Review: The Year Of Yes By Maria Dahvana Headley

Here is a young woman who practiced the principle of Love and found Light.  Her honesty and sense of humor are brilliant, and it’s a great fun read to understand Love and Light in everyday terms. 

Unconditional love in the dating scene

The author, Maria Dahvana Headley, a college student in New York City, had a problem.  She didn’t have a date on Valentine’s Day.  Why is this so?  She is an attractive young woman.  “I was becoming convinced that I was going to be lonely for the rest of my life,” she writes.  So she decided to do one thing different for the coming year: she will date all men who ask her out.  (For the record, she does not have sex with all her dates . . . just with some of them ) 

It’s a little long, but let me quote her:

I decided that I would say YES to every man who asked me out on a date. I’d go out with all of them, at least once.  I’d stop pretending to be deaf when my taxi drivers tried to tell me I was cute. I’d stop pretending to be crazy when strange guys walked too close to me on the streets.  I’d turn toward them, and smile.  And if they wanted to go out with me, I’d say, “Sure.”

No more nos.

Well.  A couple of exceptions.  No one who was obviously violent, or too drunk or drugged out to walk.  No one who introduced himself by grabbing me.

 
Whew.  This is a big challenge.  And she follows through, starting with the maintenance guy of her apartment.  

“Plying my heart open”

This is her expression of the process.  Before this experiment, she was picky and critical.  Like most of us are.  But as she got to know so many people — old, young, rich, homeless, well-educated, new immigrants, a few women — she started to see people in a new way.  She connected with people, not just men but everyone including her neighbors, with sincere human interests and compassion.  

Spirituality teachers and texts talk about acceptance and compassion.  Many times, however, they then turn around and accuse the less conscious, less loving, or less of whatever.  (This ultimately leads to the idea of the big judgment day.) 

Maria presents a delightful contrast by developing unconditional acceptance and compassion through the seemingly humble or even low act of dating with all men.  Conventional thinking may label her slut.  I think she is a madonna with sexuality.   

As I wrote in the Love part of the Creating The New World series, unconditional love is the only love there is.  All conditions and judgments are BS.  

I first read this book when it came out as hardcover in 2006 and was so impressed.  Since I was (well, still am) single, I thought of doing the same.  I quickly found I just don’t have the guts nor the energy to do so.  So hat off to Maria.  I sincerely want to have her level of openness and love. 

Sexuality and spirituality

Can we awaken our spirituality through romantic / sexual love?  Or are sexuality and spirituality like oil and water, never can be mixed well?  

This has been a big question for me for many years.  I’ve been drawn to spiritual development, but part of me hesitated as I smelled the hypocrisy and cold judgmental attitude of the “spiritual” people.  

As you know, many spiritual traditions put down sexuality and sexual love.  There is a reason to this.  For men, sexual drive can be so strong to the point it is violent, which is of course no good.  For women, being attached to her lover and children can possibly hinder greater level of love.  

And, even though it is mostly hidden, there are also a few spiritual practices that encourage sexuality.  Tantric sex is one. (Don’t ask me what it is . . . I only know the term.  Lisa, the mommy mystic, wrote a great series of posts on second chakra and talks about this in her comments)  Also, in the ancient days, there were shamanic “festivals” that involved spontaneous coupling.  If sexuality is against spirituality, how can these things happen?  

Reading The Year Of Yes helped me understand this. 

Many paths to spiritual awareness

1. Complete abstinence

You can abstain from all sexual activities and devote yourself to bigger sense of love in your path to spirituality.  Because there are indeed some challenges in sexuality as I pointed out above, this is a valid approach.  However, it comes with a cost of suppressing our sexuality, the natural part in us.  

As Akashic Record Reader, I see so many energetic issues stemming from becoming or being a monk / nun.  This is just a very hard way to spirituality.  And may I remind you that Buddha was a married man before he started his spiritual development.  I don’t think Jesus was a virgin boy, either — Mary Magdalene was his wife. 

2. Embracing your sexuality

There are two ways within this path: You can heighten your spirituality either through your sexuality or despite your sexuality.  

Many try the latter, which involves difficult balancing act within yourself.  If you have negative feelings about sexuality, your sexuality would feel like a drag or block to spirituality.  And because sex takes two, if your interpersonal communication skill and personal boundaries are underdeveloped, sex would likely become a problem than blessing.  

