit is infinite and unlimited!)
Do you feel you are not worthy of love, connection, or deep abiding friendships with amazing people? This dear one, is a distortion in your thinking. Begin compassionately and lovingly to create new habits of thought that support your highest good!
Trust your spirit to know who to spend time with. Trust the whisperings within you that move you toward connection and wholeness and expansion.
Wild geese in springtime
Allow yourself to participate fully in the great web of life that connects all living things with the resilient and powerful threads of love.
Your spirit may seem invisible to you, like the quiet operating system behind the more colorful and dramatic scenes of your physical life.
Seek and find your spirit is under all the clutter of your mind, waiting patiently for your full attention. Know that your spirit is who you really are at your core, who you have always been.
Can you tap into the timeless wisdom at your center that lies beneath all the worry, doubt and fear?
Can you swim in the ocean of light that is your true home? It lies beneath the clouds of heavy energy and stuck feelings that have built up in your energy fields over the years.
You can do this. Even in the eye of the storm in your life you can take time for yourself, breathe deeply and visit that peaceful place at your center that knows no fear, that is wise and loving, that place that is timeless, your true home.
Here you will renew and energize
yourself and reweave your scattered energy to bring you back home to
yourself once again.
Betty’s note: Recently, my youngest brother, Steve died unexpectedly. I hope Grandmother Cottonwood’s words will resonate with those of you who’ve lost a loved one.
Now that a loved one has left his body behind and his spirit has crossed to the light, we must grieve this unimaginable change, this shattering of expectations, hopes and dreams, this kind and loving presence in our lives, now gone, this ground of the known universe, this brother that has been with us since earliest days.
Steve’s kindergarten picture – 1967
In the blink of an eye, the measure of a breath, the beat of a heart, our lives have changed and we are forced to let go, to allow his spirit to continue on in a new form, in a new dimension, one that is not so easy to wrap our minds and hearts around.
His physical form has left the building, but his spirit, the expansive peaceful part of him that is love, that is eternal and indestructible, lives on.
When nothing works anymore, when you find no comfort or inspiration from those people activities or places that brought you joy and happiness in the past, rediscover your foundation, your purpose in life.
Begin with your purpose, your reason for being. Use that as the most important information, the foundation you need to reinvent your life. If you have lost your bearings, forgotten your purpose, ignored the callings of your spirit, you will be off course, your foundation will be off kilter and will need repair and rebuilding.
Re-imagine what your life can be.
Green vine tendril
Draw up new architectural plans to build on your foundation, so to speak. Now that you have rediscovered your foundation, how do you envision your life going forward? What needs to be healed? What will stay the same? What will you add? What will you remove? How do you want to feel? What inspires delights and energizes you? How will you spend your time?
Reinvent new routines and activities for yourself to build a framework for each day that will support your purpose.
Renew your energy with fresh inspirations and high quality self care. Bring in new interior decoration for your life.
Restore your spirit by reinventing your life from the ground up!
Maple seeds
Know that you are meant to be here now, planting your seeds and living your purpose!
When this stage in our spirit’s journey draws to a close and the indestructible part of us moves on to our next great adventure, we call it death.
When the physical body stays behind as the spirit becomes one with all-that-is we call it death.
Think about these questions when someone close to you dies…and when you begin to accept you will not last forever…
Will the death of someone dear limit and diminish your life forever? Or will it fuel your life’s passion and purpose?
You have a short time here while in your body. How will you spend your precious and limited time?
Will you spend more heart to heart time with those dear and beloved ones who will not always be with you in physical form?
Will the death help you rearrange your priorities in life to those that really matter to your heart and satisfy your soul?
Will you learn to communicate with the spirit world and expand your awareness beyond the physical world, beyond the world of logical and linear thought, into an ocean of light and expansion and oneness with all things?
Sunset, cloudy March evening
Can you see death as a period at the end of a sentence in the never ending story of the spirit; as a pause, a transition before the next great adventure?
Ask Grandmother Cottonwood 