I spent part of my day watching TED videos.  First up was Ruth Chang: How to make hard choices.

[ted id=2023]

This talk was about recognizing that there are deeper factors in the choices we make that relate to what we value as human beings.

Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment, pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices: reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for; and through hard choices, become that person. –Ruth Chang

There were times in my life when I let convention dictate my choices in my life rather than conviction, or what I felt deepest in my heart.  There were times when I knew that by choosing to do the “right” thing, I was choosing against love.  That has resulted in a life of secret longing.  I have made an opportunity to rectify that longing, but I am faced again with the choice between convention and conviction.

Convention says that I should stay where I am because here, I am prosperous.  Here, I have some surety of my support.  Here, I will know with greater assurance where my next meal will come from.  Here, my physical needs will be met.  But I am also concerned that if I stay here, my passion of spirit will suffer.  If I stay where I am, I will more likely be a Drifter, as Ruth Chang would call it.  My sense of spirit and passion would be restricted.

Conviction says that I should take the leap and go out because I am better supported emotionally and spiritually elsewhere.  A relationship that I have found emotionally supportive has been offered to me again.  In this relationship, I feel my passion expand, and not just in the physical sense.  I feel in this relationship that my sense of my own abilities is expanded.  With an expanded sense of my own abilities, then certainly I would be in a better position to prosper while doing something I love and something that I feel is important.

The other video I watched today (that is important to this post, at least) was How to quit your life (and reboot): Priya Parker at TEDxUHasselt.

This talk offers determining what values are important to you as well as a tip or two in how to make the leap into a life that better fulfills those values. Priya Parker challenges the listener to ask,

What is the biggest need in the world that I might have the passion and capacity to address? –Priya Parker

Priya Parker offers some tools for determining what you value.

If you were to write an obituary of your life, would the result satisfy you? Would you feel that your life had meaning?

Ask your family and friends when they had seen you most alive and most passionate.  What were you doing?  Draw a comic strip about that time.

Get comfortable with discomfort.  Do things like sing while standing in line while shopping, taking yourself out to dinner with no reading material and without your phone, and facing the back of the elevator instead of the door.

Give yourself a “life sentence.”  A business might call this a “mission statement.”  What qualities do you want to express?  What do you do?  Why do you do it?

Do the Dwindling Cash Experiment to explore how you might live at various levels of income.  Determine how you are spending now.  Determine how you might live at various percentages of that income.  Use this information to decide how much income you will need.

Help someone else.  Identify five friends who do interesting work and offer them an hour to help them solve their stickiest problems.  Ideally, what they do should be something other than what you do.

Set a withdrawal date and send out evites.  Inviting others to share in your withdrawal and reboot creates accountability.

Don’t avoid thinking about meaning just because it scares you.  Changes in the Universe are very hard to make, but they’re even harder to make if you don’t spend time thinking about what most matters to you.  …  Changes in the Universe basically need time, and need space, and need risk.  So what I would urge you to do is to think about what matters to you, think about what makes you come alive, and think about what is actually happening in the world.  And then think critically and deeply about how you want to dive in.  Otherwise, you might be cheating the future on all you have to give.  –Priya Parker

A certain complication has developed in my urge to withdraw from my current life.  I think perhaps it was introduced by the gods as an inducement to move out of my comfort zone into my true purpose.  My communications with the gods have revealed that so long as I stayed true to that purpose, the indulgence of that distraction would be supported and protected.  Jesus and Pele have both expressed a sort of preference in favor of the distraction as opposed to where I am now.  It is also possible that the path of my true purpose may ultimately include neither influence.

With respect to the communications with the gods mentioned, I often ask myself if I am just making things up when I am meditating or journeying.  In Shamanism, we are taught that imagination has reality.  Channelers such as Steve Rother will also say that these processes will always feel like we are just making things up.  In other words, the feeling that I am making things up may not make it less real.

