Fall Equinox

In today's episode, I talk about the Fall Equinox and how we can use the example of change to benefit our own lives.  Change is not a dirty word!

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Welcome to Fearlessly Feral Living. This is Reverend Karen speaking to you. And in today's episode, I want to talk about the fall equinox and how we can use the example of change given to us by the Equinox to benefit our own lives. Change is not a dirty word. Fearlessly feral living is broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch, out here in the back 40 of northwestern Nevada, where I'm a half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store. This is a podcast devoted to using new thought principles to ensure successful creative living. Fearlessly Feral is a focused ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living and is devoted to the vision of a world in which everyone lives fearlessly feral. In other words, wild and free. I blend spirituality and psychology to work from the inside out to promote successful wild and free living. So let's dive into our topic, shall we? Yes, today is September the 22nd, 2022, as I record this, and it is the fall equinox. Today we have an equal amount of daylight and nighttime, and beginning tomorrow the days will grow shorter and the nights longer. I love equinox because it reminds me of change. Change in it is inevitable, and yet we always fight it, right? Don't you fight change? I know sometimes I do, not so much anymore, but I used to fight it a lot more than I do now. I'm not sure why that is, because in my experience, every change that has ever happened in my life has ultimately been for my highest good. Today I've learned that change is good. It's not a dirty word. Today I advocate change. I advocate it on a personal level as well as on a global level. I particularly advocate change when what we've been doing is not working. And on both a personal and a global level, when what we are doing is not working, the place to begin to change is not outside of ourselves, but inside. We don't start out there by changing our circumstances or our jobs or our location or our relationship status. We can't, we we don't start there with change. Well, we can if we want to, but it's fleeting. It doesn't last. And we're stuck with the same old us. It's like moving to a different place to start a new life, and yet we discover we've brought ourselves with us. So change begins within. And on a personal level, in order to make the kind of change that I'm speaking to here, we need to look at our beliefs. Now, beliefs are deeper than our thoughts and deeper than our feelings. Beliefs are things that have been installed in us somewhere along the way in our lifetime, either by ourselves or by someone else. Now, just briefly, change on a global level when something is not working needs to happen at the level of the systems that created the problem in the first place. Just like beliefs create in our personal lives, so do they create in our global lives. Those beliefs collectively create systems that create the problems. Here's an example. Simplistic, very simplistic, because I'm not talking about the global level today, but I just wanted to illustrate this. Climate change is a very real problem. It's been created by many factors: overpopulation, indiscriminate use of resources, making too big of a carbon footprint. But all of those things were created by one basic belief that is systemic. In other words, entire populations of people believed this. And this belief is that we as human beings have dominion over everything else. Whatever it is, we can control it, we can build it, we can build dams, we can block things up, we can open things up. We can control it. We're in charge. We have dominion. Now that's not really true, not really accurate, but many people believe it anyway. Charles Fillmore explains in his book, Dynamics for Living, that dominion is really about control of our thoughts and our feelings. And when we control our thoughts and our feelings, and we learn what our thoughts and our feelings are, we become one with that thing called source. And when we are one with that, we're one with everything else. And when we're one with everything else, we are not going to want to destroy the land upon which we live. Because in so doing, we destroy ourselves in a way. So again, that's a very simplified view of it. But it helps to know that this thing works on a global as well as a personal level. So, back to the beliefs. Here's some examples of beliefs. Money doesn't grow on trees. Haven't you heard your parents say that a million times? Well, money doesn't grow on trees, you know. That's a belief. And if they say it enough, and if we say that often enough to ourselves, guess what? We believe that. Now, what does that say about our belief system? What does that say about our abundance level in our lives? What does that say about where money comes from? About where we think it comes from. These are all good things to look at and know about ourselves. Here's another belief. This one's kind of cynical, but I've actually heard this one. Life is hard and then you die. Oh my god. I've heard people actually say this. Any day above ground is a good day. Really? Is that all you want from life? Is just to be above ground? That's it? That's all you want. No, my expectations are a lot harder. I'm sorry, a lot higher than that. Much higher. Here's another one. It's natural to have health problems as we age in life. Now who told us that? I know who told me that. Medical industry told me that. Society told me that. My parents didn't tell me that. Ernest Holmes doesn't tell us that. We get to decide whether or not that's a truth for us or not. We get to decide if that's something we believe in. So here's a nice little story, an illustration about how much a belief can affect us in our lives. It's a simple thing, but I think it might help explain how beliefs can affect us in our lives. And yes, I have doggies playing in the background. Just go with it. I do. There's nothing else I can do about it. So there's a family that had a practice, and whenever they got together and they cooked a roast, whenever they got together and they cooked a roast, whoever cooking whoever was cooking it would cut the ends off and then proceed to cook the roast. One day a younger family member said, Mommy, why are you cutting the ends off the roast? And the mom said that she was taught to do that by her mother, and so on. But that question sparked a curiosity in her, and so she decided to investigate. She went to her great grandmother and she asked, and discovered that back then ovens and baking dishes were smaller, and so it was always necessary to cut the ends off the roast to make it fit. In today's world, ovens and baking dishes are larger, so the roast fits easily in the pan. There's no need to cut off the ends. Just like that, she changed her belief and she never cut off the ends of a roast ever again. Now how did she go about changing that belief? She had curiosity. She wanted to know where it came from. She wanted to know what the reason was for it. And when she discovered that the reason for it was no longer applicable, she changed it just like that. And we can change our beliefs just like that. Simply by being curious and investigating the belief. So during this