Lynn Serafinn's Cosmic Journey

Intentions for a Wonderful New Decade

I can hardly believe that we are now into the second decade of the new millennium. It seems like only yesterday I was watching the fireworks over London (on TV) as we passed from the 20^th century into the 21^st. I don’t know about you, but I have a truly wonderful feeling about this next decade. I’m going to be 55 this month (happy birthday wishes graciously accepted), which means that this decade is “traditionally” the time when someone my age would be moving towards retirement. Well I can tell you right now I have no intention of retiring at age 65. In fact, I feel like I’m just getting warmed up! Both my energy and my spirits are high, and I feel full of optimism and hope as we step into the “teenies”.

To honour the coming of the new decade, I decided to set some intentions. To keep me focussed and balanced, I decided to use the four principles of “Give, Receive, Become and Be” from my book The Garden of the Soul as a foundation for those intentions. I’d like to share them with you here.

My intention for the Principle of Giving

I have learned that true “Giving” means to listen deeply to people’s hearts and give them what they truly want, rather than imposing what my ego tells me what I think they need. This decade, I make the intention to give to everyone I meet, from my heart to theirs.

My intention for the Principle of Receiving

I have learned that true “Receiving” means to open my eyes and ears to become aware of the boundless gifts being sent to me at every moment of my life. This decade, I make the intention to allow myself to receive, with wonder, joy and gratitude, all the Universe offers me.

My intention for the Principle of Becoming

I have learned that we cannot “Become” or grow unless we let go of old ways of thinking that do not serve us and keep us stuck in a treadmill. This decade, I make the intention to let go of old stories I have about myself and the world, and to become extraordinary in ways I had never before imagined I could.

My intention for the Principle of Being

I have learned that “Being” means to know and love the Self regardless of the multitude of labels we use to describe ourselves, and to be aware of who we are no matter what challenges surround us. This decade, I make the intention to be me, and only me, and to see you as only you.

Thank you for allowing me to share my intentions with you. I had an ulterior motive for doing so. You see, I know that the true power of intentions comes when you share them with others. And I really, really want to be able to be mindful of these intentions, because I know they sometimes might not be so easy to remember. The fact that you have heard them means there is more power behind them, so thank you for reading.

Try it out for yourself. Make your intentions for the new decade, and then share them with special and supportive people in your life. Then see how much this action helps you to be mindful of your promises to yourself. And what’s even more interesting is that we don’t necessarily have to share our intentions with other people (although it’s always good to, because they can hold us accountable). If you prefer, you can go out into Nature and shout your intentions to the moon, the trees, the birds, the ocean or whatever has meaning and energy for you. Or, if you are the kind of person who likes to pray or meditate, state your intentions to Spirit, in whatever form is true for you. No matter how you state your intentions, when others bear witness to our sincere expression of them, it’s as if the Universe has etched our words into our cosmic diaries, and holds us firmly on our true course in life.

And of course, you are MOST welcome to share your intentions with me below in the comments! I’d love to be your “intention buddy.”

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Is one of your intentions in 2010 to start writing a spirit-based book? Maybe you’ve already written it and you are ready to find out how to publish and promote your book. Or maybe, you’ve just started your writing journey by keeping a diary, a blog or other journal of your thoughts, feelings or creative ideas. No matter where you are in your writing journey, I’d like to invite you to visit Spirit Authors, my brand new Virtual Coaching and Learning Experience just for mind-body-spirit writers.

We are having a fantastic Spirit Authors Grand Opening Webinar Week from Monday 22 February through Friday 26 February, where you can hear (for fr*ee) over a dozen top mind-body-spirit industry professionals, from authors, to publishers, to editors, to marketers and more, all talking about spirit-based books, from writing to publishing to promotion. You’ll also find out how you can join the new Spirit Authors membership site, bringing you bespoke courses, business resources, and great opportunities for both personal and professional networking, all aimed at writers in the mind-body-spirit genre.

To make sure you don’t miss our Grand Opening, be sure to come over to www.spiritauthors.com and sign up for our news updates, so you can receive a VIP invitation to this very special Grand Opening Webinar Week.

Holiday Survival Guide – Pt 4 of 5 – Stress over Money

5 Easy Ways to Beat the Blues and Feel Joyous this Holiday Season-  Part 4 of 5
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC

Well, as we move into the last week of the holiday season, we move into the penultimate article in our series of tips to help you beat the blues over the holidays:

1. Holiday Blues Number 1: Seasonal Affective Disorder (”SAD”) posted 6 December
2. Holiday Blues Number 2: Seasonal Illnessess, posted 10 Dec
3. Holiday Blues Number 3: Family “Dramas” (posted 27 Dec)
   
4. Holiday Blues Number 4: Stress over Money in today’s post
5. Holiday Blues Number 5: Feelings of Isolation (coming Thursday 31 December)

TIP: If you want to receive all 5 articles, be sure to subscribe to this blog in the box on the right hand side of your screen.

