Generosity

Yes, generosity.

That's my theme these days... and it feels great!
For years I somehow avoided real marketing, because I felt that it was demanding and manipulative. I was concerned about what other people would think. Heck, nobody wants to be a nag...

But now I just feel so generous. Today it's not so much about what I can get for myself, it's much more about what I can give. I feel that I have received such treasures in my life, I have learned so many amazing tools, insights and gifts, and now I want to share them. It's almost painful to hold them back...

So, here's the great gift of this journey: the more I give, the more I receive. The more I share, the more people are touched, transformed and ignited all around me.

I love my work. I get to see people blossoming, opening, expanding, coming home to themselves. It's more than heartwarming, it's rocket fuel for the soul. And then I also make a living doing this, and I see my client's businesses expand, their gifts reaching out into the world.... paying off debts, attracting great clients.... wheeee...!!!

So go ahead, be generous. With your loved ones, with yourself. Give what you have to give, share your gifts, your love, your light. You are the ONLY one who can share them the way you can!

And remember - this includes being generous with YOURSELF. With your needs, your desires, your human heart. Generosity is not necessarily about money, it's a spirit of enoughness, of kindness and caring. Being generous is a way of saying to the universe "I am enough, more than enough. I have gifts to share, and ways to give..." and that sets the tone for how you show up for yourself and others.

So find (at least) one way to be generous today, and tell us about it!

And if you want to play with me and join the amazing community of heartful, creative, passionate people who have gathered here, I've got a free call coming up on Tuesday, May 22nd. The class is called "Don't let money push you around! Take a stand for your true presence, power and prosperity".

Just writing that title inspires me again and again...;-)

All the details, plus a spiffy new video with me is up on my new website: www.livingtrueprosperity.com/call

I look forward to hearing about where your generosity is leading you...

Money is innocent ... it's what you do with it that matters!

A recent email correspondence with a client got me to clarify something that I'd like to share with you. I love it when clients help me understand what I'm actually doing... haaa...! So here's a slightly edited version of what I wrote to her, which I think will resonate for many of us:


Dear Susan,

I totally understand your concern with the corruption that happens around money, and the particular way that has influenced you. In fact, distortions and insanity around money continue to happen in our day and age, in both flagrant and insidious ways.

However, what I wish to propose is to separate out the behaviors and the lack of integrity and humane compassion from the money itself. In fact, money itself is innocent. It has no opinion about anything. Money is just a tool, like a hammer or a car or an electric wire. It's an energetic conduit. If you drive your car and get totally lost a few times in a row, that's still not your car's fault. It's the driver responsibility for having lost his or her sense of direction.

In the same way, we as a society have gotten totally lost as far as our inner compass regarding the use of our social and economic resources is concerned. That's still not the vehicle's fault, nor is it money's fault that it has been used to fuel people's greed, fear and narcissism. It's also not money's fault that your parents used it to measure people by or judge you.

In fact, when we do this sorting, both personally and collectively, we have the opportunity, maybe for the first time, to see what money is and how we want to use it. A hammer can be used to build a home, it can be used to kill someone. It's the same hammer.

By exploring the holding pattern in your body-mind that has been projected onto money unconsciously for so long, we bring mindfulness into the equation, and finally get chance to see the projection for what it is. At the end of the session there was a glimmer of clarity, a moment where you could see money with fresh eyes. You also became more clear about rejecting of the distorted perceptions your family had surrounded you with.

This space of not knowing is very precious. This is the moment of coming out of the trance, and being able to establish a new relationship with money. Like getting into that car that had previously 'taken' you astray and saying, "hmm, this is my vehicle. It can get me anywhere.... so where do I want to go? How do I want to use money in a way that IS aligned with the my heart and soul...?"

That's what I mean by 'sorting'; in getting clear about what you're saying "no" to, you also get to reclaim your authentic "YES", your right to participate in the flow of abundant resources flowing through our world.

This process of reclaiming your relationship with money afresh is uncharted territory, and it takes time to get oriented. You cannot follow the maps given by your family (we all know where they lead...) or the advice given by our consumer society ("spend more, feel less...!") This is why having a community of people charting a new course based on sufficiency, integrity and creative collaboration is so helpful.

