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Ah, the New Year. It’s fresh and innocent and undefined. Except for the things you already have scheduled for 2023. And everything you have already set into motion that is likely to continue to play out in the coming year and beyond. But besides that, it’s an empty canvas!
Last week I recommended keeping your resolutions simple – just choosing a single thing. This week I want to encourage you to put that into a context you define for this year by choosing a theme for 2023.
If you have our Dreambook, there’s a section on Theme of the Year and you can write it in there. If you don’t have the Dreambook, or even if you do but wish to make this a bit more special, I encourage you to write your theme on a nice piece of paper with a good pen and frame it or keep it in a place where you’ll see it every day.
Here are some questions to help guide you to your theme as you visualize a wonderful, productive, peaceful, playful, successful coming year.
Who do you want to BE this year? What aspect of your potential do you want to cultivate this year?
What will you bring to your community? How will you be a positive influence on your environment?
What will you be a channel for? How will you speak intentionally?
How will you grow this year? How will the world respond to your love and light?
Take plenty of time with this and consider writing your answers down to see what comes through. Out of all these inspirations, which feels like it’s coming from your Highest Self? Which feels the most compelling? Which would benefit both you and your community? What is the emerging theme?
Here are some examples: The Year of Loving Myself Completely. The Year of Living my Purpose. The Year of Learning to Trust. The Year of Shining my Light Upon the World. The Year of Owning My Power. The Year of Healing my Body. The Year of Playfulness. The Year of Lightheartedness. The Year of Remembering We’re All Connected. The Year of Forgiveness. The Year of Great Healing. The Year of Simplicity. The Year of Living Through My Heart.
After you refine your theme and write it down, try to read it ever morning, and if you’ve got a minute, feel into how life will be as you embody this theme, tell yourself, “I’m already on my way. Today I choose to stay conscious of this theme and to find ways to live it.”
Wishing you your best year yet,
Peter
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A few weeks ago I wrote about the “gaps” in everyday reality when the spiritual dimension peeks through. Sometimes they’re so profound they change us forever. Like opening the curtains to a view of life that’s truer and freer than the story we’ve been perpetuating.
More often they’re like little moments of remembering or brief glimmers of magic. Each one might not be earth-shaking, but when invited to come more often and to stay for longer, they begin to open us in a lasting way. By this I mean we expand into a sense of self that’s bigger than this personality and its circumstances.
Why would someone want this? Some people want it because they’re driven to know the truth. Others want it because it tends to translate to qualities of freedom and peace that are unattainable through “ordinary” means. Usually we think of peace as a condition that results from all circumstances being in relative harmony, and we think of freedom as a condition of certain liberties ensured by our government. But this peace and freedom are present regardless of our circumstances.
There are many ways to facilitate this process. Here are a few:
- Stay in the present moment. These gaps don’t happen in the past or the future, they always happen now, so we must be dwelling in the present in order to experience them. Be a willing participant in whatever is happening right now. Stay here with your whole being, as often as you can muster.
- Expect magic. You’re less likely to notice something you aren’t expecting (and even less likely to notice something you don’t believe it). If you expect magic, you’ll discover magic. What qualifies as magic? Virtually everything, if you’re fully open and present to it, holds awe-inspiring magic. Science and spirit both. When you expect magic, it’s not like magical things start popping up everywhere. The magical things already are everywhere; the difference is your clouded lens clears up and you see it.
- When you experience a “gap” or some magic, trust it. Don’t grasp at it. Don’t rush to write or talk about it. Don’t reach for your phone. If you feel yourself yearning to latch onto something habitual, just notice that squirming feeling inside you that wants the comfort of routine (even though it pales in comparison to this). Breathe and stay with it. Say “yes” to it with your whole being.
- Approach life with humility and innocence. Don’t assume anything. Drop your preconceptions and labels. See, hear, and feel the aspects of life that you’re not usually drawn to. Notice the spaces between the objects you usually focus on. What’s happening in the background? And how about the background behind the background?
- Take our course, Sacred Expansion. It starts on May 3rd and the purpose is to guide participants to discover what’s keeping you blocked or confined and help you expand into who you really are. Laura, a past participant, had this to say about her experience in the course: Sacred expansion truly changed my life. I was finally able to see me and begin the process of releasing the layers of ego identities and belief systems that were limiting my growth. People say I am like a different person now versus then. However, I liken it to my being myself without the encumbrances I was carrying that were not me. Click here for more information.
When we started the Dragontree, our mission was (and still is) to help people find peace. Back then it was mainly through massage, acupuncture, and healthy living. Over the years we’ve increasingly focused on guiding people to peace by helping them expand beyond their “small self.” I hope these suggestions help you do that.
Be well,
Peter
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As a young adult I often stayed at the beautiful Marin Headlands hostel just north of San Francisco. I was there one weekend while a large group of missionaries was passing through. We were all sharing the same kitchen space and I was chopping some broccoli when a cute young woman around my age approached me. We started talking and I thought it was going well. I have always enjoyed conversing about spirituality and religion, even with people of different beliefs than my own.
At the time I was immersed in learning about Advaita – nondualism – which was blowing my mind. Nondual philosophy asserts that, although we perceive many things that may feel separate, in reality everything is an expression of a single Oneness experiencing itself in infinite ways.
