"Changing the Karmic Blueprint" & "The Breath"

Maresha, how do I change my karmic blueprint?

You change your karmic blueprint by doing your spiritual practice so that you’re meditating, you’re praying, you’re chanting, and you’re really engaging the witness consciousness, watching yourself from your higher self so that when you want to go on automatic, you don’t go on automatic. When we feel ourselves wanting to respond or react in the same old way, we just breathe. We just breathe. And the breath gives us a moment to bring in a completely different energy rather than the repetitious, relentless reaction that we regularly have. So the witness consciousness allows us to reflect and just take a moment to breathe and redirect our repetitious, habitual unconscious pattern of what it is that we’re going to say or think or do.  So that one long breath in and that one long breath out will change everything. And when you’re breathing, you’re focusing on nothing except the sound and sensation of that breath, knowing that that is your tool that you’re using in this moment of consciousness to transform yourself.

It’s the same process through the years. It’s the lifelong ebb and flow of following Her, and that’s how we transform ourselves. There is nothing new and there is nothing esoteric about any of this; it is the simple, transformational, contemplative practice that we apply all day long every day to the best of our ability. And then we give ourselves concentrated times like those we have on retreat to just help us anchor what it feels like to be spending more time in meditation, more time in chanting, more time in self-reflection. In those times we can really feel the difference, and then we desire very strongly to bring that into our everyday lives so that we’re never away from it. That desire is the desire to be melded with the Absolute.

When you are in real, true conscious awareness, it never looks like a façade; it’s not a spiritual façade that you wear like a sweater or a hairdo. What it does do is bring you to your real self, and then you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to process it, it’s just there. It’s like our kitties, George and Peaches; they’re as natural as natural can be. Should I play with the curtain? Or should I eat the rose? They don’t have to think about it, they just do what they do. 

So we use our spiritual tools to change, to transform our consciousness. And as a result of that transformation, as a result of that conscious awareness, we become real. And then we don’t have to think about things anymore. Then we’re not doing all that funny stuff that we do; we’re not reacting out of an individual, karmic place. We’re not stuck in the karmic groove. We are free, and that freedom looks like kitties at play. 

(October 2013)



When I breathe, I can feel everything expand. Is that because the breath brings us to God?

The breath is God. The breath is the prana, and prana is the energy and consciousness of God. Without breath, there is no life. We have to breathe. Almost everybody breathes unconsciously all day long. If you’re alive and you’re walking around, you’re breathing. But breathing consciously is a different matter; breathing consciously allows you to change your consciousness. So when you’re breathing in the breath, it’s the breath of God, it’s the prana of that universal intelligence.

With practice, it can feel very expansive and very relaxing, and it can change our consciousness in a moment, transforming the places that plague us: our worries, our fears, our frustrations, and our angers. You can change your consciousness by focusing on the breath for just for a few minutes. It’s the breath of the Goddess, it’s prana, it’s the golden life force.

Of all the spiritual practices, the breath is the most powerful. The breath is the great transformer. In the beginning it may feel awkward and a little mechanical, but if you stay with the breath long enough, you really start to dissolve. You really start to soften. When you exhale, you let go and relax, and when you inhale, you fill yourself up and you renew yourself. So five minutes of pranayama, of breathing consciously, can be even more powerful than an hour of yoga. That’s why it’s good to remember to breathe.

In the morning, instead of saying to my husband, “Have a nice day, Honey,” I say, “Remember to breathe.” He’s so busy, and there’s so much input. So in fielding all that energy, the breath helps us to bring everything back to the present moment and balance everything. When you’re going too fast, the breath pulls you in, and when you’re going too slow, it lifts you up. It makes the perfect adjustment without your having to know what the intelligence of the prana is going to do. The prana is divine intelligence. It regulates us without our having to do anything except the most natural thing, which is to breathe. It’s the first thing we do when we’re born. When we’re born, we breathe in and it’s an inhale, and when we die, we breathe out and it’s an exhale. So life is one long breath.

    (November 2013)

Maresha's next blog will be published March 4, 2014. 

Messages of Light is published by the Sanctuary of Universal Light on Snow Dragon Mountain in Meredith, New Hampshire. www.snowdragonsanctuary.com.

The Propulsion of Surrender

 

 In the morning I become very quiet and I listen with my feeling center so that I can know what to do and how to do it. It doesn’t matter what has accumulated in front of me in the way of a laundry list, the obvious things that seem to need to be taken care of. I have that list, but I don’t pay any attention to it other than using it as a kind of light frame of reference because every day something happens that I did not know was going to happen, and I need to shift.