This process does not require us to go back to the past and resolve whatever wounds happened there, either in past lives or in this lifetime. It certainly does help, and can be very healing, but it's not necessary. What is required is to wake up to the fallacy that money is anything other than what we make of it.

I hope this email gives a better perspective on my approach.

Sending you many blessings and much love,
Deepika

How to Slow Down Time

I don't know about you, but my life sometimes feels like I’m one of those high-speed bullet trains in Japan, or a skier flying down the slope of an icy mountain moving a million miles an hour. So much to do, so little time. So I've been investigating how to slow time down, how to get more of the juiciness of life.

And of course, the clocks in Greenwich don't change and the Internet never sleeps. But time can change. Because we can change. Time is a totally subjective experience... As Einstein says, "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity".

So basically, to slow down time, I need to slow something in myself down. Something really magical happens when I'm slow enough to actually experience what's happening. And to really get the full delight of something, someone, some experience, it really helps to be able to experience it through the body, through the full capacity of our senses.

When I introduce somatic coaching, I often mention how the body is always in the present moment. It is always here, and always now. In our mind we can go flying off into infinity, we can speculate about next week's dinner party, we can relive the past in our memory. We can spend the whole day zooming between windows on our devices, have multiple threads of conversation open with people and machines all over the world. But even as we do this, our snazzy little brain is held in our body, sitting at this desk, on this day, in this moment. While we're dreaming of fantasy lovers or shiny new shoes, our body keeps breathing in and out, in and out, here and now.

An interesting thing to notice about time is that when we're zooming around like this in our thoughts, time in our actual life seems to move very fast. Suddenly the day is over and we're surprised, "Whoa, where did that day go...?" But it disappeared so fast because in many ways we weren't fully in it.

But when we do come back and notice what's actually here, when we do consciously experience our body, the sensations and feelings that are there all along but we were too distracted to notice, all of a sudden we're in a different time zone. Then the atmosphere changes and we have access to a lot more of what's already happening. We then have time to feel ourselves, to feel others, to digest information and get creative. In the time zone of the present moment, the threads of past and future come together in a sinuous dance that gives meaning to our choices. It's only here that we get satisfaction and delight. 

Just try this out: Sit for one minute and just notice your breath rising and falling. Not thinking, just breathing. I guarantee you it'll be a looooong minute. Or try it out while you walk. Instead of rushing towards your destination, start to notice the movement of walking. Feel the strength in your thighs, the pull in the hamstrings, the stretch of the soles of your feet. Drop your attention down into your sacrum, into the undulating swing in your pelvis as you walk. If you really let go, you'll even let your shoulders relax and let your arms sway with the movement. You don't have to slow down the pace of your walking, but just pay attention to what's happening in your body as you walk down the hallway, or along the street.

And as you do this, notice what happens to time. How does the rhythm of time feel now, as you bounce into the next step? What happens to the quality of your awareness, what else do you start to see, smell, hear as you walk? 

I call this moving in BodyTime. It doesn't mean you have to stop everything and go on retreat for a month. On the contrary - your body comes with you wherever you go, you don't have to go anywhere...! Your body is a natural anchor, the easiest place to reconnect with your natural rhythms and tides. And it's the easiest way to slow down time. And who knows, you may even discover that there's a whole world around and within you full of treasures waiting to be discovered... :-)

Between Love and Money

Valentine's Day. 
This manufactured love holiday always brings up a lot of ambivalence in me. On one hand, what could be nicer than a day celebrating love, romance and an opportunity to tell someone special that you love them..? On the other hand, isn't the whole affair as a huge marketing ploy designed to make people buy lots of stuff they don't need, out of fear that their sweetheart will give them hell if they don't...? Maybe growing up in a different country that doesn't partake in this elaborate ritual helps to see the manipulative quality of it all.

But the thing that is most apparent in this day is the deep psychological connection in the collective psyche between Love and Money. It's not just a day to express your feelings. No. It's about shopping for the expensive object that will represent those feelings. The chocolates, the diamonds, the fancy dinner. And this is the true tragedy. The way this culture revolves around the equation that they way to express love is through money. Money becomes a cheap substitute for love.

