Consistency

Seeds IX, 26

Seed: Contradiction


Unfortunately, turning over a new leaf on foolish consistency can mean that we must contradict ourselves. Self-contradiction can be frustrating.

As I write this, less than a week has gone by since Saddam Hussein was hanged in Iraq. I’ve been praying for Saddam every day for more than ten years. Not so much for his sake, but for mine. It’s not all right with me to hate anyone or anything.

Here’s contradiction. It’s also not all right with me to take a life. Killing someone for what he or she has done doesn’t undo the original doing. It doesn’t make up for it. It doesn’t go toward healing it. Here’s another contradiction: It galls me that I then have to pay the actual cost of maintaining that person’s existence. A prisoner doesn’t pay his or her own way.

I contradict myself. The first statement speaks against the second; the second against the first. Do I not even know my own mind? Actually, I do. I think and believe both things at the same time. Walt Whitman gives me an out, for which I’m grateful. “Do I contradict myself?” he writes in “The Song of Myself,” “Very well then, I contradict myself.”

Be serene,

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net

The Healing Codes III

I have to admit I’ve struggled with The Healing Codes. They’re a remarkable idea, and I’ve found them to be effective, but I can’t seem to get comfortable with their price. The owners of The Healing Codes offer a 90-day money back guarantee. I’m sending mine back today.

That said, I can also recommend the use of The Healing Codes. I’ve been working with a very talented Healing Codes Coach who was assigned to me as part of the package. (Don’t worry—we’ve straightened out the financial part of this between us so he doesn’t feel gypped.)

One of the functions of the coach is to create custom healing codes. They can also be what’s known as “Q-coded” which makes the time you do them shorter. My personalized healing codes have been very effective. He works on the telephone so it doesn’t matter where you live. If your interest is piqued, send me an email and I’ll be glad to put you in touch with him. seedsdrcorso@comcast.net

As for the refund, I’ve written a letter to the principals of the company explaining why I’m returning the Codes. I hope they take it to heart.

$ Conscious

One of the last frontiers for conscious living is the financial frontier. That’s a fancy way to say: It’s hard to get conscious about money and it’s even harder to stay conscious about it.

Money. What we know about it. What we’ve learned about it. What we do about it. How we act around it. Getting conscious around money is well worth it.

Here’s one of many suggestions: get a conscious credit card. I laughed out loud when I saw the ad.

Finally, a credit card for people like me.

Then a list of things about “people like me.”

I . . .

Practice yoga
Eat organic
Recycle
Read positive books
Frequent workshops
Donate to charities
Am active in the community
Put my money where my heart is

Then shouldn’t I have a credit card that supports my conscious lifestyle?

Is there one? Absolutely. It’s called the Enlightenment Card. I bit. Here’s some of their website.

Conscious Enlightenment is a global resource for people looking for information, products, and services that can enhance their overall spiritual, health, and creative needs.
Our Mission is to use the power of money, media, and information to change the world.
Our vision is to create a multi-level media platform that disseminates positive information that can be used by anyone.
We believe the world is at a tipping point. Our goal is to assist in creating a unified vision in which we as humans choose to focus on what we have in common and learn to resolve conflict so that we may all share this planet and live as one. We believe in the power of love and the individual armed with information to choose how they want to do their part and get involved.
We will defend democracy, human rights, fair trade and the principal of sustainability in all human enterprise. We listen to the ancient voices of those who have come before us and celebrate the interrelatedness of all living systems.
Our philosophy is to offer any individual who seeks integrative and healthy ideas the tools to evolve their own personal life path. By doing so, we complete the circle:
get what you give - give what you get.
Politically and economically speaking, we support all ideas that create an integrative outcome.
Spiritually speaking, our company is comprised of many people of varying faiths and beliefs. We do not subscribe to any particular religion, and feel strongly that now is the time to set aside our differences and create heaven on Earth.

Delicious, isn’t it? And why not, learning to put our money where our values are is a lifetime task for all of us. I encourage you to start now.

Consistency

Seeds IX, 25

Seed: Consistency

Oh, do we like consistency. We do! We like to know that life is the way we think it is. That things are the way we think they are. It makes us feel as though life is predictable ergo safe—and it’s not how life works at all, ever.

