Consider the thing that’s been tugging at your heart lately. Something that hasn’t quite come into focus. A dream. A wish. A desire. A sense that makes no sense, yet feels as intimate as the inside of your belly.

Its outlines are blurry, its power undeniable.

Play with it from different vantage points. Draw it in close — so close, you can taste its breath, feel the zing of it raise the tiny hairs on your arms. So close you can’t tell whose heartbeat thuds in your chest, whose pulse whooshes in your veins.

Now pull back — take it in whole, from across the room. Its slouchy stance, that jut of jaw and hip. Those waves of delight that roll across the floor like a tsunami headed straight for your heart.

Pull back further: To the rooftop, treetop, mountaintop. Pull all the way back to fill the sky. Feel the pull between you, elastic as taffy, stretching, stretching. Never breaking. Stay there, in that current of connection…

Until you’re pulled back in again, facing each other, close but not so close that you can’t see yourself. Or it. This thing that’s been tugging at your heart. Calling your name. Calling you to know it, to love it, to wrap its arms around you. To bring it to life so you can play, and play some more. Together.

Where do you need to stand, today, to bring it into being? Do you want it in your life? If the answer is Yes, what will you do to make a home for it, today?

Today’s practice:

It’s Fall, here in my neck of the woods — the season when Light turns from summer-shaded eyes and sun-blessed skin to begin her steep descent through the corridor of bones, into the cold, slow marrow of winter.

Season of drifting leaves, of trees returning their green-gold life to their ancient roots.

Today, play with falling. Play with it on the floor of your dance studio, your yoga mat, your soft, soft bed. Better yet, rake up a great pile of leaves, and fall into them. As you fall, feel the rush and whoosh and gasp of letting gravity have her way with you. Savour the tickle of leaves in your nose, their cushiony crunch, their peaty breath enfolding you.

With your back smooshed into piles of leaves, breathe in; breathe out. Feel your heart slowing to a steady drumbeat. Feel the cradle of grace that is your breath, rocking you.

With each breath in, feel the lungs of the world breathing for you. With each breath out, feel the earth breathing with you. Feel yourself being breathed in utter safety — a child cradled in falling leaves, cradled in the lap of the world.

Safely held, you are free to play. You can climb. You can fly. You can fall. You can lift. You can drop, tumble, roll, let go.

Feel your heart race as you climb, as you launch yourself from that highest branch. Fly! Wheeee! Fall! Whooosh!

Fall into safety. Fall into lift and loft and tumble, into scratch and soft and thump and rustle. Fall into freedom.

Let the feeling of falling shake your limbs, limber your heart. Let it swing you by the hand through the enchantment of the day. Know this, in your bones — you’re free to fall, and rise, and fall again, climb, leap, fly again.

Let your mind mimic your body’s freedom. Loosen your grip on the things that vex you. Let them fall, too. Let them fall.

Fall for the joy of it! Fall for the joy!

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul #AdventuresInCreativeConsciousness

Our earth is undergoing a massive re-calibration of its energy body as it orients energetically (though not physically!) to a new sun, to a new source of energetic attunement.

This process has been ongoing for several decades, but is accelerating exponentially now. Like any r/evolutionary change, it generates friction as evolutionary and devolutionary forces polarize into opposing camps, collide head-on, and attempt to find a new accommodation to each other and to rapidly shifting realities.

Since we are elements in the body of the earth, we experience the effects of this upheaval in our personal lives, our relationships and our businesses, all of which may be undergoing a similar process of disintegration and re-formation.

You may find yourself questioning and re-evaluating your vision for your life or your business. Redefining why you do what you do, and what success means to you now. Searching for new ways of living that fulfill your longing for meaning and purpose, and provide sustainability, freedom and joy. Perhaps you’re standing in the debris of relationships that cannot meet you where you are, or in the ruins of ways of being that no longer make your heart happy.

Things that worked beautifully for a long time may simply stop working now. You may experience more stress, more chaos, more confusion, more uncertainty on every level. Or the opposite — greater joy, ease, simplicity, delight, freedom. It all depends on where you are, in your own evolution, and in your relationship with the planetary forces at play.

The effects of this process are evident in the extreme volatility that’s erupting globally. Upheavals in the lives of neighbourhoods and nations. Shifting geopolitical, economic, social, cultural and tribal/religious alliances. The effects of climate change, world-wide. These are all the natural consequences of the wars we have waged on each other, and on the body of the earth, for several millennia.

The Deva of the Earth is crafting a new energy body — in part, so it can hold and generate more power. Power that’s harnessed in service to greater harmony, love, peace, unity and wholeness in every dimension, and especially here on Earth.