Maria took the path directly through her sexuality.  Spiritual development wasn’t her objective in the beginning, but she ended up with spiritual light.  Again, this path takes guts.  She went through many embarrassments and disappointments.  When done well, however, this path marries sexuality and spirituality beautifully. . . I see such possibility.  

Her polyamorous approach ends in finding the one love of her life.  Quite an unexpected and lovely ending.  Reality is stranger than fiction and love is a miracle.

Online Gratitude Journal Raw Food Adventure Edition #28

Aaaaagh, I forgot to post my Gratitude Journal entry last week! Not that I don’t have gratitude but just too busy living my life. (In my case, “busy” includes meditation, relaxing at Starbucks, and napping, too.) I guess I will make this series to monthly review now.

Eating foods of light and life

Part of the busy-ness comes from my recent adventure in modifying my eating habits as I wrote in my last Gratitude Journal. If you missed that post — it’s about feeding directly on Light rather than on foods. I believe this is the path we are heading as we go through Ascension, and I want to make sure with my own body.

First I tried to just reduce my food intake. This didn’t work very well. Evidently, my physical body was not quite ready. So I changed my plan and decided to increase the ratio of my raw food intake to see if this has a positive impact in the transition. Raw vegetables and fruits are the most light filled foods, and I think eating more of them helps our body to learn how to eat less.

I checked books on this topic at the bookstore and the library. While there are many raw cookbooks (or “un-cook books), I find 12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food to be most helpful. This book explains the benefits of raw foods and practical steps to eat more raw. The author, Victoria Boutenko, and her family has been eating raw over 10 years.

One of the things she strongly recommends in this book is green smoothie, which is just a blended drink made of dark greens like kale or spinach and fruits like banana or berries. She advises to drink it every morning until your body gets enough nutrition and enzymes that it’s been missing. You don’t need to change any other part of your eating — just drink green smoothie every day and after awhile, you will naturally want more raw foods because your body gets healthy and can wisely choose what and how much foods it needs. I’ve been doing this, and really, it tastes better than it sounds!

I also read blogs on raw foods. My favorite is In The Raw. (The link takes you to her post on green smoothie) She has obviously been studying the raw food diet well and I love her warmth and lightheartedness.

Sprouting and life

I also started sprouting. My first batch was a handful of adzuki beans because I have lots of adzuki in the pantry. I bought them to cook, but I’ve been putting it off… so they are over a year old.

I was pleased to see all but one bean sprout despite the age! Sprouts are so cute. It feels special to see these small beans coming to life. It’s like magic — you just water them twice a day and boom, they grow tiny roots and buds. These beans are alive.

It was interesting to check this one bean that didn’t sprout. It had white spot that I think is mould. So all the beans were in the same environment, but only the dead bean got mould, all the live beans look completely fine.

This can apply to human health, I think. If you have infection, whether it’s sinus infection or yeast infection, it may be about the overall liveliness issue rather than the local issue. The cause of the infection is there all the time but healthy body has a way to fend it off. When your body is weak, the external pathogens take advantage of you.

Today I’m grateful for the natural healing power within me. And for the farmers and produce sellers. I look forward to going to the farmers market soon. (Photo by Mr. Greenjeans)

Creating The New World, Part 2 Light

This is the second part of the Creating The New World series.  You have the power to change your life and the world.  The time can’t be better because Light Ascension brings tremendous opportunity to change.  So we are exploring the possibilities of how the New World can be built on the following five energy flows:

1. Love
2. Light 
3. Truth
4. Abundance
5. Power 

What is Light?

Now when you look at the above list, do you feel Light is a bit different from the other four qualities?  This is because we are talking about both spiritual light (awareness) and physical light. 

Explaining the true nature of the physical light is challenging for me because I’m not very well versed in science.  Here is the basic idea:  Visible light such as the sunlight is just a part of all spectrums of light.  There is a lot more to light, perhaps more than we know today.  There is no substance called darkness — darkness is the absence of light.  Light is both the wave and the particle (photon).  And if I understand the concept of quantum physics, everything is made of energy and particles that move around.  We are all energy, we are made of light.   

