Articles by Kathy Baxter
Over the course of the last month news of instability, corruption, graft, manipulation and decay seems to have increased exponentially – making some feel that the “end” is nearing. Yet, it is surprising how many are seeing this as a welcome sign that the shift is upon us, and balance is finally being restored on earth. It is such an unusual and hopeful reaction to outer difficulty – it bears closer scrutiny. Of course mass media is not served by looking at this as a good thing so we are barraged with gloom and doom reporting. What we have here is a matter of focus. Are you looking outward at the systems that are breaking down, or are you looking inward at the manifestation of a new reality?
Think of our reality as being incubated in a very large egg. It is time for the hatchling to emerge, and it has begun to peck at that shell. A few pecks, a little crack. Oh, there comes fear. Everything familiar and “safe” is beginning to fracture. A few more, another crack. We have been pecking for a while now, fearful of the outcome, yet anxious to emerge into the light. The shell is riddled with cracks, and in a short while, there will be that last critical outward push that shatters the shell, reducing it to a powder around…around what? Are we to be annihilated or freed?
This is the question that defines the inward focus. What is hatching? Inside this corrupt and antiquated shell, a green thing is emerging. When you move to a new house, the first spring is filled with curiosity as green things emerge all over the yard – as yet undefined, but promising new life and beauty. As humanity moves into the new spring of the 5th dimension, this green thing is pushing its way into being. We are creating this new reality and it deserves and requires our attention.
I have been working hard over the last year or so to shift my focus away from the fear based focus on what is breaking up and falling away, and toward understanding what that green thing is and how I might best feed and cultivate it. The more I study it, wonder about it and love it, the more I have been rewarded with an intuition about its marvelous potential. Probably the chief reason I was fascinated and in love with the Obama campaign was that he was asking us to look forward to what could be – to pool our creativity, hope and heart in a massive focus on what is fair and good – on what honors the earth and each other. This felt like the green thing to me. Seeing the jubilation and celebration on election day and inauguration day felt like the green thing. As he continues to speak to us in the language of values I am reminded again that we elected ourselves president, and made him chief spokesperson. There is a way in to that inner circle of decisions – a way to be a part and to be heard. That’s a green thing too.
Looking at the collapse of huge financial institutions it seems hard to imagine that something good could come from it. But leave it to Bill Moyers to find a way to point out the possibilities. In his interview with Simon Johnson Prof. Johnson talked about a possible scenario where big banks would ultimately be broken up into smaller units – institutions with a more human scale and more direct accountability. As I listened to this I thought, this is part of the green thing! Then the next week (is Bill Moyers a guru?) he interviewed Parker Palmer about maintaining your spiritual focus amid the breakdown. . That’s part of the green thing too! Internet based micro lending – where one on one we find partners and create magic – another part!
Here are some sign posts I use to identify the green thing:
Human scale is affirmed. Whatever institution or collective used to accomplish the common good is close enough to us to assure transparency, individual participation and accountability.
Community is reinforced. Either we grow closer to and more interdependent with physical neighbors, or we build stronger personal relationships in virtual communities.
It is organic. It is much more grown by intention, individual participation and person-to-person sharing than through management by large institutions or government.
It is elegantly and surprisingly simple while the issues surrounding seem to be beset by byzantine complexity. (This is the “why didn’t I think of that” criteria.)
It recognizes our commonalities and points to the unity underneath all of our diversity.
It affirms the power of collective conceptualization. It recognizes that we are creating this new reality with every thought, feeling and action. (Thoughts are things. Keep the good ones.)
In the weeks and months ahead, I hope to add to this list, and to my understanding of what that green thing is that is emerging in the broken shell. I hope to be able to keep my focus, my curiosity, my creativity and my love directed on that creation. If you see a resource, and recognize it as being part of this green thing, please share it with us by sending a note or a link to kathybax@gmail.com. I’ll put your links up on the Harvest of the Heart website so that others can see them too.
