Month: August 2018

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Fractals & Coping with Periods of Great Stress

I had a really fascinating thing happen last night while dreaming. I felt myself waking from deeper levels of sleep, and I kept repeating a phrase to myself, as if in order to remember it later. The phrase was ‘fractal mapping’, but applied in a certain context.

This is what the Fractal Foundation has to say about Fractals:

“A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos.”

Some examples of fractals are sea shells, snowflakes, lightning, ferns, broccoli, peacocks, pineapples, crystals, mountain ranges, trees and leaves, shorelines, rivers, sea urchins, and sea stars.

What about Fractal Mapping? What is it? How does it apply to our world? 

“It is the underlying fractal structure of geographic features, either natural or human-made, that make reality mappable, large-scale maps generalizable, and cities imageable. The fractal nature is also what underlies the beauty of maps.” – Bin Jiang, Cornell University Library

Distilled into plain language then, fractals are repeating patterns—simple and complex at the same time. They are something relatively simple, repeated over and over and over again, to create a larger pattern. When you closely observe the pattern, you can discover its building block at the heart of the chaos.

When seen in physical states in nature, fractals are indeed beautiful. I’ve always loved to see how elements of our world can be built in these ways that are perfectly orderly and pleasing to the eye at the same time. And the end result takes an endless variety of shapes and form.

But what about how fractals can apply to non-physical reality?

In my dream, I knew fractal mapping could be applied to how we approach stressful times in our lives. We have all experienced moments of profound stress, when we feel overwhelmed by everything we’re expected to cope with at once. The key to enduring these moments, according to this dream, was to apply fractal mapping to understand the basic building blocks of our unique manifestation of stress—the single leaf of the fern, or the single segment of the sea shell. Take the smallest part of your cause of stress. Distill it down to its most basic components.

It is possible. Patterns appear in our lives as well as in nature. We repeat the same behaviors ourselves. We get stuck in the same cause and effect loops until we learn from our mistakes and correct them. For example, if we are enabling someone else’s poor behavior, cleaning up their messes so that they don’t have to, we will get suck doing so over and over again until the exhaustion overcomes us. Our frustration with the situation builds and builds until our discomfort—the effect of our choice to enable—reaches a breaking point.

Now, it’s your job to figure out what specific choice you are making that’s building your fractal pattern of stress. When you take it all apart, what’s repeating?

Take that thing. That small thing. Find a way to change THAT. Discover a way to make a different behavioral choice to help yourself escape your fractal pattern of stress.

You can ease your monstrous stress load by using fractal mapping to understand the nature of YOUR reality.

As I came out of my dream, lifting up to more shallow levels of sleep, I kept repeating the phrase fractal mapping to myself, over and over—another fractal—in order to remember it. I honestly knew nothing about fractals until this morning, when I did research upon awakening. This can be a tool to help yourself. To HEAL yourself. You can conquer your self-made mountains. You can break them down to their smallest parts. Understand the pebble and the whole mountain will crumble.

Have a blessed day, friends.

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Ego vs Soul

It’s always said good versus evil is the ultimate conflict in our world. This isn’t true. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ as presented by organizations like the Catholic church do not exist. They’re warped shades of the truth, build to conjure fear and exert power over the masses. In reality, there is only the Source of all creation, and everything separated from it. The Source is Love and connection contrasted by that which is selfish and disconnected. In other words, the real ultimate conflict is Ego versus Soul.

By Ego, I don’t mean the traditional definition of the word, but the personality our minds construct during our lives in order to identity and separate ourselves from everyone else. It’s the way we tell ourselves we are unique and special, in ways no one else will understand. The personality is tied to our physical bodies, wired into the mind. The personality is driven by fear, above all else. It tells us to be afraid of others’ success, to do anything in our power to rise above others and establish ourselves as better than. It whispers to us that life is a competition, and we are losing.

But the personality—the Ego—isn’t real. It doesn’t exist beyond our bodies or beyond this life. When we die, we leave the personality behind. It’s the Soul that is eternal and continues on.

