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Today I pay homage to the great Albert Einstein.  Why?  Because I feel like it, no other reason.  He threw out some gems for us to ponder.  “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.”  “Love is the greatest force there is.”  And perhaps my favorite:  “You can’t solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it.”  
Quotes such as these have great ramifications for us in our lives, if we choose to ponder them for a while.   
For example, rational thinking has its place in the world.  It probably serves us really well when considering things like schedules.  But there is another kind of thinking that I think opens us up to possibilities, and this is what I believe Einstein was referring to.  He also said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”  I like to play a game I call “What If?”  In this game, I simply imagine how life would be IF.  It is a form of spiritual practice for me.  What if? This game allows me to imagine possibilities.  And here’s the kicker:  if I can imagine them, they can happen.  My job isn’t to know how they can happen.  My job is simply to know that they can.
And here’s where the next quote comes in handy, my favorite.  This quote has also been attributed as saying that one can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it, but I like consciousness better.  Consciousness goes deeper.  Consciousness is not just our thinking.  It is our feelings, our beliefs, our very sense of who we are and how we show up in the world. Einstein is not the only one who told us that if we want to change our life we need to change our thinking.  “Change your thinking, change your life” is the tag line for Centers for Spiritual Living.  
And change your thinking, change your life is the very foundation of all of my own personal work in the world.  Having problems in your life? Change your thinking.  Feeling like life is unbearable, hopeless, not worth it?  Change your thinking.  Having problems with other people, or with relationships?  Change your thinking.  And then I proceed to provide tools to do exactly that.  And again, it isn’t just about changing the thinking.  It is about changing the consciousness.
This is difficult to describe.  I have a Masters Degree in...wait for it.....wait for it.....Consciousness Studies.  And I still don’t quite know what that is.  What I can tell you is that we studied philosophy, science, religion and psychology.  What I can tell you is that incorporating all of those schools of thought and study into my own life changed my consciousness and produced a person who was different than the one who entered that study.  I changed my thinking, and my life changed.

This is why I like Einstein so much.  This guy was a scientist who knew the power of things like imagination and intuition.  He knew the power of love to solve all problems.  Which brings me to his love quote, “Love is the greatest force there is.”  Never mind that the Bible says love never fails. Never mind that it is said that love is a synonym for God. Yes, those all affirm that love is the greatest force there is.  And if you don’t believe that, allow me to share with you another experiment I’ve played with over and over again, and discovered that it works, every time.
If love is the greatest power there is, then love should be able to solve all problems.  But in order to do so, love needs to have a way to express.  That way is through us.  WE need to be the vehicles through which love moves.  WE need to be love.  WE need to have the consciousness of love.  I began to consider, when contemplating this experiment, what love could/would/should look like in my life.  First of all, it is unconditional.  This means I place no conditions on whether I love someone.  It has no exceptions.  This means I love everyone equally.  I’m an equal opportunity lover!  And what does love feel like?   It feels peaceful.  It feels joyous.  It feels relaxing.  And sometime excited and enthusiastic.  Short version:  love is always positive, never negative.  So I began to consider where I felt negative in my life, and I began to replace that negativity with positivity.  I got so good at it that people were calling me Pollyanna.  I did not care.  I intuitively (thank you again Albert Einstein!) knew I was on the right track.  Am I successful at it all the time?  No, but I strive.  I have used this technique when I was ready to divorce my husband.  I’ve used it when I have felt the weight of the world’s ills on my shoulders.  I’ve used it when there has been an antagonist in my life whose seeming goal seemed to be to cause problems for me.  I have used it when I found myself harshly judging others. I’m still happily married and the antagonists always seem to go away.   The others remain idiots but when I stop harshly judging them, I can sometimes have compassion for them, which is another form of love.  I am not perfect at this.  I haven’t yet solved the world’s problems, but you know what?  Love is the greatest force there is and if enough of us embody it, together we CAN solve the world’s problems.
It is time for me to bring this blog to a conclusion, which is sometimes difficult for me to do, because one thing leads to another which leads to another and I could go on and on.  So I will close with another Einstein quote, “creativity is intelligence having fun.”
In this holiday season, I wish you fun, creativity, changed thinking and most of all, unconditional love!
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Yuletide Greetings, Happy holidays, Joyeux Noël, Feliz Navidad, Seasons Greetings!