Parents shower their children with gifts, and money is the standard that represents how much value someone has. Your boss shows love and appreciation by giving a bonus. Couples fight endlessly about money and what to spend it on. And behind it all is the hidden question: "Do you love me...?" As many practitioners and self-employed people know, offering one's own services brings this emotional tension right to the forefront. Subconsciously we ask ourselves, "if someone doesn't want my services, does that mean I'm not lovable? That what I offer has no value..?". In fact, regardless of our profession, most of us are all living with this juxtaposition of money = value, money = love.

However, this doesn't always mean that for everyone having a lot of money = lots of value. For most of us that's the American Dream, but in fact, in each person's psyche this mixture will be unique. In my family, for example, wealthy people with lots of money did not have much value. They were the "Capitalist Exploiters" of the world, certainly not worthy of love. So I learned that the spiritually and morally valuable way was to be poor and struggling, but happy. In other words, I couldn't have money and love at the same time. I had to choose one over the other.

But in fact, this is just the same equation, just reversed. That's often what happens when we react to something by swinging to the other side of the polarity.

Love has no price tag

Over the years of working with this issue, I have come to know that personal value and love have nothing to do with money. These are two different dimensions of reality. In fact the best way to find this out is to have lots of money. When you're totally loaded, with more money than you know what to do with, then you realize that you are no more loved or precious than before. In fact, you have always been capable of giving and receiving love. You are no more, or less, precious inside than a hungry child in India. Our intrinsic value has no price tag. And no person, bank account or award can validate what is our birthright.

However, having access to money does give you a greater range of possibilities in the outer world. So once you are resting in the values that you care about, solid in your lovingness, then it's natural to use money in a way that supports the expression of your heart. In other words, Love is the master, Money is the servant. There are many examples of philanthropic endeavors where wealthy individuals use their capital to support more love, be in through ecological projects, orphanages or supporting the arts.

But regardless of how much money you have, when your heart and money work together, as separate energies but in deep collaboration, then you life comes into a sense of alignment. Then your work and your values are supporting each other. Money provides a connection to life, it opens opportunities and provides the foundation upon which your love can flower. Then money becomes a game to play and enjoy.

The more I experience this flow in my life, and see the openings in my relationships, my business and inner world, I want to share it with others. So I created a program to help people unravel the emotional knots that get in the way of true self expression. It's called the True Prosperity Foundation Program, and it's starting with a FREE tele-class this Thursday, Feb 16th. For me True Prosperity means not just having more money. It's about the prosperity of freedom, of love, and a generosity of spirit that makes us wealthy in all aspects of our life.
More details on my website: www.deeperintolife.com/prosperity.html

Enjoy the love...!

The True Prosperity Foundation Program

Are you tired of reading all the right books, going to marketing seminars and creating your vision, only to find yourself stuck in the same pattern with money again and again? Do you know all the insider tips and tricks, but somehow you never actually do what it takes? Do you feel trapped and frustrated in your life, regardless of how much money is coming in? Or maybe you use money to hide your authentic feelings from the people around you...

Whatever it is, our relationship with money is one of the most complex and significant relationships of our life, and yet we usually don't know what's really going on. We almost all have strong emotional reactions that come up around money, which unconsciously dictate how we behave around it, and interfere with our natural intelligence and creativity. It's hard to make smart choices or be effective when you're frozen in fear, racing with panic, avoiding pain or pushing down anger.
It also uses up a ton of energy to manage all of this in our body on a daily basis...!

But luckily, there is another way.

There IS a way to have a clear, empowered, grounded relationship with money. It becomes easy to get stuff done when you free up your energy to face the tasks at hand, separate from the emotional load. Sorting out what you patterns are and finding your roots in your body makes you a money magnet, without all the hard work!


Practical tools for real results

In the Foundation Level program you will learn to:

• Master the Seven Skills of Presence, Power, and Prosperity.