Knowing this, the Ego fights the Soul instinctively, for supremacy. It does its best to scare us into compliance, so that we will scramble for power outside of ourselves to prove its worth. It makes us believe that material possessions—houses, cars, clothes, jewelry—are what determine our value. That power comes from things and accomplishments, job titles and awards. But I invite you to really look at those in our world right now who do have money—as much of it as anyone could dream. Do they seem happy to you? Content in their lives? Or do a great many of them they seem afraid? Paranoid even? Miserable?

That’s because sometimes we don’t understand something until we have it sitting in our hands, to experience up close and personal. Those people have what so many never will, and yet… it’s not enough. There is no salvation in money. No peace or true joy.

Ego is also responsible for our thoughts. The voices in our minds that obsess over past and future, worrying over what has already happened, or what might be. It fills our awareness with noise so that it feels more real and in control of us.

These are the types of lies the Ego is built on. It is afraid because it is by nature impermanent, and cowers in the face of imminent, inescapable destruction. The Narcissists in our lives are Ego-driven. They are the closest to our understanding of ‘evil’ that we will ever find.

Soul is our connection to the Source. It is pure, powerful Love, bonding us in unbreakable ways to every living force in our reality and beyond. Soul is immortal. It’s also quiet in its power, whereas Ego is loud. The thought-noise in our minds generated by Ego tends to cover over the peace of the Soul waiting for us beneath. It’s necessary to go inward to connect with our Souls in order to silence the noise of thought created by Ego. Through things like meditation and in-depth self-scrutiny, we can clear away the chatter in our own heads, letting the Soul’s steady peace rise to the surface.

Our Souls are the source of all true power, originating from the Source. What this means is that everything we would ever need is already within us, accessible and ready to be discovered. All of the needs you’re trying to fill through things like money, fame, or accomplishment can be better satisfied through understanding ourselves better. Once you’ve begun to truly love yourself as you are naturally, the need for attention or physical proof of your worth disappears.

And you should love yourself. Our Souls are each perfect and unique ‘as is’. Is there room for growth? Absolutely! That’s why we’re here on Earth—to heal the parts of ourselves our Souls have decided to focus on, on this part of our journey. But you were born with all of the tools required to complete this task. You have the talents and interests specially designed to steer you toward the pre-set life goals in your Soul contract. Fate will set you on the right path and keep you moving in spiraling patterns around key issues. By taking a broad view of your life thus far, you will notice patterns. Pay close attention to them! These are your unique lessons. They will keep appearing in your life over and over again until you resolve them.

You may ask how to solve these patterns—especially since we tend to get stuck in them for a while. The answer is simple. Intuition. Gut feelings are the voice of our Soul directing us to where we should go. They’re subtle, and we have the ability to ignore them, so you must pay attention to your inner guidance in order to both hear and understand what’s being conveyed.

We are not incarnated with the full force of our Soul. We only take a small part into our Earthly bodies for the duration of our lives. The remainder of our Soul stays behind in our true home, anchoring us there. Our Souls are too powerful energetically for our physical bodies to survive more than a small portion of them. The small part that we do incarnate with is a portion we’ve chosen to heal through our lessons on Earth. We also bring with us gifts to use to contribute to the greater well-being of this world.

I promise you that if you work at distinguishing what impulses are coming from your Ego, and which come from your Soul, it will go far toward resolving the main trouble spots in your life. Stop trying to prove yourself to be right, or better than, or more than others. Just recognize the beauty to be found in each of us, and how astonishing the real you—your Soul—is. You are powerful. You are intentional. You are exactly who you were meant to be, without having to work at it at all. Nothing about you is a mistake. Nothing can truly hurt you, because your Soul is eternal. It is loved more than you can know, and always will be. Your only enemy is your own Ego. I encourage you to face it, and see what miracles can be discovered by simple self-understanding.

Have a blessed day, friends.

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What is the meaning of life?