 

And so when something comes up that is difficult to shift, I shift it because I don’t conform to social structure, I don’t conform to regular time, and I don’t conform to any of the social mores that we live by. I made peace a long time ago with living in a state of surrender so that I’m very comfortable with shifting things when She tells me to do so. If I need to change an appointment or call someone and say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t going to work for me right now, let’s see if we can change this,” I’m very comfortable. I’m very comfortable if I say, “Yes I will,” and then Spirit says a little bit later, “No, you won’t.” I’m very honest and I say, “I thought I could, but I can’t and I’m so sorry.” And I am sincere in what it is that I say.

 

In a surrendered state, you cannot care what people think about you, you cannot think too highly of yourself, and you cannot get too attached to what you want. It is all very different, and it is all very beautiful. The ebb and flow of what comes to you through spirit has this kind of nature that I’m talking about. There is a natural energy there, a natural propulsion that carries you. A tremendous amount of synchronicity and accomplishment and joy comes in opening up to this ebb and flow and allowing yourself to surrender to what the Goddess wants for you and to what your part is in the Divine plan. The Divine plan doesn’t necessarily mean you have to move to Calcutta and become a nun; it might, but it also just means how we live our ordinary lives, each and every moment, each and every day.

 

And then there are the extraordinary things. When I was a very, very young woman, I built a house in a deeply wooded area of New Hampshire. I remember standing at the top of the driveway and looking across into the woods, and I absolutely knew there was going to be a healing center there. I knew it with every fiber of my being. I could feel it. I knew it was going to happen, but I had no idea how it could happen. I had just been trying to build a house with no mortgage with my own hands, so to even think of building a healing center was something I could hardly do. Or, when I was spirited very strongly to Cape Breton, I knew when I was on the island that I had to have a Sanctuary there, that I was going to make a Sanctuary on Cape Breton Island. Both of these things came to pass, and much, much more.

 

How do we know these things? I couldn’t have come up with these things myself. When I look back at the task that was before me then, there’s no way I could have said to myself, “Yeah, let’s do that.” What I’m saying is that without the propulsion of Spirit within me, around me, behind me and all about me, I could not have done it on my own.

 

So the art of surrendering, the consciousness of surrender, is extraordinarily beautiful, and that is when Spirit can use you. When Spirit can’t use you, you get stuck in Purgatory. Now that’s a very Christian, Catholic kind of view, but there is a purgatory, and it’s in between. It’s neither here nor there, it’s neither up nor down, it’s neither heaven nor hell; it’s like being stuck. When you do not live a surrendered life, you live a life in Purgatory. You’re stuck. You’re not doing anything. You’re just kind of going on day by day like a somnambulistic zombie. So it’s not hell, it’s not heaven, it’s just somewhere in between that is void of light.

 

Why? Because there’s no risk. If you’re going to live a surrendered life, you live with risk, you live with doing things that you would not normally do, saying things that you would not normally say. But when you condition yourself to that flow and that ebb, there is no risk. All that ego resistance that says, “This is too risky,” is gone. It disappears. All those places are traps to keep you comfortable and immobile, and most of all to keep you from doing any good in the world. 

 So I listen in the morning when I wake up. I go to my feeling center instantly, very, very quickly. I say my prayer of thanks, and I begin to move in the flow. By the middle of the day it’s been busy, and I’m always breathing in and breathing out, and I am listening. In the evening, especially around bedtime, I’m always listening with my intuitive ears and my feeling center. That is how I stay in contact with Her, and that is how I can move in that beautiful stream of light, in the ebbs and flows of that light.

 

Living Life as a Meditation

 Reflect on how you go through your day. What do you do? All the ways in which the mind goes off on all the things that the mind goes off on, take you away from your meditative awareness; “She suffers your foot to be moved,” and you lose focus. You become watered down when your unruly mind pulls you around. You cannot live in a surrendered state unless you learn to focus your mind, your higher mind, on the task at hand, which is the one that is given you by God. What does focus mean? Focus means that our minds are under control so that we can follow the prana or the surrendered propulsion of Spirit. When Spirit gives me something to do, I am focused on getting it done.

 

When you’re off thinking about politics or about the cruise two months down the road, or you’re wondering why this isn’t happening or that isn’t happening, you are no longer meditating. You see, life is a meditation. How we live life can be a meditation, a meditation in motion. Meditation is learning to still and focus the mind. We don’t just do it when we’re sitting; I am meditating all the time. So whatever the task at hand is, that is the one we focus on. Well, what about this one over here? Well, when this is done, we’ll get to that. Otherwise, the energy gets dissipated and watered down. It gets disassembled, and then we get overwhelmed. Well, so we’ve got this that we’re being asked to attend to, and then we can say, What about this? If we start going there, well, I don’t feel like doing any of it. And we’re sunk before we’re even succeeded in focusing on one, one, place that we have been given to focus upon.

 

And as for keeping and preserving your prana, your energy, that will make you lazy. The energy comes from God, and you will not feel the propulsion that is potentially there for you to feel if you are trying to regulate your own energy.