time of equinox, we might be curious enough about our beliefs to change, to investigate it, to to check things out, to look at it and say, oh my goodness, really? So if we've got a belief that change is bad, we can look at that. If we think bad things always happen with change, we can look at that. If we think change is difficult, we can look at that. There might be some healing work that needs to be done. Or maybe change makes us anxious. During this time when the weather's starting to change and temperatures are getting a little cooler and the days are getting shorter, we might start worrying about what winter's going to bring. You know, is it going to be too much wet weather, not enough wet weather? Are we going to be in a drought again? Or are we going to have too much wet weather, too much snow, we can't get around? That's those are all beliefs. They're all based on beliefs. And so if we're worrying about the future, perhaps learning to live mindful and live in the present moment might eliminate some of that anxiety, in addition to looking at the belief that makes us worry about the future. What is it in our lives that causes us to worry about the future? Are you beginning to see how our beliefs affect our thoughts and our feelings? Now, let's take it a step further. Ernest Holmes says if we're thinking, we're creating. Our thoughts create our lives. Now, before you run away in protest, never to listen to me again, let me clarify. It's not individual thoughts that create our lives, it's the trend of our thoughts that create our lives. And it's the feelings that we feel when we have that those trending thoughts that creates. I am not saying that if shit happened, you created it. Sometimes things just happen. I get that. I'm not saying you created it. Believe me, I am not. But I will say this. When shit does happen, if we are personally self-aware, if we have a few spiritual practices in place, if we have a support system, if we have some faith, we are then able to respond in positive ways to that bad stuff happening. And we can both learn from it and benefit from it. Here's what has been true for me in my life. Every single so-called bad thing that has ever happened to me has ultimately been for my highest good. No exceptions. Now, a lot of that bad stuff happened earlier in my life. And as I grew older and learned some spiritual truths and implemented some spiritual practices into my life, I soon realized that I had a belief that needed to be changed. Because I believed that in order for me to experience good, I had to first experience bad. When I had that realization, I had to sit back and kind of have a good laugh at myself because, oh my God, really? I can't get good unless I first have bad? No, that's not the way things work here anymore. I can experience good just because I'm worth it. Just like that. I changed that belief. And the belief is now I am worthy of good in my life. Period. Did it start out that way? No. I had to do lots of tweaking along the way. I had to start with a knowing and believing that it was possible for good to simply happen. I had to stop judging things as good or bad. I had to begin to practice acceptance. I had to increase my faith and my or my knowingness. Some people don't like the word faith. Use knowingness if you don't like the word faith. I had to do some other little tweaking and other changing of other little beliefs in order to change that one big one that in order for me to experience good in my life, I had to first experience bad. So however we get to the ultimate changing of the belief, then we do that. We get there and we use all the spiritual tools available to us to get there. So that belief that I needed to experience bad before I could experience good affected me on a whole lot of levels. And yep, the good news is that we can change even deeply held beliefs like that one. We can change beliefs that affect a whole lot of other beliefs. Here's another example of how beliefs can affect us in our lives. My first marriage, I was married to a man who was an absolutely charismatic, intelligent, beautiful man. He was awesome. Like me, he was a sober alcoholic in recovery. And we had a conversation one day. We were walking along the beach, and we were having a conversation about whether or not people could change at deep fundamental levels. And because I had already experienced that change at a deep fundamental level, I knew that it was possible to make that kind of change in our lives. He, however, did not believe it was possible. Now he had an opinion of himself that he was not worthy of good. He wasn't worthy. He was shame-based. And he took that and thought his way in back into another drink, and he ended up dead. Died of alcoholism and drug addiction. They found him on the floor of his apartment dead of an overdose. So take a look at those beliefs. Take a look at how they're affecting your life. Take a look at whether you really want to continue to believe them or not. And then change them if necessary. On this day of profound change in the world, when Mother Nature is doing her thing and the leaves are turning and the harvest is beginning to peter out and the days are growing shorter. Take advantage of this time and look at the changes in your own life. See if there's something there that you've simply outgrown. See if there's a belief there that causes you some unpleasantness. Release that old stuff without blame, without shame. No blaming, no shaming around here. No shooting of yourself. Release it with gratitude because somewhere along the line that belief served you well for a time. It just doesn't serve you any longer. That's all. Replace it with a new belief. That's the key to releasing a belief. We gotta get a new one. So we release the old one. There's a void there. You have to replace it with a new one. The cool thing is we get to decide what the new one is. It's not being fed to us by someone else. It's not being fed to us by our parents or by society. We get to decide we are at choice. So I am knowing absolutely beautiful, fearlessly feral living for you. I am knowing an absolute glorious willingness to want to take a look at those wonderful beliefs that you have that have got you to this point, and yet willingness to be able to take a look at those and decide whether or not any of them needs to be changed. And then a willingness to go ahead and change them. I am knowing absolutely fearlessly feral living for me and for you today. I thank you very much for listening. I'm so grateful for you. Once again, Fearlessly Feral Living is a focused ministry of Centers for Spiritual Living, and your support is so much appreciated and fully tax deductible. You can support us in a number of different ways. You can become a member of Patreon by going to patreon.com slash fearlessly feral. That'll get you to a landing page where you can sign up to contribute as little as $2 per month, and every little bit helps. You can contribute more, of course, if you want. You can also donate by going to our PayPal page, which is paypal.me slash Karen Lindsley NV. That's paypal.me slash Karen Lindsley NV. All these addresses will be in the show notes, by the way. And you can check out our website, fearlesslyferal.org, where there's lots of little goodies in there or blog and lots of news. So once again, thank you very much. Enjoy life, Fearlessly Feral.