Some people call this Oneness God or Goddess or Source or Divine or Dao. What’s important isn’t the name but the experience of this connection, and how it redefines how we see reality.
I had in my suitcase a book called Aghora in which an eccentric spiritual teacher explains that since everything is God, both sex and eating are simply acts of “putting God into God.” So, when this missionary woman asked me what I was doing, I guess I thought I was being clever by replying, “Oh, just chopping up some God.”
She was clearly taken aback, so I explained that if the whole universe is an expression of one God, then broccoli was of course included, and therefore I was chopping up some God to put into God (myself). She was speechless for a moment, then said – a bit louder than was called for, I thought – “God is not broccoli!” and walked away.
There were several lessons for me in this story, starting with (1) nobody likes a smug person pushing their buttons, and (2) if you truly want to make a difference in the world you need to meet people where they are. But aside from my social failure, maybe the most important lesson was that there’s often a huge difference between the description of an experience and the experience itself. In other words, to understand something intellectually tells us nothing of how we’d be affected by experiencing it.
In lectures, I used to explain how physics seems to “prove” nondualism, hoping that even the nonspiritual types in the class would be won over. I’d point out that while each of us feels we’re separate from everyone else in the classroom, we and the world around us are all just different configurations of the same fundamental stuff – subatomic particles or even more fundamental fluctuations of energy. It’s a powerful idea, but I doubt it’s caused many people to conduct themselves differently towards their neighbors.
For me and most people I know, life changes have come through direct experiences of this Oneness in non-ordinary states of consciousness facilitated mainly by meditation, yoga, ritual, self-inquiry, immersion in nature, music, acupuncture, art, pain, dance, conscious breathing, interpersonal connection, and entheogenic substances. Ordinary reality (even with impressive-yet-unactualized spiritual concepts) appears random and soulless by comparison.
I didn’t have the chance to ask, “If God is not broccoli, what is broccoli?” We tend to draw vague, subjective lines around life and then deem one side worthy of our reverence and the other unworthy, but the abolition of such lines isn’t automatically liberating. I’ve seen people, myself included, latch onto the idea that everything is Divine and then fall into nihilism. Because, if it’s all God, why try? Why care? Why choose one path over any other?
This kind of thinking is a sure sign that we’re operating from a mental concept and not actually experiencing what it represents. It would be similar to take a psychedelic mushroom and hold it between your teeth, telling yourself, “So this is what psychedelic mushrooms are all about. Meh.”
Your homework is to determine whether or not broccoli is God. Since “God” is a spiritual concept, it can’t really be assessed in ordinary reality. Everyday thinking needs to fall away. You can get there using any of the approaches I mentioned above.
Be well,
Peter
P.S. I’d like to share one of my favorite quotes on nondualism from Tantra scholar Christopher Wallis in Tantra Illuminated (slightly abridged for space):
“Since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of the one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience by definition is an experience of God… If we propose that some things are more God than others, like concentrated orange juice versus watered-down orange juice, then we must propose the existence of something that is not God that waters down divinity. But no such thing can be found, at least in this philosophy, because 1) the definition of God here is the unbounded Light of Consciousness, 2) everything that is known to exist is an object of experience, and 3) every experience is by definition pervaded by consciousness. Therefore, this – whatever is happening right now – is as God as it gets. Now, if you are in a miserable or banal life situation, you may be disappointed by this announcement. But notice I said, ‘This is as God as it gets,’ not, ‘This is as free as it gets.’ Freedom means actually experiencing the divinity in each moment.”
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Ah, the New Year. It’s fresh and innocent and undefined. Except for the things you already have scheduled for 2023. And everything you have already set into motion that is likely to continue to play out in the coming year and beyond. But besides that, it’s an empty canvas!
Last week I recommended keeping your resolutions simple – just choosing a single thing. This week I want to encourage you to put that into a context you define for this year by choosing a theme for 2023.
If you have our Dreambook, there’s a section on Theme of the Year and you can write it in there. If you don’t have the Dreambook, or even if you do but wish to make this a bit more special, I encourage you to write your theme on a nice piece of paper with a good pen and frame it or keep it in a place where you’ll see it every day.
Here are some questions to help guide you to your theme as you visualize a wonderful, productive, peaceful, playful, successful coming year.
Who do you want to BE this year? What aspect of your potential do you want to cultivate this year?
What will you bring to your community? How will you be a positive influence on your environment?
What will you be a channel for? How will you speak intentionally?
How will you grow this year? How will the world respond to your love and light?
Take plenty of time with this and consider writing your answers down to see what comes through. Out of all these inspirations, which feels like it’s coming from your Highest Self? Which feels the most compelling? Which would benefit both you and your community? What is the emerging theme?
Here are some examples: The Year of Loving Myself Completely. The Year of Living my Purpose. The Year of Learning to Trust. The Year of Shining my Light Upon the World. The Year of Owning My Power. The Year of Healing my Body. The Year of Playfulness. The Year of Lightheartedness. The Year of Remembering We’re All Connected. The Year of Forgiveness. The Year of Great Healing. The Year of Simplicity. The Year of Living Through My Heart.
After you refine your theme and write it down, try to read it ever morning, and if you’ve got a minute, feel into how life will be as you embody this theme, tell yourself, “I’m already on my way. Today I choose to stay conscious of this theme and to find ways to live it.”
Wishing you your best year yet,
Peter
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