It is always nice to know that we are not alone out here working on this evolution thing. To assist you in connecting to the grand energy of ascension, here is a prayer that you might like to include in your daily practice, just a reminder that what you are doing on a daily basis has more power and more significance than you would ever guess.
Archangel Michael's prayer for Light workers
I am a divine instrument of Light, through which the higher dimensional frequencies of creation flow.
From this moment forward, I will fully and completely live my perfected vision of Heaven on Earth.
Each day, I am becoming a master of Divine Manifestation in the world of form, and I move beyond the restrictions and limitations of the third and fourth-dimensional reality.
I carry the torch of God Light; I radiate the love of Angels
Henceforth, each and every day I draw to, through and around me more and more of my Perfect I Am Presence of God.
http://www.truthout.org/022409A Reinventing Wealth in a Progressive World
http://www.truthout.org/022409R The Obama Code
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02202009/transcript2.html Moyers with Parker Palmer
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02132009/profile.html Moyers with Simon Johnson
Every week it seems that something else comes up to give me another lesson in letting go. It happens often enough that I can see a pattern in my own process. My initial reaction is to fight like a mother bear against the change. Especially after having separated from so much in my life, my ego screams out against having to say good-bye to anything else. I might cling to a difficult relationship, or keep doing something that isn't yielding abundant results. Just the fact that I have done it before is enough, at this stage, to keep me engaged in holding on. We all are familiar with what Universe does with the recalcitrant aren't we? If at first you don't let go, the next nudge gets a little harder, and the one after that harder still. When it is truly time to let go of something there is little to be done to avoid it.
When I get to this realization, I have a little tantrum. I'm such a grown up! If people are lucky, they don't have to be around me on my tantrum days because I can be pretty owly. Now that I recognize this I can make it a little shorter - maybe even only a half day depending on how big the letting-go is. And then I have the flat time. Ok, resigned to this, not happy about it, not wanting to figure out alternatives, just plain depressed that I'm in this familiar and tiresome spiral again.
Are you recognizing the classic stages of grief? Yes, I do follow up with bargaining and eventual acceptance.
It can be exhausting. Since I'm giving up a lot of things (in the end, willingly), I find myself in up and down cycles that can overlap each other and keep me engaged most of the time in this dance of re-defining myself, grieving the lost self, and welcoming the new. That's the deal with letting go. It can happen in clusters, in series, relentlessly. Roles drop away, friends get sick, jobs don't work out, clients cancel appointments, promising business ideas don't pan out. No matter how efficient one gets at the process of letting go gracefully, there will always be more just around the corner.
The quality of surrender is the ocean to the mud puddle of letting go. To finally get off the gerbil wheel of managing change, it is necessary to reach the state of surrender to the present moment. Surrender is global, profound and complete. It is affirming that a bigger power (bigger than your 3-D ego) is in charge of your life and the best way to handle your affairs is to get out of the way and let it work.
Letting go can be handled piecemeal. You can dribble it out, put it off, negotiate it, put it to the side and imagine that you can pick it up again at another time. Surrender is total and irreversible, and it requires trust, optimism and faith. Surrender requires the impeccability of self-love, honor and integrity.
Ekhart Tolle reaches this point of surrender when he stands in the observer position in pure consciousness, watching the ego react to events and thoughts. Letting go is an act of the ego. One surrenders to the Observer - to pure consciousness. Surrender is what you do when you fire the ego, when you give the straw boss the pink slip. To surrender requires one to stand with impeccability in the moment, alert and observant, detached from ego and aligned with Spirit.
In this place, you will always find peace.
In the dark ages, when I was thirty, I finally got around to taking calculus. For a brief and loony moment I thought I might try to get an MBA…it seemed logical at the time. Now I can see that this calculus course was another of the bricks in my own personal yellow brick road to the transpersonal. As I was plunging into derivatives and solving all those equations, I GOT in a big way, in one of those great Aha! moments. You can describe anything – absolutely anything - with math. A painting, music, an emotion, an idea – anything. It took my breath away. I was lost in the Zen of a calculus moment. As I look back, that moment changed my perceptions forever.
