All is well here in the African bush.  During our stay at Thamabati we were privileged to come across a pride of 9 lions - 7 young boys and 2 girls who had been lucky enough to secure a meal consisting of a young hippo during the night.   Unfortunate for the young hippo of course but very lucky for the hungry young lions.  At any rate, the sighting made for some lovely pictures which I share with you here.

My traveling partner David goes home tomorrow morning and my next friend does not arrive until May 1st, so I will have a couple of weeks to acclimate to the rhythm of life in South Africa.  My charge is to contemplate a worthy message and what is occurring to me this morning is the ongoing  conundrum of time - past, present and future. 

As we awaken to the higher levels of awareness and consciousness available to us, our attention to time shifts.  Prior to this awakening, almost everyone has their primary focus rooted in the past.  This focus almost always has a limiting influence on our happiness in the present and most certainly plays an important role in the future we are constantly creating for ourselves.    In my Facebook Live event this past Saturday, we explored how both the 'bad' and 'good' experiences we have get stored away as memory and then projected into the future thereby affecting our present moment experience of life. Not merely do we limit our satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness and peace but we move through life with our authentic, true and real self concealed by our human story. This inauthenticity is the source of suffering, depression, addiction and a host of other ailments.

A fundamental piece of work every aspirant of authenticity must face and accomplish, is the making peace with the past regardless of what happened, what we think we remember happened or even what we might have made up along the way.  Werner Erhard, the visionary behind the Landmark Forum inspired my life when he said, "Whatever you can let BE, can let you BE."  

I know that this work of letting our past be, forgiving those who made missteps with us and those with whom we misstepped is a process and takes as much time as it takes.  But the time must inevitably be taken because doing so is the opportunity  to architect a future of our own design rather than living a kind of re-run existence where the same old stuff continues to happen.  Trust me, the same old stuff happening has nothing to do with luck or fate or the idea that the 'apple doesn't fall far from the tree".  The same old stuff continues to happen because we are endlessly stuck in the re-play of the past. 

The conundrum of time is that once we let the past be, we are not done with our work. Now we have to manage the human tendency to think we know how the future will turn out. The work of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Dr. Ernest Holmes, Jesus, Buddha, Wayne Dyer and every other teacher and avatar of the ages, offers us the truth teaching that how the future gets created is by us through the God-Given tool of creation - our minds.  It is our beliefs, our attitudes, our perspectives, our interpretations and our feelings about all of that which mold s the molecules of existence into things, conditions and circumstances.  That is why Dr. Holmes built his legacy on "Change your thinking, change your life."   Now, I am really talking to myself because I am in this moment (with David leaving) facing an opening for my future and I have this silly idea that I might be bored. And thinking I might be bored is messing with my serenity!

This, of course has nothing to do with reality.  It does have everything to do with who I am in relationship to 'being' versus 'doing'.  It shows up like, "what will I do with my time or myself?"  It ties in with my recent theme of becoming aware of how lions and elephants don't worry about what they are going to do tomorrow.  They never feel depressed at not knowing what their purpose in life is.  And they never stay mad at their mothers.  Only human beings do such silly things. I invite you to join me this week in the pondering of how we put things into the future that we don't really want and then our emotions and feelings respond as if the things we projected actually happen.  How crazy is that really?  Every experience we want -- happiness, peace, hopefulness, joyful anticipation is actually created by us in the only moment there ever really is.  NOW.  NOW. NOW.  Don't awfulize the future!

Join me this coming Saturday at 9am on Facebook and YouTube Live to explore the top of "Creating Something Out of Nothing".

Enjoy the lions,  I will feature the elephants from Thamabati next!

Love, Denise

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