Let’s face it. Sometimes we spend money during the holidays as if we had an unlimited supply of cash. But then, the bills start to arrive. And while we might have felt bright, bubbly and festive when we did our holiday shopping, when we begin to assess the financial “damages”, our euphoria can rapidly turn into stress, and even guilt, making it impossible for us to feel the joy of the season.

I’m pretty sure just about all of us have experienced such “buyer’s regret” at one time or another in our lives when we have purchased something and thought twice about it after the fact. At other times of the year, if we bought something and had regrets about it afterwards, we could usually return it if we wished. But with holiday spending, this isn’t so easy, as most of our spending is on gifts for others, or on holiday consumables like food, drink and entertainment. We cannot return these items and get our money back.

So, how can we relieve ourselves from this stress and guilt? Continue Reading…

Holiday Survival Guide – Pt 3 of 5 – Family Dramas

5 Easy Ways to Beat the Blues and Feel Joyous this Holiday Season
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC

SO sorry this is late! I actually thought I had posted it before Christmas. So, you’ll be getting 2 posts back-to-back, one today, one tomorrow.

Today we continue our series of tips to help you beat the blues over the holidays:

1. Holiday Blues Number 1: Seasonal Affective Disorder (”SAD”) posted 6 December
2. Holiday Blues Number 2: Seasonal Illnessess, posted 10 Dec
3. Holiday Blues Number 3: Family “Dramas” (in today’s post)
4. Holiday Blues Number 4: Stress over Money (coming Monday 28 December)
5. Holiday Blues Number 5: Feelings of Isolation (coming Thursday 31 December)

TIP: If you want to receive all 5 articles, be sure to subscribe to this blog in the box on the right hand side of your screen.

Surviving Family Dramas during the Holiday Season
For many people, visiting with relatives during the holidays is a wonderful experience, because it allows them to reconnect with loved ones they might not ordinarily see during the rest of the year. But for many others, visiting with parents, siblings and extended family can bring out the worst in us. It’s as if we’ve travelled back in time. We might be the most powerful and respected person in our professional life, but somehow when we are around our childhood families, we change into blithering idiots. By dint of some inexplicable time-warp, we get caught up in the age-old “family dramas” that drive us absolutely batty and leave such a horrible aftertaste when we go back home to our “adult” world. Within minutes, we manage to regress into a juvenile version of ourselves that never shows up under any other circumstances. But what is worse is that we find it nearly impossible to get out of the age-old scripts we have played out since our youth.

Small wonder why I chose to speak about this in a Holiday Survival Guide!

Getting “hooked” into a role
When we get stuck into a family drama, I call it being “hooked.” The reason why we get hooked into our family dramas lies in the term “drama” itself. Think of what a drama is. It’s not merely a judgemental word; it’s actually a very accurate description of what is taking place. A drama is a complex story with complex characters. And our family dramas are no different. When we are hooked, it means we have taken on the role of one of these characters. And, yes, there are cliché roles in which people tend to be cast. Continue Reading…

Aesthetic Awareness – spiritual emptiness waiting to be filled

(Pssst! See the END of this post for info on my SPECIAL HOLIDAY GIFT GIVEAWAY,  where can you receive over 1 hour of free audio book excerpts this holiday season.)

Meditation 28: Aesthetic Awareness
from “Lessons from the Iris: the Principle of Receiving”

Aesthetics are the subtle qualities of beauty, originality, ingenuity and artistry that surround us at every moment in the world. They are not things that can be defined or quantified with any kind of measurement. They speak to us at an intuitive level, and can be found both in nature, as well as in the creations of humankind. After all, humankind is also a vital part of the Natural World, even if we sometimes lose sight of our connection to it.

Aesthetics surround us at every moment. When we feel moved by a sunset or other natural wonder, cry when we hear a particular song, feel a lump in our throat over a work of art of any kind, or find ourselves affected in an inexplicable way by the poignancy, perfection, or uniqueness of anything we witness or experience, Continue Reading…

Every Day is Halloween – what does your costume say about you?