Okay, if you thought this logic is tricky, I accept it.  I can’t fully prove it.  So mark this idea as “hypothesis” or “?” and read on.  Later in this article, I will get back to another way of seeing the “reality”. 

Spiritual light is the awareness of the true nature of us and this world.  Creating the New World based on Light, then, is about creating and living it with enlightenment, rather than with confusion and fear as most of us do now. 

The true nature of ourselves 

I touched on this in my previous posts on lightworker and who we are, but it’s worth repeating here.  Because as long as we think we are separate beings made of body and mind, we will not be free from fears. 

In the beginning, there was Light.  The source of all energy.  (Some also call it God.)  As the single whole being, it was perfectly complete — there was no lack nor any kind of defect.  

This was wonderful, but also a bit boring.  The Light has intelligence and it wanted to experience its love and abundance in a tangible way.  So it split part of it to form pieces of itself.  Scientists call this big bang.  

These pieces formed the universes.  The stars.  And life forms on them. Our Higher Selves come directly from this Light Source as well.  The important thing to remember here is that each individual piece is the same quality of the original Light and, like a hologram, each piece contains all the information of the whole.

The Earth Experiment 

Some of us traveled through the stars and came to Earth, a place where these individual energies can incarnate in the physical bodies to create in terms of forms.  The original plan for Earth was to be a fun creative place!  In order to incarnate, our Higher Selves first infused part of it as souls in much the same way the Light infused our Higher Selves.  (For this reason, the Higher Self is also called oversoul.  I learned this recently from one of the comment.)  

Our souls lived in the physical bodies, and when the physical bodies decayed and died, souls moved on to the other side for a rest, and eventually lived another life.  Some of us have repeated this process of reincarnation many times.  Some of us are getting to the point of development when the Higher Self infuses a brand new soul to replace the older one, resulting in Ascension soul shift. 

What is enlightenment? 

We all came from the one Light and even today, we receive our vital life energy from this Source.  And deep inside, we know — we remember — who we really are.  We came from Light.  We are Light.  (Another way of saying this we are God.)  We are all one.  Enlightenment is fully being aware of this true nature of us.  

Now let’s see how the original intention of Light is working.  By infusing multiple pieces of itself, it has created an illusion of separation, differences, and lack.  A perfect setting to learn love and abundance!  And so we’ve been learning these wonderful qualities using the contrasts created by the illusion. I must say the plan has worked out very well.  So much to the point that we are ready for a new plan. 

Completing the “learning by contrast” process

As I wrote before, one aspect of Ascension is we complete this learning by contrast process. For eons of time, one of the major purpose of souls incarnating in this world was to learn their life lessons.  But for many of us, we have done this enough times.  We are graduating the school of life.  

It’s time we put our learning into practice.  It’s time we fully manifest the love and abundance and live them.  It’s time we live from the enlightened and empowered perspective.  It’s time we live as Light, as God.

This is not to say you need to skip the learning and pretend you are enlightened.  If you are still in the learning your life lessons phase, take your time and complete your learning.  It may appear to be a daunting big job, but once you get the hang of it, you can learn quite quickly.  

I have also found that having Ascension soul shift is not equal to remembering our true nature, or enlightenment.  The ego still gets in the way and sticks to the way we are used to think and see the world.  There is some time lag.  But if you stay open (and you will because it’s hard to close down after the Ascension soul shift), you will start to notice the change . . . 

(I also believe it is possible to ascend without soul shift.  I’m just pointing out the Ascension soul shift cases because this is how I, as Akashic Record Reader, came to notice Ascension.) 

The shift of self awareness

In my case, I first experienced it on a sunny morning at my Starbucks.  I was looking outside the large window.  There were trees in blossom, people walking by, and behind them all, the beautiful blue sky.  

So I was looking and admiring the beautiful day.  And . . . I became aware I was looking.  

Huh?  I know, this is a bit hard to put into words.  

You most likely have a sense of you, yourself.  Who you are, how you view the world, how you have lived your life.  This “you” resides in your body and your mind.  And this you experience your life as direct experience. 

I have my sense of self, too.  I experience my life in this world as me, Akemi.  When, say, someone talks to me, I perceive as this person is talking to me, and so, if she says something nice, I am elated, and if she says un-nice things, I get offended.  A beautiful day make me feel lucky.  And the people out there walking by — well, I don’t know them, so I pay little attention.  This is how I usually go through the day.  