I’m one of those people who always wants to discuss life’s biggest questions – like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ – rather than engage in small talk, but I’ve had trouble finding others like myself. I started this blog to create a space where those questions might be asked, and begin to be answered, in a way that opens the conversation for further consideration rather than giving anything like cut and dried answers. You’re free to disagree with anything and everything I say. We all go through life deciding what feels true and what does not. Keep what works and leave the rest.

Right now, in August of 2018 in my corner of the United States of America, there is a lot of upheaval – politically, environmentally, energetically, socially, etc. It’s a situation that causes stress. I’ve found that answering some of the bigger questions about what we’re all doing here, what our true purpose is, helps to establish a foundation of comfort, strength and peace whenever the news stirs up anxiety. We all need more ways to tap into the deeper truths about our existence in this place to help us endure our hardships with grace and hope.

What are your big questions? The REALLY big ones? The ones you carry like an ember burning in the depths of your heart, sometimes causing pain, other times shining a light? I urge you to pose them either here in the comments on in your life, to someone you care about. Get them out in the open.

After suffering the profound loss of my entire biological family – through both death and estrangement from seemingly endless cycles of abuse – I was unable to NOT dig for answers to my own big questions. Grief creates a wide space, which we can either try to fill with things like alcohol or drugs, or with pure-hearted effort to figure out what the hell is really going on. I did not find the support I wished for when I lost those I love. Unfortunately, I think this is more common than not. It’s hard to face the finality of death. To love someone with your whole heart, to have them woven into your life and then feel them ripped away. It’s a scary enough prospect that friends, family, everyone can get driven away. We don’t want to have to face the tough stuff, as much as it’s good for us to do so.

What’s the meaning of life? From where I stand, it’s to learn. To grow. To exorcise our own demons through trial and error. We see a goal, strive for it, and fall flat on our face. Or we reach it but find it’s too much for us to handle, and not as wonderful as it seemed from afar. No matter the outcome of our striving, it’s the act itself, the effort, that means the most. We are here to do our best, every moment of every day. Just that. Do not feel like you are a failure unless you meet some arbitrary series of goals. Do not assume that success in life is an amount of money in the bank, or a certain number of friends, or the size of your house. Allow yourself the kindness of stopping all comparisons with those around you. You are yourself, and that is a beautiful, complete truth. You are exactly who you are supposed to be. Every aspect of your being, your body, your personality, your dreams, are intentional. You are who you are so that you will face the lessons specifically set out for you by the Universe. All you need to do is take the ride of life and let things come as they may. THAT’S IT.

You are allowed to mess up. We tend to learn the most when we do, actually. We find the most contentment when we embrace exactly who we are – warts and all – and go from there. We come equipped with everything we need in this life, right inside us. The love or power we tend to seek outside of ourselves can always be instantly found within. Love yourself with all of the energy you expend yearning for shining dreams, and you will be better off than you were. Stop trying to attain power from external places, and seek it in your soul. The more we go out into the world looking, searching, scrambling for the answer, the more we realize it was inside us all along.

It is a real tragedy that our society does not create space for us to be steered inward, learning about spirituality and listening to our intuition. There is so much noise around us all the time, so many screens and voices clamoring for attention, that we never stop to hear our own inner voices.

But, they are there. Please, experiment. Find quiet. Listen. Breathe. Meditate. Clear your mind. Ask a few big questions. There will be answers. You will feel guidance steering you to your purpose, and were exactly you are meant to be. Tune out the noise outside of you and just… listen.

You are here for a purpose. Look for it. Feel for it. Your soul wants you to realize it, so stop working against yourself and just let it come in its own time. It will get here faster the less you fight it or fear it. Ignore the distracting noise, and the false promise of money, attention, or external power. Those things will never be your answer.

There’s a lot of pain when we have to let things go, but lean into it. Let it wash through you and leave again. Feel the space the loss leaves in its wake. Use it to heal and grow.

I’ve been searching for places to find respite and calm. I want this blog to be that kind of place for anyone who needs it, so please join me in conversation. If you want to share your questions below, please do. You’re not alone and you are loved – much more than you know.

Have a blessed day.