What are you painting on the canvas of your life?

A year ago today I received my ordination from Centers for Spiritual Living.  It was a long road to get there:  8 years of education plus 4 years of working “in the field” after graduating with a Masters Degree in Consciousness Studies.  When I look at the photos of me in my memories feed, I see someone who looks tired.  I was doing what that lady in the commercial for anti depression meds was doing, walking around with a paper smiley face to cover up what was really going on.  I had experienced so many changes and losses in such a short time during that period of my life and I was weathering it as best as I could.  I’m strong.  That is a character asset that has served me well many times in my life, allowing me to persevere and sometimes even succeed, no matter what.  But the shadow side of that is that I became accustomed to only being able to succeed when I felt a need to be strong to stand against what life was dishing out. That is not a good way to live.  Today I’ve come out the other end of that journey.  The active grieving is done, the PTS (I refuse to call a normal reaction to shit happening a disorder) is lessening in frequency and intensity, and today I have learned that I can succeed without hardship.  I can and do succeed just because that’s the natural and normal progression of things. And today the sun is shining and it isn’t snowing, for the first time in weeks!  So today I will bundle up and venture out into the world to continue painting on the canvas of my life.  As Ernest Holmes said, “we must all become artists in living,” and today I am an artist painting a bright and glorious canvas!

Hello all!

I’m so excited I just had to post again and let you know what is on tap for the Expectations workshop this Thursday!.

$25 and three hours of your time invested and you will learn:

1. How expectations are really subtle attempts to control others.
2. That fear is what causes us to want to control
3. How to replace fear with faith or love, and expectancy
4. How to communicate your expectations clearly.
5. How to use disappointment as a propellant, not a retardant

This workshop is online, via Zoom platform, which is a very easy video conference system. Thursday, January 18 from 6-9 PM., cost is $25. You can register in one of three ways:

1. Use my online store: http://karenlinsley.com/?page_id=1174#!/Its-not-about-THEM-Its-about-ME/p/94899803/category=0
2. Use Pay Pal
3. Call me and register over the phone.

Once I recieve your registration I will email you the link to attend.

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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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I have a sticky note on my desk that reads, "A lot of spiritual work is dealing with the idea that we are separate from God."

In my experience, it is this idea of separation that causes feelings of loneliness, stress, overwhelm, burden, anger, isolation, distrust, doubt, guilt and any myriad other host of negative feelings.

I have never believed in a God separate from me, but I never voiced that, because of a perception that most people believe in the separate "God in the sky" version of Spirit.  Even many so called alternative religions believe in a Force separate from us humans.  Every day I hear folks say things like, "The Universe will provide."  It's still a separate God, even if they are calling it something different.   I could never make sense of a separate God.  And when I returned to my childhood roots at a Center for Spiritual Living and began to take classes, I soon learned why:  One of the first things we are taught in our classes is that God and I, we are One!

In fact, that concept is the first of ten of what we call the Core Concepts of Science of Mind. It is also the first statement in a list of "We Believe" statements that have been adopted as a way of explaining to newcomers who we are and what we believe.

Ironically, around these parts we don't tell anyone what to believe.  But we do have ten statements telling everyone exactly what we do believe. Here is the first of those ten:

"We Believe in God, the Living Spirit Almighty; one, indestructible, absolute and self-existent Cause.  This One manifests Itself in and through all creation, but is not absorbed by Its creation.  The manifest universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self-knowingness of God."

The part that says we are each free to believe what we wish is the part where I interpret that rather wordy sentence in my own way.  I choose to interpret it thusly:  I believe in God, it manifested itself in and through me by knowing me.  Yet God is much more than that, it isn't just me.

The ramifications of such a belief, or lack of one, are far reaching, and the subject of another blog post, but for now, I will leave you with this:

God and I, we are one!

How do you feel about the concept of being one with God?