The OED says that consistency means to place oneself and stand still. “I’m a Democrat. My parents were Democrats. Our whole family will always be Democrats.” Not a lot of room for change or growth there! Or, how about this one? “We’re Baptists, seven generations back.” Fill in the blank with your own forevers and alwayses. “Jews, redheads, Irish.” It doesn’t matter. A devotion to consistency can mean we’re resistant to change.

I love what Ralph Waldo Emerson says about consistency:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

We don’t often hear the second part of the quote,

“adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It’s from his essay called “Self-Reliance.”

Note, dear one, Emerson’s adjective: foolish. Consistency all by itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s good to put your keys in the same place every night when you come home. It guarantees they’ll be there in the morning. It’s the foolish consistency, which keeps us where we are when we need to change—that’s the bugaboo.

Is there some foolish consistency operating in your life right now? That’s okay. Go ahead, change it!


Be serene,

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net

The Ultimate Affirmation

I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.
I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy.

These are the words of Charles F. Haanel, the man who wrote The Master Key System, which outlines the principles that underlie The Secret. I’ve been studying Haanel for a few months now.

The affirmation which appears above is Haanel’s “ultimate affirmation,” although he doesn’t call it that himself. He does, however, say that this affirmation will answer any concern you might have.

I got my start in spiritual work with affirmations. An affirmation is a positive statement which produces a desired result. This one is a doozy. I’ve written it eight times, in eight colors, for the purpose of embodiment. Each color corresponds to a chakra.

I keep this affirmation up on my computer as an open Word document. Every so often I center the words on my screen and meditate them, or speak them aloud.

The idea is to become so saturated with your chosen affirmative statement that it is absorbed by your subconscious mind. Affirmations are about steeping, like a really good cup of tea.

If you’d like, email me at seedsdrcorso@comcast.net, and I’ll be glad to send you the colored words as a Word doc attachment. Then you can contemplate them as you will. I think you’ll find that when you truly know yourself to be whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy that nothing will disturb the calm peace of your soul.

Rolling in Ecstasy

What causes you to roll in ecstasy? I know you know the kind I mean. Like a favorite dog squirming through a perfect tummy rub. Or a cat (they don’t really roll) stretching after a thoroughly satisfying purr.

Ecstasy is an amazing word. It comes from the Latin ex- which means out of, and stasis which means place. When you are ecstatic, you are actually out of place. That bugs me. How is it that ecstasy is something we want then?

Stasis, as I’m sure you know, is the basis of our word static. The emotional equivalent of static is security. I’m here to tell you that there’s no such thing. That’s right, NO SUCH THING at all, ever, anyplace, in any time, whatsoever, EXCEPT . . . within.

This quote from Franz Kafka astonished me—I ordinarily associate him with darker ideas than this one:

You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Here is an out of place place to be considered a prime destination. Genuine, bona fide, real, permanent security is to be found in that out of place place within you known as the Divine Spark. There is no place to go but here within your most precious self to find ecstasy.

As the world rolls in ecstasy at your feet, feel free to join in.

Mentor

Seeds IX, 24

Seed: Mentor

Mentoring has been around since the Greeks. It was originally a proper noun; the name of the Ithacan nobleman whose disguise the goddess Athena took in order to guide and advise young Telemachus. The word has become part of common business parlance. A mentor is a trusted counselor.

Newsweek had a full-page ad devoted to National Mentoring Month (it’s January, for those who want to know). There are websites devoted to mentoring: www.mentoring.org, and www.whomentoredyou.org. Do you have a mentor? Do you want one?

I have had several mentors in my life. They all taught me something; some still do. They all watched my back; some still do. I take the word mentor a little differently than the OED does. Ment- as a prefix means mind, as in our word mental. A mentor has often minded me and my choices. Other times, my mentors have re-minded me.

It’s June as you receive this Seeds. Even though it’s not National Mentoring Month (the 7th annual one will be January 2008), call your mentors today. Thank them for helping you to mind yourself.

Be serene,

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net

Take the Spiritual Direction

Those of you who know me personally know that I have been a spiritual counselor for more than 25 years. That astonishes me. I never set out to be a counselor—it happened of its own accord.

At the time, I was teaching a class on how to create Affirmations that work and one of the students asked if she could come and talk to me outside of class. I said sure, and a spiritual counseling practice was born.

Like anyone’s lifework, my practice waxes and wanes. I’ve never advertised it, although I did once try to write a brochure about how I do what I do. The brochure was dreadful, and I gave up. Part of the reason it was so hard to do is that it’s almost impossible to explain what I do. It’s never uniform, nor is it system-based.

