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Life is about paradox.  Surrender to win.  What you resist persists.  Give to receive.  Accept a problem to solve it.  I will never forget the first time, very early in my spiritual journey, a mentor told me that I must surrender to win.  Fighter that I had been most of my life, it was extremely difficult for me to understand this concept.  I had a bias against traditional religious language back then and in my mind I thought I was surrendering to a male authority figure that was separate from me.  I wanted no part of that.  Eventually I moved into a place of surrendering to a process that promised wonderful things if I completed it, and that worked.

Which brings up another paradox of sorts.  One must go through something to get around it.  Take loss, for example.  It does absolutely no good, and sometimes harms, to not properly grieve a loss.  Rebound relationships are an excellent example of this.

Another paradox is that we must look at ourselves with love and acceptance, not shame and condemnation.  Those parts of ourselves that we find objectionable will only change if we love and accept them.  Shaming them and condemning them just makes them stronger.

What are you resisting today?   Is it persisting?

The beauty of living a life which contains a consistent and persistent practice of compassionate self inquiry is that it allows us to be aware of what is blocking us from our good, and with awareness comes the beautiful change that that moves us into the next greatest expression of our being.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the equinox coming up, probably because I'll be traveling to Lake Havasu City at the end of this week to do a talk there on this very topic at the Lake Havasu Center for Spiritual Living.

We get an equinox, or solstice, twice a year.  Once in the spring around March 20 and once in the fall around September 21.  These signify the day when the daylight hours and the night time hours are equal.  For the spring solstice, the day light hours then grow at a rate of a few minutes a day, till the fall equinox, when the day light hours then begin to shrink at the same rate.

Traditionally, fall equinox celebrations centered around harvest time, and this makes me think of what I am harvesting.  And what I am harvesting today depends on what I have planted yesterday.

Ernest Holmes (founder of Centers for Spiritual Living) tells us that today's outpicturing is the result of yesterday's consciousness.  This means that the thoughts and beliefs I held yesterday are what is manifesting in my life today.  Is this to be taken literally?  Not necessarily.  More accurately, it means that the tendency of my thoughts will influence my life in that direction.

So if I have planted good thoughts, thoughts of gratitude and optimism and love, then that is what my life will look like.

Does this mean that shit won't happen?  Nope.  It does indeed happen, it is part of life.  But if my thoughts have been ones of love and acceptance, then I am better able to handle it when it hits the fan.  I am not talking about spiritual bypassing either.  I'm talking about focusing on what is good while taking responsibility.  A good example of this would be the cancer patient who chooses to create humorous situations, all the while going through the medically indicated treatment.

So this is a time to consider what is going on in your life, and consider the seeds you have planted in your consciousness.  Do you live in the past, basing your current decisions on what happened when you were a kid?  This might be a good time to revisit that and see if a change is indicated.  Do you limit your actions based on fear?  This might be a good time see what it is you are afraid of, and what is behind the fear.  It may no longer be valid.

The equinox means the days will be getting shorter and the flurry of activity that most of us engaged in during the summer will begin to slow down.  Fall is a time to regroup, and see if perhaps we want to plant some different seeds.

I'd love to hear about your seeds!  What have you planted that is growing in your life right now?  What do you want to plant from this point on?

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