As a child growing up in the 50s and 60s in the US, I loved Halloween. Apart from the fun of dressing up and going out for trick-or-treat, it was also my father’s birthday (he would have been 90 years old today if he were still alive), so my mother always bought a really fancy bakery cake every Halloween in honour of Dad’s birthday. After many years of having the same type of cake year in and year out—orange and chocolate layer cakes smothered with sugar jack-o-lanterns, black cats and witches—he finally rebelled and asked to have a “normal” birthday cake instead. But as far as I was concerned, I loved the fun of my father’s Halloween birthday cakes every year.

Apart from being the one day of the year where parents surrender all attempts to keep their children on a healthy diet, Halloween is also the day where we, both children and adults, get to dress up and make believe we are someone or something else for a day. What we choose could be our alter ego, our wildest fantasy or our scariest nightmare. I believe we can often learn a lot about ourselves by looking back at what we wanted to be on Halloween when we were children.

What do our Halloween costumes reveal?

I remember the very first Halloween outfit that I selected for myself when I was about 4 years old. Continue Reading…

Moving into the Storm – from enslavement to freedom

The following blog post was originally written for Transition Bedford site at http://www.transitionbedford.org. I decided to include it here on my own blog because, although it makes references to working within the Transition Network, the key points are relevant to everyone who wants to understand more about what it means to be free at an inner level, and to understand more about why they may not always be creating the impact in the world they desire to create. I welcome your comments and feedback, as I spent  significant amount of time writing it, lol! Hope you enjoy it. –Lynn

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Whether we are aware of it or not, the members of the Initiating Group (IG) at Transition Bedford are now evolving from the “forming” stage into the “storming” stage. Can you feel it? Entering the storm means we are making real progress, even if it seems unclear right now. So, at this important juncture, in hopes of taking us even further into the eye of the storm, I’d like to share some ideas which have been swirling about in my mind ever since my Transition Training in London. It has to do with media, our responsiveness to it, both conscious and unconscious, and our role as leaders in the community. After much reflection, I believe in our work within the Transition network, it is essential that we bear in mind

1. That we as an initiative will need to understand and address public emotions that may be stirred up by the media in all its forms (TV, film, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, pop culture, music, advertising, Internet, social media, etc)

2. That we will also need to become acutely aware of how WE ourselves are impacted by media, whether consciously or unconsciously

3. That we will need to know how to protect ourselves against succumbing to any unconscious unwanted impact, so we do not become “reactionary machines” instead of creative, resilient human beings, both individually and collectively.

4. That we will also need to become acutely aware of our own impact upon our community as we reach out to them.

5. That we will also (and most importantly) understand how to avoid unintended impact upon the community.

It is important to understand that these statements do NOT mean that we, as part of the Transition Network, are not entitled to our emotions. It would be an unreasonable expectation to think that we as humans should never feel angry, overwhelmed, grief-stricken, bitter, hopeless or cynical, especially when we are facing issues of such importance as climate change. Nor is it true that, by being part of a Transition Town initiative, we are expected to become super-humans or non-humans.

In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite. Continue Reading…

Poise as a Quality of the Divine

Many thanks to Evelyn Thomas of Lizard Life Coaching who selected the number 27 for this week’s meditation. If you would like to help me write my upcoming book “The Companion Guide to the Garden of the Soul” and possibly have your name listed in the acknowledgements of the book, and announced on my weekly radio broadcast, just select a number from 1-80 and post it in the comment thread below.

Meditation 27:  Poise
from “Lessons from the Iris: the Principle of Receiving”

Poise is a state of being in which you move freely and effortlessly within your own energy.

We tend to think of Poise as a word used to describe the quality of someone who is physically graceful and calm. Many of us also believe Poise to be the ability to control our emotional expression. While these external symptoms might sometimes be indicators of Poise, there are not the key elements. In fact, they might even been a shield that is covering up a lack of genuine Poise. How many of us refrain from expressing our emotions because we have told ourselves that it is the more “poised” thing to do. But if such emotional restraint is coming from the desire to appear mature, professional or in control, it is unlikely to be genuine Poise. You can tell the difference between the two, because true Poise results in a feeling of ease, satisfaction and freedom, while false Poise results in a feeling of being stuck, frustrated or stifled.

Poise, therefore, is not the absence of emotions, but the strength of their authenticity. We can be poised even when our emotions appear to be very powerful. Some of the most poised people in history are those who have wielded their genuine anger, grief or passion with creativity, honesty and fearlessness. When we are poised, we are most able to express all the colours of our Heart and Soul. Continue Reading…

Bedford replies: ‘We are NOT stupid, Mr Prescott.’