Because we are cells in the body of the earth, this creates tectonic upheavals in our own lives. We are forced into a close and truthful examination of our beliefs about power, and the ways in which these continue to distort and diminish our relationship with our selves, our bodies, our souls, our communities, and our world.

The powers of wholeness have sent us an invitation, inscribed in love, written on the vellum of truth: To develop a relationship with power that is inclusive, generative, and that benefits all beings, including ourselves — and especially including the planetary being we call Earth.

We are being called to learn from our history, to forego paradigms of dominance and submission, exploitation, abuse, divisiveness, and power-over.

We are invited to the greatest of adventures: To discover how to live the true purpose of our species, how to take our place as generative partners in the ecology of being. To discover that we are Joy, we are the miracle that we — and the Earth — have been waiting for.

When we place the creative power of our human incarnation in service to the earth and to all beings who live here, our hands and hearts help to shape the evolving energy body of the earth.

We are the hosts, not the guests, at this birth-feast. We are creators, not simply consumers, of the earth’s bounty. We are invited to end our brutal legacy of pain, of arrogant exploitation. We are invited to transform the story of humanity as pillagers and profiteers. We are invited to become loving stewards of our planetary home, to nurture and preserve the miracle of life on earth for all beings.

Indigenous elders and wisdom-keepers from around the world hold aloft the light by which we can find our way. They are the carriers of the human spirit. They remember, on behalf of us all, what we have forgotten — that our deep ancestors chose this planet as a place to evolve our species through the exercise of choice and free will. That we are here to learn how to live in harmony with the earth, to embrace all beings as family, to generate love, beauty, and creative delight. To serve, with devotion, our cosmic community.

We cannot co-opt the spiritual traditions of other times and cultures, but we can learn from them, and build on them. We can add to the sum of human wisdom, human kindness. We can become worthy ancestors for the generations that follow us, the ones who will inherit the earth we have helped to create. We are being invited to step up, to grow up, to become the elders and wisdom-keepers for new generations.

Take some time — today, tomorrow, this week, this year — to attune to this process of planetary evolution. Attune to the invitation it offers you, to grow in creative power, sovereignty, love and freedom. To become one of the great ancestors of the world of tomorrow.

How does it feel to stand in this place, holding this invitation in your hand?
Joyous, exciting? Terrifying? Overwhelming? Liberating?
Does it fill your lungs with oxygen? Make you want to gather up your shine and head out to the celebration?
Or something else entirely?

For today, simply begin by embracing your own humanity. Meet yourself where you are. Be curious, loving, playful, generous with yourself.
Who are you, really, beyond the roles that define you?
What light and power do you hold that’s uniquely yours, that is the blaze of your incarnation?

How will you meet this invitation to host the party? To be a creative, generative source of love and power in the earth’s evolution and rebirth?
What can you, and only you, bring to the Great Cosmic Birth Feast?

Today’s practice: Tune into the crests and troughs of the waves that you’re riding right now — the slip-sliding micro-movements of your life.

Feel the nature of each phase of the wave — the bright billowing surge, its sunlit crown foaming against the force of gravity; the swift plunge into a coldly swirling unknown.

Experience fully the vibrational nature each of these states of being. Savour the precise differences that make each of them unique.

Explore the relationship between them. Ride the movement of the wave; feel how it functions — that moment when ascent becomes descent, when crest begins the slide back to trough, when apogee swells towards rise.

Hold each of these phases of movement in the cupped palms of your hands — rise in one, fall in the other. They are, each of them, a wedding of form and function. Feel their heft and texture, the hot and cold of them, the density and loft of their restless, expressive life.

Move your hands in the dance of their co-mingling. Let the movement travel from your hands through your arms, from your arms through your body. Feel, in your whole body, this movement of rise and fall, swell and slide, this undulant life.

What do you know now, that you didn’t know before you entered this dance? What do you know about the movements of your cells, of your blood, your nerves, your breath? How do you experience the surge and ebb of your life now?

What do you know about the movements of your world — the ones that elate or frustrate you; the ones that scoop you through the waves of hope and despair?

What will you do with this knowledge? How does it change your relationship to power, to action? How will you embody and direct the power of this movement today?

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul #AdventuresInCreativeConsciousness

Remember when you were a child, and a tree was a wondrous being of dappled light and swaying shadows on sticky summer afternoons? Remember the feel of barkskin and sap stinging the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet. The sharp green scent of leaves rustling all around you as you climbed the branching ladder of the tree’s many arms.

Remember how you loved that tree, how you loved who you were, curled in the nest of its canopy. Remember how you loved the world beneath you, a magic carpet undulant with promise, the wind swinging you high in your hammock of green and gold.

