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.

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?

It would be all too easy to say, “Just don’t spend as much next year.” Equally, it would be all too easy to say, “Don’t worry about it. It’s only money. You can’t take it with you, so spend it when you’ve got it.”

But the problem is, it doesn’t work like that. To say, “Just don’t spend as much” is about as effective as telling a smoker or a drinker, “Just don’t smoke/drink as much.” The truth is we are probably spending for reasons ever so subtle, we might not even be aware of them. And unless we understand our true motivation for matters to do with money, no amount of “Why don’t you just do this or that” will change our habits. Money is not actually the cause of our stress and guilt. It is how we think about ourselves in relation to money that is the culprit.

In this article, I will look at three common ways our relationship with money can cause stress in many people, especially during the holidays:

1. Misunderstanding the true nature of money
2. Using money as a substitute for authentic expression
3. Using money as a distorted measurement of our worth

What money is and what it is not
Our culture of consumerism seems to induce the feeling that we are dependent upon money, just the same way an addict feels dependent upon a particular substance. But the truth is we are not dependent upon money; we have only given our power away to it and come to believe we are.

Money is actually a convenience we human beings have created to enable us to place a quantifiable value upon things, so we can easily trade for whatever we want and need to make our lives fuller and happier. Our monetary system has helped us move from needing to determine an equivalent value for every single item or service we might wish to exchange with each other. It also made life a heck of a lot more practical and enabled us to create the modern world in which we currently live. For instance, I seriously doubt I would be sitting writing this article if, every day, I had to lug around a bucket of milk with me every time I wanted to get a loaf of bread, or whatever I happened to need. I’d have no time for self-development or writing articles!

Seen from this perspective, we can realise that money is actually a creation, a tool and a convenience we humans invented to make our lives easier and to give us more time to grow at a level of consciousness, rather than simply focus on survival all the time. I would go so far as to say that money is a “divinely inspired” creation. How ironic it is, therefore, that so many of us get into a panic and regress to a sub-human “survival mode” when it comes to thinking about money. Our fears and anxieties prevent us from seeing the divine nature of money. Some are so fearful and so blinded to the divine nature of money that they try to use money to gain power over others, either physically or psychologically, thus creating more stress, fear and anxiety in the world (for the most part, all those annoying “cold calls” you get from call centres are dependent upon your anxieties around money, and their entire ethos is built upon a distorted view of what money is).

But when we can see the divine nature of money, we are able to develop a genuinely healthy relationship with it. We come to understand that it can help us create a world in which we have time to explore the Self and find fulfilment at the Soul level, in whatever form that might mean to us. If we relate to it for any other reason (i.e., “I need money to pay my bills,” etc.) we are apt to feel inferior to and resentful towards it, and will tend to push it away from us, making our feelings of lack even greater.

So take a deep breath and start to see money from this perspective: as a wonderful creation whose sole purpose is to bring freedom and enlightenment to all human beings (not just the so-called “rich”). If we are feeling imprisoned by money, rather than free, it does not mean we need more money; it means we have not yet fully understood our authentic relationship with it.

How our perspective determines our relationship with money

Just as in our relationships with other people, it is important to cultivate a healthy relationship with money. If we view it as the evil Task Master, it will treat us as if it were one. If we view money with the spirit of creativity and choice, it changes our relationship entirely. Here’s an example: Let’s say I am walking down the High Street with £20 in my pocket and I unexpectedly see something I have been looking for that normally costs £20 but is on sale today only for £10. It’s a great bargain, but I know I have to go grocery shopping, and I usually spend £20 on food. I have a choice in how I react to it:

• I could tell myself, “I can’t afford that. I don’t have enough money,” and feel disempowered and limited.
• I could tell myself, “I’ll buy it and I’ll just have to live on canned soup and stale bread,” and feel impoverished, lacking and guilty.
• I could tell myself, “I’ll put it on a credit card. What difference will an extra £10 make?” and delude myself that I am in control, making my dependency problem even worse.
• I could tell myself, “I want to spend my money on food today, and I’ll come back next week for that,” and feel more empowered and at choice.
• I could tell myself, “I’ve really wanted that a long time, so I’ll buy that today, and when I do my grocery shopping, I’ll save money by leaving out all the packaged meals and treats, and stock up on my favourite fresh fruit and vegetables instead. I’ll even make the fruit and veg taste especially delicious by looking up some new recipes for them on the Internet,” and not only feel at choice, but feel I have created an exciting solution for myself.