.
This is your consciousness.

This is your consciousness on light
To understand this shape better, imagine taking a string that is attached in the exact center of the pentagon, and pulling it straight up into the air at a 45-degree angle. Yikes! Now every pentagon has five NEW sides! And when you start to spin this in space, you get a major manifestation machine!
What can you get in 4-D that you didn’t get in 3-D? Well for one thing, in 4-D you can “see” from all faces of your human consciousness – not just from one. Your telepathic or clairvoyant abilities develop, and the desire to follow Spirit becomes more and more irresistible. As you learn to navigate in this emotional body (as distinguished from the physical body) you begin to have more lucid dreams, more déjà vu experiences. You move from the conventional base of knowledge into a heart based knowing. You will be drawing from the knowledge in all twelve of the dimensions of your consciousness.
(This seems a little bit like being able to go back to high school, knowing what we know now. Ah the delightful possibilities!)

At each turn, take three deep
breaths in through the nose and out
through the mouth.
Begin by drawing the golden light of
Universal energy in through the
rown charka to the count of three
crown chakra. (three deep breaths) Bring the light down
the spinal column to the hips.
Turn the light at a right angle and send it out to the edge
of your hips. (three breaths) Finally, send the light at a ee the energy take it’s third
right angle turn down to the earth
(three more deep breaths).
We - you, me, all of us - have evolved to the point today that it is possible to cultivate this connection with joy in our lives, and for a much greater proportion of our time. We chose the quote from Tolle's A New Earth this month because it says so clearly what we need to know about tapping into the level of consciousness that leads to peak experiences.
Why do we want to do this? We are seeking meaning and purpose in our lives. Most often we try to understand purpose in terms of what we are doing out in the world. We are all doing worthwhile things every day - yet we continue to look for meaning. If we can learn to be totally present with what we are doing to the point that we are focused, engaged, and passionately involved in that moment, the connection and meaning will begin to flow. This takes discipline and practice. It isn't easy to just swan in and turn off the monkey mind - that little guy is holding on to your attention for dear life, after all. But if you take this project on a little at a time, and gradually increase the moments you dedicate to full attention to the moment you will begin to see that you don't have to be a master artist to have a peak experience. What you are doing doesn't need to be earth-shaking. In fact, the more trivial the moment seems, the greater the surprise you will find as you lose yourself in that moment.
As Tolle has so eloquently demonstrated in A New Earth and The Power of Now, the secret is to disengage your mind from its constant evaluation of what you are doing. We are in the habit of comparing, evaluating, judging every passing moment. We spend vast amounts of time rehearsing the past or planning for/dreading the future. Even in the present, we often get stuck in what our “everybody” is thinking about us.
Look back on your own past and think about a peak experience. We have all had them, although they might have been fleeting. In the moment, during these experiences, the Great Inquisitor in your head was sent out for coffee. So absorbed and intrigued with what you were doing, you didn’t have time or attention to give yourself any feedback containing the word “should”. I have had these experiences when I was playing with my kids, when I was doing watercolors, when I was writing. In every case, I would be surprised to look at a clock and see that hours had passed in what seemed like minutes. I couldn’t begin to tell you what was going on around me. Did the phone ring? Was it raining? Who knows? Who cares? It was bliss while it lasted. I could describe the look of delight in my child’s eye, or how great that one stroke of the brush felt as it laid down a perfect wash, or how satisfied I was to capture a phrase that sang like poetry in the middle of a paragraph.