That tree was home and beauty, outlook and adventure, a sailing ship on a sea of sky. It was Tree. Its whispers lingered in your dreams, those fragrant nights of childhood summer.

When did tree’s glory dim and recede? It remains true to itself — taller, fuller, stouter, but still tree. What’s changed, in your relationship with it?

When did you slip into the story in which tree is resource, to be managed, cultivated, exploited for its timber or its bark? When did it become a precursor to paper, to firewood, to the frame of your house, the turned legs of your dining room table? Or one more thing you are responsible for — leaves to be raked in the fall, branches to be pruned in early spring.

When did you stop loving Tree for its tree-ness? When did you stop loving yourself for your self-ness?

Can you trace the pathways by which this happened? When did you slip into the story in which you — your beauty, your joy, your eager heart, your creative blaze — became a repository for desires not your own; a screen for the projections of society and culture.

When did you allow a half-blind world to describe you to yourself?

What strange, reverse alchemy transformed you from beloved to resource — to be exploited, tamed, cultivated, packaged? Even — especially — by you?

Stop. Turn around. Retrace your steps. Climb back into the tree of your being, feeling your own rough bark, your sticky sap, in the palms of your hands, on the soles of your feet. Discover the secrets of your hidden chambers, your musk and music, your seasons of longing, your surging desires, your shivering joys.

Who are you, O creature of love and music, of branching arms and sunburnt hair?

This is your journey. Back to yourself. Back to loving heartwood and sap, bark and leaf, ear-shell, blood-tide, breath-wind, galvanized skin on muscular flesh. You.

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul

Today’s practice: Be home

Attune to the guardian spirit of your home.
Invite her to grace your life today.

Her arms are filled with gifts for you–
welcome and peace, belonging and nurturance
Divine order, support, love, delight, sovereignty, joy.

Take the gifts she offers, as many as you can hold.
Feel them enliven your home, your heart
with beauty and power.

From the moment you wake until that last flicker of light
before you slip into sleep,
your home holds you in love and blessing.

She is the ground from which you rise each day.
She is the lap of the Sacred, cradling you in tenderness–
shaped by human hands, to grow your human heart.

Whatever your experience of home has been, in the past–
the spirit of home accompanies you now.

Rest in the peace of knowing you are safe–
you are home, you belong.

Move into your world
carrying the power and blessing of home with you.

Be home
for everyone you meet today.

‪#‎ToBeSoul_DoSoul‬

Today’s practice: Play with your creative muse

Attend to the nature of your relationship with her. Do you dance joyously together? In syncopated rhythm, heart-to-breath-to-body, leaping, twirling, carving gorgeous shapes in the air through which you move?

Does her brilliance overwhelm you? Is she impatient with your slowness, your fumbling, human feet that stumble through the beat? Your need to repeat a step over and over to get its rhythm in your body?

Beguile your muse onto your own stomping grounds. Reveal to her the sweetness of the slow glide, the languid turn. Share the delight of raised dust and pounding feet.

Let her pulse entrain yours to quicksilver. Let the freedom of her limbs, her unfettered heart whirl you through the Milky Way — out to the crackling rim of the universe, into the unknown beyond.

This is the dance. You, squelching her through the glorious mud of pond, the green rustle of meadow. She, steering you in the glittering wake of the stars.

What do you discover, what is revealed, when you bring your worlds together in this way? What can you create together, when you each bring your genius to the dance?

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul

Today’s Practice

Meet one of the looming, impossible-to-scale mountains within you.
Meet it face-to-face.

Notice its shape, its size, its adamant
vertiginous topography.

Place your hands and your feet on its slippery, scree-lined slope.
Notice the trackless paths you’d have to traverse
to climb its granite body.

Feel its dangers: those scimitar rocks that can slice open an artery–
the thin, unbreathable air that shivers at its peak.

Feel the tremble and lurch, the cold despair the mountain’s shadow
casts on your heart, in your belly.
Feel it.

Call your soul into this fragile communion.
As its sun blazes through, all is illuminated:
The mountain, your lurching heart, the space between you.

Notice your ferrous arms, your powerful, unyielding legs.
Breathe in the sky of your own levitation.

Discern the true shape of the mountain before you.
Feel its curves in the swivel of your hips,
its caves in the secret passages of your body.

Know your self, the mountain.
Know the mountain, your self.

Touch of fingertip on lip.
Intimate mystery.

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing a daily practice on my Facebook page under the rubric #ToBeSoul_DoSoul. Because we evolve through action, being soul is an ongoing activity in our everyday lives. Mostly, the daily practices I craft as experiments in soulful living are brief — ways of playing as soul, reminders that our actions and choices matter. When we practice acting from our essence, we incarnate our soul’s potentials, develop our capacities, and function as agents of soul and wholeness in the world.