In a recent article, former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was quoted to say that the Bedfordshire town of Bedford, should be given a “stupid award” owing to its local planning committee opposing the construction of wind farms on aesthetic grounds. While the implications of this opposition are duly noted, the recently formed community initiative Transition Bedford, part of the larger Transition Town Network of over 1500 local initiatives worldwide, replies, “Look deeper, Mr Prescott, and you will find that the people of Bedford are not at all stupid in matters to do with climate change and peak oil.”

To illustrate Bedford’s intelligence and to increase public awareness on these important issues, Transition Bedford will be hosting a free viewing of the film “In Transition” at the Ent Shed on Castle Road, MK40 3QY, on Wednesday 9 Sept 2009 at 7.30pm. Special guest at the event will be Chris Keene, a member of the “Zero Carbon Caravan”, a troop that is currently cycling and sailing from Wales to the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen.

BEDFORD, BEDFORDSHIRE – 1 September 2009 – Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott thinks Bedford is “stupid.”

At least that is what he was quoted as having said in a recent article published by Business Green and The Evening Standard. According to the article, Mr Prescott said the planning committee in Bedford, whose wider borough is estimated to have a population of more than 150,000 people, should be given a “Stupid Award” (named after the recently released environmental film “The Age of Stupid”), calling the committee, “stupid nimbys” and saying “I hope they get upset about it.”

But a group of local Bedfordians, who are members of the recently formed initiative Transition Bedford, invite Mr Prescott to look a little bit deeper, beyond the surface of local planning committees, to see the real Bedford.

“And if he does,” says current Chair of Transition Bedford initiating group, Lynn Serafinn, “he would see an informed, passionate and proactive side to Bedford, where people are at the cutting edge on the issue of climate change.”

Transition Bedford is a part of the larger Transition Town Network, founded in 2006, which is now comprised of thousands of other towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods who are taking definitive, community driven, grass-roots action in response to climate change and Continue Reading…

Continuity – The Dance of Change within the Changeless

Meditation 77: Continuity

Continuity is a sense of begininglessness and endlessness that comes from feeling connected to Existence itself. In the Divine sense, Continuity does not refer to the act of “sticking with things” for a long period of time. In fact, Continuity has nothing at all to do with “doing”; it is an attribute of Being. Nor does Continuity refer to a need for things to be changeless. Quite the opposite, Continuity is that state we reach where we are able to witness all of Creation as a great system of continual flow and change without beginning or end. Existence is both always the same, and always changing, simultaneously. When we witness this, and feel this at our core, we come to realise that Reality is comprised of a single experience of Divine Continuity, which has infinite possibilities of expression. These possibilities flow like the colours of a kaleidoscope as we turn the wheel around and around. As these patterns are ever-changing, we cannot say there is ever truly a specific pattern, as there is no way to “freeze” them in time. When we release the need to hold on to a particular pattern, we begin to step into the awestruck feeling of Divine Continuity, and come to enjoy every moment as it unfolds before us.

It is often said that unhappiness comes in life when Continue Reading…

Awareness Raising and Inner Sustainability

Awareness Raising and Inner Sustainability
by Lynn Serafinn, MAED, CPCC
Coach, author Lynn Serafinn dicusses the inner work needed before Transition Town groups embark on awarness raising, to ensure personal and societal resilience. For more information on Transition Beford go to http://transitionbedford.wordpress.com, or visit the Transition Network at http://www.transitionnetwork.org

It’s a paradox. Effective “awareness raising” is in many ways “awareness grounding”.

What I mean by that is that we tend to think that “raising” awareness in people is a matter of telling them facts and details so they may understand the urgency of an issue as crucial as climate change and peak oil. But it is my observation that when people become over-saturated with sensory and mental data, far from this raising their consciousness, they actually go numb. It’s called “overwhelm”. I used to be that way earlier in life (and I get back there occasionally when I don’t take care of myself). When the issues of life became too much for me to bear, I became numb, disconnected and resigned. This is a spiritual tragedy for any individual. But when an entire culture becomes numb, it is not only a tragedy, it is a recipe for societal self-destruction.

My good friend Karen Maycey, who came from Manchester to speak at the Bedford Wellness Circle on Monday, went through this process of overwhelm when she was first diagnosed with stage-2 breast cancer last year. Karen has always been a very active “go-getter” in her work as a coach and workshop leader, and prior to that as an international tour guide. She had always been on the constant run all over the planet. But shortly after she was first diagnosed, and via a very intense group healing session in which I participated, she intuitively came up with a motto for herself, which was, Continue Reading…