Tolle instructs us to approach these experiences first by getting rid of labels so that we can truly see the object we are focused on. To see it without judgment, fully and in the complete appreciation of the mystery of its existence. Don’t call that flower a tulip. Don’t call it anything, let it be nameless, and drink in its beauty. Really notice. Do the same thing with your child or grandchild. Really notice them. Suspend your idea of who and what they are, and just see them without trying to name anything. Do the same thing with your friends, with your work, with your entertainment. If you can excuse your Great Inquisitor and release thoughts about the past and the future while you are doing this, you have begun paving the road to the Joy of Being.
Two months ago I wrote about having left the solid ground of cause and effect for the mysterious flow of the river. (Into the River) I'm still working on the "how" of being in this flow, but am being supported by an abiding presence that keeps saying to me "Give the very best that you have to give, and take what you need." So, being a literal type, I ask, "What am I supposed to be giving?" I'm coping with the enigmatic answer. "You are to give whatever you are asked. You see, you don't need to plan this."
Oh. I see. I am not in the position of deciding here. I am in the position of responding to opportunities. And the way I respond has everything to do with evolution. I am to respond with an open heart, enthusiasm, and a desire to give it my all. I am being asked to INVEST in the smallest thing, to approach each moment in the NOW reality as though this was my best chance to demonstrate my intentions to the Universe. And of course, it is my best chance. This is true of every moment. If I can let go of my need to know where all of this is going and just be totally enthusiastic about every single thing I do, well, I'll get there, and I will be alive and vibrant the whole way there. Wherever that might be.
The concept of contributing the best that you have to give is the foundation of a new economy that can eventually move beyond money exchange. It is a brave step away from our belief system in that it requires us to leave behind the idea that we are in competition for scarce and insufficient resources. We have so many defenses in place to protect our position, to guard our egos and our resources. We spend so much time counting and comparing that we have little time left to enjoy our lives. But imagine a world where every single one of us did give our very best at every opportunity. Imagine a world of unlimited generosity. Imagine a world where your contribution is received with gratitude and joy. Imagine the magnificent exchange of energies - and hold that thought. We are going in that direction.
Suspend all of your self-judgments. Let go of your conditions. Open your heart to your greatest inspirations and give your best - all the time. Whatever might be called for. As you do, you will touch more people with your example than you can possibly imagine. And as you drop your protective guard, you will be saying to the Universe that you trust that you are ready for excellent opportunities.
Now what about taking what you need? This is a tricky one because so many of us don't feel worthy of taking. Receiving a return from the Universe completes the giving cycle. When you receive, you allow the cycle to complete so that it can begin again. If you resist receiving, you are blocking the energetic flow of the whole cycle.
Life is really a fantastically intricate barter system. Right now we depend heavily on money as an intermediary between what we have to give and what we need to live and thrive. But there are other energetic trades that bybass exchange of money. These trades aren't always as obviously paired to action. When you extend your best effort into the Universe, resources begin to appear. A surprisingly inexpensive apartment will become available. Someone will be letting go of exactly the laptop you wanted. Friends will appear to take you out to dinner. As the balance shifts away from competition towards the unifying energy of collaboration, this kind of exchange will become the predominant one, and money will begin to lose it's power over us. In the meantime, work on ridding yourself of the belief that what comes to you deprives someone else. This is not true. Each individual is creating their scenario and can create a flow of resources of their own. Your lack dos not support others in lack. Holding this belief in lack contributes to the impoverishment of all.
We are reaching the end of a most challenging 2007, and we are in the season of ritual and tradition as we return to our center and wait for the return of the light at the solstice. According to numerology, 2007 is a “9” year, a year of completion. So many things are winding down and playing out. For many of us, this has meant some wrenching challenges and losses, accelerating change, a sense that time is rushing by. What no longer serves us is being left behind, and even though the short term is sometimes agony, in the long term this is good. It feels to me like we are wringing the sponge out, extracting the very last drops of those things we need to leave behind.
By the middle of 2008, I predict that we will be experiencing a radically different kind of interface with life itself. Cause and effect aren’t working the same way any more, we are moving away from the constraints of time and space, and we are also losing our relationship to the way we act on the world to make things happen.