• Identify the emotions and beliefs you’ve unconsciously assigned to money.
• Gain insight and clarity about constrictive and habitual money patterns
• Improve your relationship with money in measurable ways (more financial opportunities, income, and greater ease in all aspects of your financial life.)  
• Use your body to anchor you in the present moment, no matter what's going on around you.
• Heal underlying emotional wounds that have stifled earning, creativity, and an authentic connection with yourself and others. 
• Allow the money you’ve tried so hard to get or hold on to, to flow and experience freedom and abundance around your finances.

Sign up to secure your spot in the True Prosperity Foundation Program beginning February 16, 2012. SPACES ARE LIMITED for this program, so make sure to sign up before it's too late!

To sign up, go to: http://www.deeperintolife.com/true-prosperity-program.html

Stepping into Fullness

In these last few weeks, I have been called forth to express more precisely what it is that I do, and what transformation my work brings to people. I’ve been asking myself how does my guidance and support affect people’s lives and contribute to their growth…? Since I view the ultimate uniqueness of each person as so precious, in the past I have been reluctant to make any generalizations. However, as I reflect upon the beautiful emergence and transformation that I witness every week with my clients, I've come to recognize that the essence of my work could be summarized as helping people step into their fullness.

What does that mean? How does it really feel to be more fully yourself, to be at ease and in alignment with your nature…? As I sat with this question, I remembered an email I received a few days ago from a client which illustrates this so beautifully, I thought I’d share it with you verbatim:

“For as long as I can remember, I have been imprisoned in what I thought was a ‘protective’ armor. Maintaining and carrying this cumbersome structure through constant resistance and struggle has been enormously painful and exhausting, but I mistakenly believed it was necessary for my survival.

Yesterday, I got my first real epiphany of what it would be like to "dis-mantle" this armature. I have had tastes before, but nothing like this. As magical as yesterday was, what it really impressive is that as I am living my life today, I continue to be mindful (an elusive concept for me!) of the understanding of moment to moment choices about whether or not to haul around that heavy, rigid structure. Each time I do not contort my body and spirit into that old shell, I consciously release the tension in my body and breathe in trust. This brings fresh waves of joyful relief. There is some uneasiness with the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable, but I am allowing that to be and so far am surviving quite nicely!

So stepping into fullness isn’t actually an effort; rather, it’s a process of stepping OUT of the narrow, confined, habitual ways of being that have become second nature to us. It’s a return to the natural flow that’s always been there, unacknowledged. We all have patterns of thinking, feeling and carrying our bodies in chronically tense ways, certain ‘states’ we automatically go into again and again… and again. I call these states Mind-Shapes, and they keep us small and confined. It’s hard to breath in there and often there’s a feeling that “this is just how it is”. But as soon as we become aware of the whole setup, and as soon as we have an inner experience of what it’s like to live outside that box and breathe the fresh air of our own vibrant aliveness, that’s when we find our liberation. When we become aware, we become free to choose. When we know the difference between armor and flow in our body, then we have the magic key that takes us back home.

There are different ways to discover this key, and each person will have an easier time with certain doorways, tools, practices and discoveries. But although the paths are many, the outcome is the same. As the old defenses fall away everyone finds themselves feeling more whole, more alive, more present in their life. Relationships get more intimate, playful, and juicy. Work becomes more meaningful and life in general becomes an adventure. Because everything is a reflection of how we are inside, being at ease with yourself makes everything you do flow more naturally, and with grace...

Stepping in to fullness is reclaiming what is already yours. It is being the whole human being that you are - the emotional, physical, intellectual, sexual, spiritual, quirky and magnificent being that is uniquely you.

If you have your own story to share about discovering your fullness, please share in a comment or send an email... oh, and Happy Spring!!!

Gratitude Meditation for Thanksgiving:

Put a bowl on your altar and another container full of beans. Could be garbanzo, mung beans, anything you like. As you go through your day, whenever you notice something or someone you are grateful for, name it and put a bean in the bowl. Maybe take a few moments to reflect and give thanks as you charge the offering with your love and appreciation.
Tomorrow, take the bowl of beans and cook them as part of your Thanksgiving meal, consciously nourishing yourself with them and ingesting those qualities into your blood and bones.


Hope you like the idea, and that it inspires you to create your own unique variation... :-)


Happy Thanksgiving!!!