The main thing that has become clear is that I have felt stifled where I am.  Ultimately, I guess I have to ask my heart what it wants.  Ultimately, conviction will have to win out over convention.

This item was posted today: Gaia Portal – Prescience of mind is paramount as Gaia enters rapid ascension phase.

The first thing I needed to know to understand this was the definition of “prescience.”  It is “the fact of knowing something before it takes place; foreknowledge.”  Well, I know what I have been told about things.  I am deeply concerned that those who have told them to me are who they say they are.  These things that were said are controversial, and they will almost entirely change my world, if I act on them.  If they were genuine, then there is no question that action must be taken on those things.  Discernment can be difficult when dealing with beings from other dimensions.  Even the most highly advanced among us have been deceived at times.

Another part of the message that caught my attention is “Severance of expired paradigm structures proceeds.”  The grand question here is which is the expired paradigm.

There is something that I need to release.  I prayed about it in the ashrams this past weekend.  There is someone I have been holding anger toward.  This person does not even know me or that they have done anything to hurt me, and yet they managed to claim for themself something very dear to me in such a way that I could not even protest it, such was the finality of what was done.  It was someone else’s carelessness that created the problem, and yet that someone else can seemingly do no wrong in my eyes.  As I discovered the depth of the anger in me about this situation, I realized that I had better find a way to release it lest that anger go out and harm this other person.  Anyone who wants to tell me at this point that anger only harms the one who is angry most likely has no understanding of thought-forms and other ways a person can extend their energy.  But it is my desire to be harmless, and so this anger needed to be transmuted.  I can’t help but wonder if to do so, I will have to surrender that situation entirely.  I would like to think that there is a solution that will not require it, but I also don’t like a certain ghoulishness that this situation seems to create in me.  This most definitely needs to be healed before I can move forward in that situation again.  I will say that I feel better about the situation now than before I presented it in prayer over the weekend.  All of these considerations leave me wondering which are the expired paradigm structures.  What is it, exactly, that needs to be left behind?

One thing that I will say here, lest anyone become confused.  We are a few days into a Mercury retrograde.  Things decided now may yet change.  Decisions and agreements made during a Mercury retrograde are not necessarily permanent.  This is a time when we may encounter setbacks in our progress toward the goals we may have set when Mercury was direct.  We can only wait and see what happens when Mercury goes direct again around July 1.  As I said in the beginning of this post, I know what I was told about what is to happen.  A key person was informed of this information yesterday.  I look at these next few weeks as this person’s opportunity to catch up to what I have already come to accept.

I have of late been concerned about the fairness of taking a settlement.  I found assurance that I have a right to such in an article I read on the Galactic Connection site entitled Ashtar on the Road – Tara & Rama Report 27May 2014.  Within it was cited another article, The Case for Reparations.  At the top of that article was the following quote:

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

So it would seem that my time where I have been justifies a settlement, especially when it is considered that my son feels that I am treated more as a servant here.

I discovered a new ashram last night: the Yogini Ashram.  I was looking for a place to learn about Tantra and found a Meetup.com listing (second day link) for a class that will take place at the end of the month.  It just seems like the right thing to explore, given the way things are working out lately.

As it turned out, my own guru had lived in the Yogini Ashram off and on for some time.  This was a reassuring reference.  The ashram has two temple rooms: one featuring Babaji, and the other featuring Kali.  My guru had just been talking about Babaji that morning with her Sunday meditation group.

The meeting I attended last night was Deep Yogic Relaxation – Yoga Nidra.  The process used was quite similar to guided meditation and creative visualization techniques used in hypnotherapy.  I warned them before we started that I was very tired, I might fall asleep during the process, and I might snore loudly when I did.  I was told that this was fine.  And so we proceeded.  I felt quite rested afterward.

After the Yoga Nidra process, I was invited to stay for the Kirtan event afterward.  It can be rather challenging to sing and chant in another language, but the call and response format made it easier.  Also, the chants started out slow and then built up speed, which also made it easier to follow along.