Today’s practice is a bit longer. Play along if you wish, and share your experiences with us here.

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Today’s practice

Attune to the soul of Humanity, to the vision it holds for the evolution of our species. Why are we here? What is our role in the family of life on this earth?

Invite the pattern that the Deva of Humanity holds, in its energy field, into your own body, into your life.

What does it feel like, to be fully human? How does your embodied humanity embrace the multitude of other life-forms on our planet? What impact does a truly evolved humanity have, on our world?

Attune to our deep ancestors, who descended from the safety of treetops to the uncertain terrain of forest floor or savannah. They, who first walked upright 6 or 7 million years ago, didn’t know what their actions would mean, for us, their daughters and sons who have arrived here all these millions of years later. They couldn’t imagine what this shift to a vertical stance would mean for the history of the world.

To stand upright, to see the horizon eye-to-eye for the first time, when all you’ve ever known of the ground was a narrow negotiation between belly and grassland… Such courage! Such willingness to adventure in search of sustenance!

Where do these ancestors live, in your body? Get down on all fours and experience your world, for a few moments, from that horizontal stance. Belly low to the ground and protected. You are longer than you are tall. What do you know of the world around you? Which of your senses is keenest, most reliable in this horizontal orientation to your world?

Slowly, stand upright. Feel the shift in your body, in your primary modes of sensing and perception, in your relationship with the horizon, with your environment. Feel the flow of human evolution in the arches of your feet, in the way light enters your eyes.

Move through your day with the awareness that every choice you make today will reverberate through to your descendants. You are the activity of the Deva of Humanity. You are the ancestor of the generations to come. You are the blade of the knife that carves the shape of our world.

Over the past 35+ years, I’ve collaborated with thousands of clients and students to help them create lives and businesses that they love. Much has changed, in the landscape of our world, during that time. But this truth remains: No matter what circumstances you find yourself in, or what issues you face, the key to creating your heart’s deepest, truest desires is to reconfigure your inner ecology to unite it with your soul. 

The more skillfully you do this, the more gracefully your outer world takes on the shape of your soul, and harmonizes with the pattern it holds for your life. 



This is just as true of your business as it is of your life. When you make this ordering of your inner ecology and the ecology of your business the center of your daily practice, your soul and the Deva of your business together can craft stories that heal, transform, bless, and re-shape your world.

Business is a soul path. At every stage, it calls you to free yourself of whatever binds you – outworn beliefs, stories about who you are and what you can create, ancestral agreements about the nature of the world and your place in it. Anything that attempts to shrink the vastness of your soul into a story, template or pattern that is – inevitably — too small for you, must go.

This isn’t easy. When you’ve been immersed in a particular story or world view for much of your life – especially if your identity is shaped around it – it can be hard to see that it is just a story. Hard to look beyond it to see that there are an infinite number of other stories you could choose to shape and to live by.

And, not all stories bind you. True stories liberate you. Like true desire, they are the voices of your soul, calling you to a fuller, more creative, more abundant life.

Today’s Practice

Today, consider the effects that your stories have on your business. Often, these are stories you’ve shaped out of accumulated past experiences, layered over earlier, childhood beliefs. And, hidden in the life of your business is a treasure-trove of stories that holds a map for its becoming.

In your journal, explore these questions:

• What stories of freedom, possibility and liberation can you tell about your business? What experiences, accomplishments and milestones line the winding road that is the history of your business?

  Draw a timeline of your business, from its inception to now. Mark these occasions and name them, on your timeline. No occasion is too small to celebrate. Draw or sketch an image or symbol, or add photos of these stories, if you wish. Create a story of triumph and celebration.

• What essence or soul qualities gave birth to your business, and contribute to its present incarnation? If you aren’t sure what these are, look to your deepest, truest desires, which always express soul qualities.

  On your business’s timeline, mark those events, experiences and turning points when your vision and determination, your foresight, courage, perseverance and grit, your wise choices, your wiliness to take risks, your heart and generosity expanded the world of your business. Take some time to acknowledge each one. Embrace and celebrate each of these essence qualities. Celebrate the You who embodies them now and has done the work to plant them firmly in the world of your business.

• What past dreams, projections, or fixed ideas about yourself or the world are you ready to release? Which fantasies would horrify you if they were to be fulfilled today? Which ones no longer hold any real juice or vitality for you?

  Mark these down (in pencil!) on the timeline of your business too, in the order in which they occurred. Thank them, and bless your past selves, who created and nurtured these stories. Then, release them with love, and erase them from your timeline.

I wish you the miracle of true stories, forgiveness, gratitude, and celebration.