The key to remember is that the more we are able to see money as a creative tool for our own fulfilment, rather than something that is both limited and limiting in our lives, the more we are able to develop a healthy relationship with it and free ourselves from stress. In other words, when we view money as a free-flowing energy that is meant to flow into us and through us from the world, we can then begin to allow it to come into our lives. I discuss the attribute of “Allowing” in the section called “The Principle of Receiving” in my book The Garden of the Soul. In order for things to flow into us, we must allow them to enter. Money is no different. If we view money as something that has control over us, we will block the barriers to it coming into our lives, and continue the vicious cycle of disconnection, lack, and helplessness.

Using money as a substitute for authentic expression
Just as it is important to understand our relationship with money, it is equally important to understand the reasons why we spend money, especially during the holiday season. Are we spending for the “wrong” reasons? For instance, are we using spending as a means to express our love? Buying gifts to express love is fine, but in some cases, spending becomes a substitute for actual expression of love. I have known many people in my life who found it difficult to express love outwardly, so they would buy gifts as a way to say what they felt they could not say with words or other actions. The result was that they would feel good when they were shopping for the gifts, but afterwards, their mood would dip seriously low.

I’ve observed several reasons why people who spend for the wrong reasons experience this mood swing. First, they feel as though they are unappreciated or misunderstood by the person(s) for whom they bought the gifts. This is because, whether consciously or not, they had replaced their ability to express their inner feelings with external gifts. But no gift can ever adequately express our feelings. And while the recipient of the gift might feel truly grateful, the gift can never say what the gift giver is truly feeling inside. In other words, gifts can only ever be an enhancement, not a replacement, of our emotional expression. If we use them to express what we feel incapable of expressing, we are likely to experience the “dip”. We might even feel that our feelings are not being reciprocated by the other person, but when our emotions are not clearly expressed, we are less likely to get the kind of response we are seeking.

The flow of natural self-expression is an attribute of “The Principle of Giving” in my book The Garden of the Soul. The key to understanding “Giving” is in understanding where it originates. In order to learn how to give authentically, we must first be able to tap into the resources of our own inner Self. All true giving starts there. If we use gift buying to avoid the flow of energy from our inner self into the outer world, we will always feel misunderstood, frustrated and “poor”.

If you are experiencing this kind of “dip” after you have completed you holiday spending, I encourage you to explore the enquiries:

1. What I am trying to say through my spending?
2. What other means can I use to express myself more clearly and openly?
3. What holds me back from being clear and open?

Money as a distorted measurement of our own worth
If you finally want to unlock the straight-jacket in which you have put yourself over money, it is vital that you take a good, honest look at how much of your opinion of yourself is entangled with your financial wherewithal. Ask yourself, “How much of my self-worth do I determine according to how much money I have?” You might not be completely conscious of the fact that you are doing this. But if you have fleeting thoughts that your house, job, clothes, car or other possessions are not good enough compared to other peoples’, or that you “should” have better things just because it feels like the rest of the world has more than you do (as opposed to wanting things because they are a part of your inner-most dreams), then you might be measuring your self-worth through your money.

If you find that you routinely use credit cards to get things that make you feel better, but then you feel guilty and stressed every time the bills come around, you are more than likely allowing money to be a distorted measurement of your own worth, whether consciously or not. It is highly important that we tap into “The Principle of Being” (another Principle from my book The Garden of the Soul) to nurture this distortion back to health. In my Garden of the Soul workshop, one of the things I do is take people through a “peeling the onion” exercise where they strip away all the layers of ego until they find the core of the Self, that is not dependent upon time, circumstance, status, money or any other external factor. When we can tap into that resource, we become resilient when stress over money begins to tighten its grip around us.

TODAY’S JOY FORMULA:
Turning Money Stresses into Joy

So many people on the media/Internet talk about “financial freedom”. Well, I have a different view of what this term means, and how to create it. So here’s your “Joy Formula” for this holiday to help you move from stress and anxiety over money and towards a more creative and empowered life:

• Explore the true nature of money as a creative energy that is here in the world to serve you and open up possibilities for self-awareness
• Understand the real reasons why you spend.
• Dive into the emotions you have been trying to express through your spending, and find ways to express them openly.
• Identify all the ways you have attached money to your own self-worth, and strip them away to find the true Self.
• Cut up your credit cards and learn to spend only what you have. This is possibly the most liberating thing I have ever done!
• Find creative ways to decrease your outgoings through refinancing and/or stopping spending on what is not bringing joy into your life.
• Sit down with a notepad write down all the things you could create that could result in more wealth flowing into your life.