Loosely, I work with a client’s conception of God to help that client create the changes desired in her or his life. Sometimes that takes one session. Sometimes, four or five. Then, usually, that client goes away till the next time a particular change is desired.

When I was in seminary, I heard about a “new” practice called Spiritual Direction. It’s actually an ancient practice and a precursor of what we’d now call a therapist. The purpose of a Spiritual Director is simpler than that of a therapist. An anonymous nun is quoted by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in Sharing Sacred Stories: Current Approaches to Spiritual Direction and Guidance edited by Robert Frager,

“Spiritual direction deals with only one thing:
how to reduce our resistance to God.”

When I read that sentence, it occurred to me that this is really what I do, and have from the beginning. I use my intuition to listen, ask questions, make connections so that a client is able to let his/her own version of God work in her/his life.

The next time you’re not sure of how to make a change in your life or are uncertain of how to get where you want to go, if you’d like some assistance in reducing your resistance, by all means, take the spiritual direction.

The Soul of Money

It’s looking like I’m about to have a new gig as a Chief Spiritual Officer, just as I requested. A series of wonderful synchronicities brought about this circumstance. Among them was a meeting, taped by my partner in chiefspiritualofficers.com (a website is in the works even as I write), which I was invited to hear. The owners of the business made reference to a book by Lynne Twist called The Soul of Money. Being the A student that I am, I was on Amazon before you could say bookshop.

In The Soul of Money, Ms. Twist, a longtime, seasoned fundraiser, speaks to our financial preconceptions and assumptions. The first one is that we live in a world of Scarcity. Not new information, but do you see the word scare in there? She divides it into three axioms:

There isn’t enough.
More is better.
That’s just the way it is.

Ever resorted to any of these in a conversation about money? I’m pretty sure we all have. My own response to her words of wisdom was a simple ouch.

The far larger portion of her book (Thank God/dess!) addresses the opposite of Scarcity which she terms Sufficiency.

[Do an experiment for a moment. Stop reading, and say aloud the word scarcity. Say it several times, and see how it feels in your body. Now take a deep cleansing breath. (This is code for: EXHALE! The inhale will happen naturally after that.) Try saying Sufficiency and see how it feels in your body. I’ll lay my top bet, which is a quarter, that Sufficiency felt better than Scarcity.]

Sufficiency is an exciting new context for every aspect of life, especially for money. Ms. Twist invites us to “change the dream,” based on a principle shared by many indigenous peoples that we dream our world into existence. Yes, even our “money world.” Scarcity is a dream we dreamed, and, even better, sufficiency is a world we can dream if we want.

She quotes the delicious Buckminster Fuller, he of geodesic dome fame, and writes that scarcity is about a “you-or-me world,” and sufficiency is about a “you-and-me world.” Here’s how she suggests we get there:

Take a stand
Change your conversation
Create a legacy of enough

I was so impressed by her thoughtfulness, her consciousness, her suggestions. Before I read the book, I had promised to loan it to a friend. Now that I’ve read it, I’m going to have to renegotiate my promise. This is a book to own, and read, again and again and again. My friend is going to have to get his own copy.

Here are some of her closing words:

We can shift from scarcity to sufficiency,
from complaint to commitment,
from envy to gratitude.
We can, through the stand we take,
through the power of conversation,
and through conscious attention to our legacy,
change the dream.

I think it’s time we begin to look at money as having a soul, don’t you? Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money is a gentle confrontation guaranteed to wake us up. And, you’ll have to forgive me for I can’t resist, you already know that . . . the best way to make our dreams come true is to WAKE UP!

Mistaken Identity

Seeds IX, 23

Seed: Mistaken Identity

It’s a case of mistaken identity. It happens to me often. I have a particular winter coat I wear with a luxurious black fox collar. When I wear my hair up, and pull the collar up, there is some sort of glamour that attaches to me. People stop me and ask, “Aren’t you that actress who . . . ?” (They can never remember her name.) I always laugh and say no—it’s a case of mistaken identity. (I call it my Actress Who Coat.)

I got to thinking about this expression the other day and I realized that more often it’s not others who mistake my identity—more often it’s me who mistakes my own identity. Of note, the mistake I make with my identity is to think it’s narrow or limited in some way.