That morning, however, I became aware there is another me, kind of like hanging right behind me in the air, looking at me and the world.  And this another me was thinking — well, not really thinking, but if I have to put it into words, sensing something like, “Ah, what a beautiful world I have created for myself.  It’s good to see from here (“here” meaning my physical perspective).”

I didn’t hear these words.  These were my “thoughts” as I saw the world and myself.  In other words, my sense of self shifted from the one I have known to that of my Higher Self, from my consciousness to superconsciousness.  (In case you are wondering — I’ve come back to my usual sense of self.  I guess it comes and goes.)  

The true nature of “reality”

Again, our Higher Selves came directly from Light, the Source, God.  We are pieces of God.  So we have the same creative power of God.  You have created your life and this world.  And so have I.

But if so, you may ask, doesn’t your world and my world conflict against one another?  Well, only if we are separate conflicting beings.  We are not. 

As I wrote in the first installment of this Creating The New World series about Love, there naturally is no polarity in the fifth dimension.  All the darkness, the lack of light, will be the thing of history in the New World.  

So those people walking by are strangers to me on the physical conventional level but are part of me and my creation at the higher level.  The shift of self awareness will let you see it.  

The true nature of reality is it’s a make belief creation on one level of dimension.  Hope this helps your uneasiness about the initial hypothesis about this world is made of Light  

Feeding on Light

When we become fully aware of our true nature, to be in full alignment with Light, we start developing lightbodies.  And I believe we can take energy from Light rather than foods as we become lightbodies. 

I know this idea of feeding on Light is wildly unpopular.  Does it bother you so much if you don’t have to eat?  Can you give up, say just 20% of your eating?  I didn’t get much response to this question in the linked article.  But just think how we can improve the lives of the world’s starving children by doing so ^_^ 

The physical aspect of Light and spiritual awareness of Light need to be integrated fully.

How to bring in the New World

Like the first installment on Love, I’d like to present some things we can do today to bring in the New World based on Light:

1. Become more aware of your “problems”.  Problems are the means you chose to learn your life lessons with.  So don’t avoid or ignore them.  Rather, pay attention to what you are learning from the difficult situations.  This accelerates your learning by contrast process. 

2. What is stopping you from embracing the status of divinity?  Check within.  I want to point out that this awareness has nothing to do with telling people you are God.  When you know you are God, your vision of the world will change.  So don’t worry about what other people may think or say (they are only pieces of your creation anyway).  Work on yourself.  

3. I’m learning this is a process that takes some time because we are still in the third dimension.  So while it is essential to examine your awareness, relax.  

4. Relax we do, and also embrace lightheartedness.  This is actually fun!  It’s a big myth that spiritual awareness can only be achieved by tons of serious disciplines.  

The New World will be filled with Light, with each individual being aware of who they are and loving one another for who they are.  It’s blessed with true sense of humor (not satire or bitter cynical laughs), and in tern, enjoying lightheartedness helps us move on to the New World.

5. Take time to relax outdoors, enjoying the sunlight and fresh air.  (I do recommend UV protection.)  Reconnecting to Earth by walking or gardening is good, too, because Earth is ascending as well. 

6. Listen to your intuition and act on it.  Your intuition is the part of you that is not tainted with conventional thinking.  It’s the shortcut to the New World. 

7. Take care of your physical body.  We are developing the lightbodies within our existing physical bodies, so it’s critical we care about good physical health.  Feed yourself with light filled foods, such as fruits and vegetables.  Also cleanse yourself with water both internally (by drinking plenty of water) and externally (by immersing yourself in water). 

8. While talking about physicality, get rid of clutter from your personal space.  It’s hard for light to enter in cluttered space.  Here is a 21 day plan to clean up and organize your space. 

9. Quit feeding energy to darkworkers.  I already wrote about this in the Love part of this series, but it does no good to you, to the darkworkers and to the world to participate in their drama.  When a darkworker can steal no energy, they are prompted to come back to Light.  

 10. Admire the beauty of life and this physical world.  Even after all these negative influences, we can still see the original beauty.  Take time to appreciate it and it will grow as you feed it.   Also admire arts that praise beauty.  

Do you have more ideas how to bring in more Light?  Please share in the comments.  Thank you.  (photo by carf)

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