I feel a deep sense that I have left the land and have entered the river. The current is carrying me past events and manifestations, but I don’t yet have an idea of where the current is taking me. As events pass, there is no possibility of attachment – they flow by, and others follow in a constantly changing array. The one thing it demands most of me is trust that the current, which is much bigger than me, is purposeful, and that my work in the world will be presented to me as I continue in the flow.
The tools to work in this new interface are so different that they are sometimes hard to recognize, but one old favorite is still most useful. Ritual that connects us to larger themes now has the power to connect you to a multidimensional reality full of richness and grace. The magic of ritual is that it encourages you to identify with a consciousness beyond your ego. As you participate in the comforting traditions and practices that connect you to profound philosophical and spiritual truths, you lose your self identification and become one with the All That Is. At the moment of unity realization, you are open to your higher self and spirit more powerfully than at any other time. When you reach that place, slow down, notice, and listen. You will be richly rewarded.
Traditions and rituals can come in many packages, and need not be attached to organized religion or cultural expressions. The important things is that they speak authentically to your soul. One tradition I treasure is a labyrinth walk on New Year’s Eve. It is a powerful time to lay down the old year and open to the possibilities of the new. Your own rituals and traditions will be as unique as you are. If you are served well by them, honor them with more focused attention this year. If you feel a desire to create more meaning in this season’s activities, ask yourself what you are missing. Is it a connection to the earth and the energy of creation? Are you longing for a different sense of family? Would you like to feel deeper roots in your cultural heritage? Do you feel a calling to service? Take some time during this darkest month of the year, this very busy month, to listen to your own heart and give yourself the gift of connecting to ritual and tradition, new or old, that serves you and lifts you up. 2008 is a “1” year of new beginnings. Now is the time to charge up those batteries and get ready for action!
Candor and the New Energy:
My Inside Voice Editor Just Quit
One of the warning signs of middle age seems to be an odd and disquieting inability to keep the Inside Voice (thoughts) from becoming the Outside Voice (faux pas.) I have a dear friend who opened my eyes to this trend a good ten years ago when she said she was voluntarily taking herself out of a lot of social and political activities because she just couldn’t keep her mouth shut at crucial times, and she feared the consequences of her sometimes brutal candor. It was a great loss to many of us, because along with her sometimes razor sharp honesty, we also lost her humor and insight. Ten years later I am most definitely in her candor category.
The way out of anger that works best for me is to accept the responsibility for having created every experience that I have. My soul brought me an experience so that I could obtain the benefit of a lesson. If I can take the energy of my anger and turn it toward seeing the lesson I am learning, and thus capture the gift of the encounter, I can then, from a place of integrity and compassion, speak my truth in en-lighten-ment. From this vantage point, I am more likely to be able to see the fear in my oppressor and to find compassion and understanding for their position. Takidiscipline of pausing and choosing a reaction rather than being guided by my own Monkey Brain. I like to imagine that I have a menu at these times and that I can order my reaction from that menu. I can choose a path that leads me to a higher awareness. All you have to do is read the headlines in any newspaper today and you will see the evidence that truth is working its way out of the darkness. As candor becomes an imperative rather than a choice, it becomes safe for people like my friend to come out of self-imposed exile. (Indeed, it is much harder to hide!) She and I can now mine the decades of experience we have gathered and find the grace to stop and reflect before reacting. I invite you to embrace your own candor – to see this sometimes shocking lack of tact as a messenger – a Dragonfly. Follow that Dragonfly to the light by pausing a moment before of us, the first impulse is reacting and choosing the most light-filled response that you can find. If you are at a point in your life where you want, need and deserve to get deeply in touch with whom your soul knows you to be, seek the light when you have a choice between the demure little social fib, and a great big angry reaction. Look for the expanded menu, and consider choosing a path of authenticity and truth with compassion.