Mistake means to take in error, and it is an error when I limit my identity. The etymology of the word identity is to be the same. Here’s where I take myself in an erroneous way—I assume that I am always the same. Now, both you and I know that I’m NEVER the same. I change all the time. So do you.

The next time you experience feeling misunderstood either from within or without, think on this idea of mistaken identity. You might find that the mistake is your own. If so, go find a mirror and apologize to yourself!

Be serene,

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net

Invoice #1182

When was the last time you received an invoice in the mail? I got one today. At the bottom was a handwritten note. It said:

Thank you for the gifts you bring to our world. Thank you for spreading the Truth of who you are. Thank you for your order.

I stood completely still as I read it over twice. What an amazing way to do business.

The invoice was from The Universal Flag. Their tagline is: We are One with All. I’d ordered a t-shirt, a flag and a lapel pin. I know they write something on every invoice. For that matter, they might write the SAME thing on every invoice. It doesn’t matter. What a spiritual practice.

If you’ll go to their website, you can see a phenomenal video about the Universal Flag. The man who designed it resisted doing so for a long time until Spirit made it perfectly clear that creating a universal flag was his to do. So he did it.

The flag itself is beautiful as you can see from the picture. The meanings are even more beautiful. I was destined to be a fan from the moment I saw the flag; their simple, spiritual practice of a handwritten thank you clinched it.

What is Global Mindshift?

I’ve found a new, or new-to-me, magazine recently called Ode Magazine. Its tagline reads: for intelligent optimists. That’s what sold me. It was begun in The Netherlands in 1995, began English and Portuguese versions in 2003, and their subscription quotient just passed 100,000, and growing.

A full-page ad in the May 2007 edition made me laugh out loud. I looked at the picture—a rarity for me being a word person—for a long time before I read the headline or the words beneath it. The picture is Earth in a velvet wing chair.

The headline reads:

Your
Mother
would like to have
a word with you.

I bet she would. With all of us. It’s an ad for a website called Global-Mindshift, and I like both its intent and its message. Mother Earth in a chair is an invitation to sit down at our computers and connect with the site. They promise:

Your mother will be pleased you did.

I think she would.

Here’s who the site is for: This site is for you, individuals and organizations alike, who, from a broadening base of thinking, are interested in exploring, connecting and acting on behalf of a better future for all life.

The mission of the site is: Global MindShift's mission is to help bring about a new era of cooperation and creativity on the planet.

The only way I know of to facilitate this is to make space for gathering and thinking both outside and inside our collective boxes together. Global MindShift is an internet Think Tank to which everyone is invited. Everyone with a mother, that is.

One of the things it says on the site is that whilst conversation is important, it’s not the final step in change. The final step is action.

In my careful reading of Ode, I noticed an email address for the Editor-in-Chief, so in the spirit of intelligent optimism, I wrote to him about his website. Why, I asked, aren’t there any bloggers? And would you consider me to be one on Ode’s site? My very own global mind shift. What did I have to lose?

It took three days and I got an astonishing answer. The web editor invited me to be a Charter Member of their Readers’ Blog which debuts on or near June 10th this year. There are only a few of us, and we’re invited to contribute as often or seldom as we choose.

Global mind shift and action, my friend. One email. Think of it. Just one email opened a whole new world to me simply because I sat down and wrote it. My biological mother was a marketing wizard when she was alive; I’m sure she was pleased at my email.

W.I.N.

Seeds IX, 22

Seed: W.I.N.

Lou Holtz is a well-known former college football coach. He is credited with leading the University of South Carolina to victory. Applying his philosophy will go a long way toward helping us know when we need to apologize. W.I.N. is an acronym for a wonderful question, “What’s Important Now?”

So many times in life we get stuck in the past. It doesn’t matter if it’s the deep, dark, old past or the less deep, less dark, recent past—the past has passed! IF we’ll let it. Do you want to win? Ask “What’s important now?”

I think you’ll find that if you center yourself in the present what used to be so important isn’t as important now. I know I do. What was important loses its charm next to what is important now.

It’s a great philosophy for football games. Last’s week’s game? Not so important. This week’s? Crucial. Dear one, ask yourself “what’s important now?” and let go of what used to be important. The bluebird of happiness could light upon your shoulder.

Be serene,

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

When you have friends you would like added to the Seeds e-mail list, send their addresses to me at SeedsDrCorso@comcast.net