And finally…

If you find yourself lying awake at night thinking about unpaid bills, stop your thoughts from running away, and start making a mental inventory of all the little things around your home that make your life fun and joyful. Don’t forget to count the blanket that is wrapped around you as one of them! Then, wrap the blanket more snugly around you, and nestle into a sweet slumber with a smile on your face.

In the next instalment of my “Holiday Survival Guide”
I’ll be talking about how to beat the blues of
FEELINGS OF ISOLATION during the Holiday Season.

Again, it’s not necessarily what you might think!
Be sure you check it out in 3 days’ time.

Like this article? Share it with others… AND be sure to leave your comments and your OWN holiday survival tips below.

(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, we are in touch with the subtle realm of Aesthetics. There is something undeniable about our experience that touches us at the deepest level, but to try to pinpoint what precisely makes it so powerful is as impossible as trying to capture the substance of a rainbow. The magic of an Aesthetic experience lies within its ephemeral nature, and the fact that we are experiencing a unique moment in time and space, and feel connected to it at the heart and soul level. And while many people enjoy the intellectual pursuit of analysing artistic merit, it is important to understand that if we attempt to connect to our aesthetic experiences purely from an intellectual platform, we are apt to lose the essence of their magic, and we deny ourselves the full experience of connection to them.

In The Garden of the Soul, the Iris is the mentor of Aesthetic Awareness. She teaches us how to be inwardly silent, and fill up completely with the moment. Together, we stand with her, appreciating fully the unlikelihood of a triple rainbow, and the fact that we have come together at that particular point in time and space to witness it together. She models for us how to become receptive to the Aesthetics that surround us at any given moment, and thus develop our Aesthetic Awareness, which is an attribute of the Principle of Receiving. In order to Receive, we must first empty ourselves of any intellectual or emotional obstructions. We must become like an empty pitcher ready and waiting to be filled with nectar, or a flower bud that simply allows the rays of the sun to bathe it before it can blossom. If we are full of our own mind-games, judgements or limiting beliefs, very little of the nectar or the sunlight is likely to fill us. When we become empty and ready to receive, we become able to see and taste fully all the subtle qualities of the world around us at any given moment. This is the essence of Aesthetic Awareness.

When we develop this Awareness, a sense of Awe, Gratitude and Appreciation became almost uncontainable inside of us. Aesthetic Awareness, therefore, is the doorway to many other Attributes of the Principle of Receiving. In other words, only when we become truly empty, do we become truly full. When we master the art of true emptiness, we finally become able to taste the nectarean pleasure of Divine Aesthetics.

Enquiries to cultivate this attribute

1. What kinds of things would I love to empty from my heart and mind?

2. What subtle beauty, wonder and uniqueness do I become aware of when I am empty?

3. What would be the best thing about life if I were truly Aesthetically Aware at every moment?

Many thanks to Andrew Mondia, a Canadian actor currently living in London, and a Facebook fan, for selecting the magic number 28 for this week’s meditation. This meditation was read on the air on “Lynn Serafinn’s Garden of the Soul Radio Show” on Wed 11 Nov 2009. 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 comments below.

SPECIAL HOLIDAY GIFT GIVEAWAY!

The above excerpt is from my upcoming book The Companion Guide to the Garden of the Soul. Have you picked up your copy of the original book The Garden of the Soul yet? It’s an Amazon bestseller in spirituality, mind-body-spirit and self-help. Check it out on Amazon or on the official book website.

AND…if you are reading this before the end of December 2009, I have something extra special for you.  In the spirit of giving and receiving this holiday season, I am giving away over 1 hour in audio book excerpts as a special holiday GIFTS to everyone who purchases the Garden of the Soul during the month of December 2009. So when you buy it as a gift for someone you love (even if that someone is you), YOU get 4 free gifts for yourself.

To check out my Garden of the Soul Holiday
Gift Giveaway CLICK HERE.

Warm wishes,
Lynn Serafinn
“Turning up the volume of the music in your heart!”
lynn [at] lynnserafinn [dot] com