 

Maresha, I can’t help but feel things, but I don’t always go with what I feel or move quickly on them.

 

You don’t move quickly because you go up into your head. It comes to you, but then you talk yourself out of it or hesitate, which is very common. You have to find out what your feeling center is hooked into. If it’s with situations with other people, it’s going sideways and so then you’re feeling what other people are feeling, and you’re in that sphere. I’m talking about feeling very clearly the light of the Goddess, a vertical experience, a direct line. We have to train ourselves because when we have a feeling center that is developed, we can still feel everybody’s everything. We have to discern what is it that we’re feeling and how to activate that direct, vertical line. I know how to open the channel and align very, very quickly, not with someone else, but with my Self in direct communion because I’ve been practicing it my whole life, and before this lifetime, and the lifetime before that, and I don’t know how many others.

(October 2013)

Maresha's next blog will be published on February 25. 

Messages of Light is published by the Sanctuary of Universal Light on Snow Dragon Mountain in Meredith, New Hampshire. www.snowdragonsanctuary.com.



The Holy Spirit

There is an essence which is the very energy of life. It exists in all things and at every level of existence. It is the energy of creation that gives life and from which life is made.  This essence and heart of the universal intelligence is expressed in many ways. In the Book of Genesis, creation is described as the “spirit of God” moving upon the face of the waters. The universal sound of Om is described as the “divine breath” of the universe. Other expressions of this universal intelligence are Chi, Prana, God, Goddess, Great Spirit, Divine Life, and so on. We will refer to this essence as the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit exists in all forms. It penetrates every level of existence: material, biological and spiritual. It ranges from unconscious biological functioning in our bodies, to creative and inspiring ideas and visions in our minds, to feelings of love and openness in our hearts, and to the experience of connection and oneness in our spirits. It is the divine spirit of matter and space. It animates our individual intelligence. The Holy Spirit is the great intelligence that animates all things. The Holy Spirit thus forms a bridge of connection between matter and spirit, between us and the Divine.

The Holy Spirit functions within us both consciously and unconsciously. It serves us, even if we do not realize it. We do not need to be conscious to realize its effects. We draw and absorb this divine energy from food, air, water, sunlight and the earth. As the Holy Spirit enters our bodies, it radiates, vibrates, and charges all of our systems: lymphatic, circulatory, respiratory, excretory, digestive, endocrine, and so on. It charges and vitalizes our glands, organs, muscles, nerves, feelings and thoughts. It fuels our instincts, our intellect and our spirit.

The Holy Spirit is available at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances to everyone equally. When we consciously realize the presence of the Holy Spirit, we have the key for connecting with and for expressing our divine nature. We can transcend our unconsciousness and begin a conscious relationship with the Divine. As your spiritual practices deepen, your ability to resonate with the Holy Spirit is magnified. This resonance softens and relaxes the places in us that are hard and unyielding; it liberates our fears and brings us into the flows of love.

When we are connected to the Holy Spirit, it acts upon us and creates a state of healing. We resonate with love as our isolation from the Holy Spirit is dissolved and as our fractured spirit moves into unification. Simultaneously and gracefully, we are brought into perfect relationship with ourselves and the universe.

  

                                                            An Ancient Vedic Prayer

 

Asatoma sad gamaya,

Tamasoma jyoytir gamaya,

Mrityorma amritam gamaya.

 

Lead us from the unreal to the real,

From darkness to light,

And from mortality to immortality.

                                                                             

(Undated)

Maresha's next blog will be published February 18. 

Messages of Light is published by the Sanctuary of Universal Light on Snow Dragon Mountain in Meredith, New Hampshire. www.snowdragonsanctuary.com.



 

 



                                            

February Greeting from Maresha

Dear Reader, 

 

Prana dissolves all obstructions effortlessly. The indwelling spiritual intelligence, embodied within the currents of prana, knows how to adjust all variables of physiology, emotion, and thought currents. The simple act of breathing in – consciously, and breathing out – consciously, is the great balancer, the great sustainer, and the great provider. There are no exceptions to this. Prana (infinite energy of light) is accessed through  each breath we take. 

 

Breathing consciously is like tuning in to a relaxing channel of flow and effortlessness, easily dissolving hardness and tension.

 

Breathe in – listen to the sound and sensation of the long inhalation.

Breathe out – soften, soften, soften……

You cannot change your consciousness without changing your chemistry. Breathe consciously. It will change your chemistry and therefore, your consciousness.

 

Blessings and love,

Maresha

Maresha's next blog will be published February 11, 2014. 

 

Messages of Light is published by the Sanctuary of Universal Light on Snow Dragon Mountain in Meredith, New Hampshire. www.snowdragonsanctuary.com.