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What Secrets Within You Are Waiting To Be Discovered?

What would you do if you wanted to search your heart, mind, and soul for all the talents, gifts, and abilities hidden within? And how would you seek help in bringing those precious gifts forth into the world? If you were an ancient Greek, you’d be very familiar with the sisterhood of female deities known as the Nine Muses.

The role of these sister goddesses was to preside over knowledge of every art and science and to bestow inspiration on those seeking to find and pursue their creative connections. The image of the Muse, the power of the feminine guiding spirit, lives on in our culture today. When you need assistance in exploring and activating your power to imagine, to intuit, to dream, and to create, you can call upon the Muse.

If what you need is power for self-exploration and self-discovery, the feminine spirit can help with this effort to look within. You can ask for help in uncovering your gifts and abilities and in bringing them forth to serve the world.

How can you begin to explore the hidden gifts and abilities you have within? Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

1. What’s my story? –Think about the ways you describe yourself and your life first to yourself and then to others. Recognize the deep value of acknowledging the truth about your thoughts and feelings. Only the truth can set you free to look at your life with love and acceptance. Clearing barriers to self-love and acceptance eases the way for your hidden gifts to come forth. Use your daily journaling practice to build your comfort level with honest expression. Writing becomes a powerful discovery tool as you look for keys to your hidden gifts. Be sure to explore examples of people, things, and experiences you love.

2. What makes me happy? – What are you doing when you feel most free, most passionate, most engaged? Think about the things you do each day and how you feel in every moment. Are you sometimes sleep-walking through your life, not really present or focused? Do you often imagine yourself somewhere else, doing something else? Make a list of the activities or places or circumstances that really bring you to life, as opposed to putting you to sleep. What are the components of those awakening experiences? Maybe you are tutoring a child who needs help with homework or serving lunch at the senior center. Maybe you are attending a city council meeting to express concern for the growing homeless population. Maybe you are studying a subject that fascinates you, leading a prayer group, learning to grow a vegetable garden. Whatever engages your passionate attention is a clue to your gifts and your life purpose.

3. What attracts my true presence? Where you are in any moment tells you how near or far you are from accessing your soul center. Are you actually listening to your significant other talk about their day? Are you really tasting that fresh cup of coffee? Are you seeing and appreciating the bright burst of spring flowers in your neighbor’s yard? If you aren’t present, where are you? Your meditation practice is your finest tool for learning to focus your attention and become present in the present moment. Tuning in to the Divine through meditation strengthens your connection to the power source of all creation. You’ll need for that connection to be finely-tuned in order to discover your gifts, talents, and abilities and power them up to help heal the world.

4. Who needs what I have to give? This sounds like the quandary of someone looking for a job, doesn’t it? When you are looking for work, you might scan the want ads looking for a match with your skills, as you understand them. Think about those fellows being on the other side of the equation. What are the times when you have made a good match—your talents and another’s needs? Did you feel joy and purpose in bringing your talent to another’s aid? Whatever you did to help, and the satisfaction you felt, can be keys to a deeper understanding of what powerful gifts you possess that the world is needs right now.

5. How can I know my gifts are real? Is it possible that some ancient poet asked the Muse for inspiration and she replied, “No way!”? If so, the story never passed the test of time. What came down to us instead are examples of the traditional prayer or invocation of classic poets asking the sisterhood of Muses for their support and guidance. Like these poets, have faith in the power of your gifts and the power of a loving universe to help you bring them forth. Believe that your unique gifts are real and that they are needed here and now. Your firm connection to Source, nourished each day with spiritual practices—meditation, prayer, journaling, and loving service– is the foundation for all the faith you need in your amazing potential.

Just as your soul longs for the experience of self-expression, the world needs your unique contribution. As you call forth and use your unique gifts, you begin to live the life you were born for, joyfully engaged—mind, heart, body, and soul!

Recognizing your Muse is only one small facet of exploring the powerful energy of the Divine Feminine in your life.

For more ways to awaken your gifts and bring them forth into the world, join Deborah for a very special free webinar, How To Rebalance Your Inner And Outer World With Divine Feminine Energy >>

Divinely humble

The Price of Pride: Pinkerton the Pig and Jesus on a Donkey

“Who would care for a sand witch?”

That’s the opening line of one of my favorite children’s books. Hey! Adults can love children’s books too!

It’s called Me First, and it tells the story of a pig named Pinkerton who has to be first for everything. I know we all know somebody like that in our lives.

Anyway, in his haste to be first, Pinkerton thinks he hears someone asking if he’d like a “sandwich” (you know, lunch), while in reality it is a Sand Witch: a mysterious magical creature asking if he will take care of her.

Of course, in his haste to be first, he gets trapped being the servant of the Sand Witch, who ultimately teaches him that first is not always best.

It’s a cute story for growing minds, but the lessons it teaches can resonate with us through life: humble yourself, be kind, first is not always best.

I’ve been thinking a lot about being humble these days as we head into Spring, and with Spring, major holidays for the Abrahamic religions: Passover, Easter, and (later) Ramadan.

In all of these religions, we see the common theme of humbling oneself, as well as the dangers that befall those who choose pride.

Let’s take a look at the Passover Story. Moses leads the Hebrews out of captivity, eventually leading them into the promised land. Moses, a man who humbled himself before his God, was vested with great authority and power in order to save a people, who had been toiling under the crack of Pharaoh’s whip without mercy.

But take a look at Pharaoh for a moment. Here’s a man who when Moses says, “let my people go,” decides “absolutely not.” “Your people are my property.” Pharaoh considered himself to be a living incarnation of Horus, a powerful Egyptian God, and rejected any attempt by this foreign God, to mettle in his affairs.

What happened as a result? Famine, plague, pestilence, death. After every curse, Moses begged Pharaoh, “let my people go,” but this prideful, arrogant man could not humble himself before this foreign God, no matter the might this God showed. Pharaoh, blindly, thought himself to be greater. Ultimately, he and his armies were swept away in the Red Sea and drowned as divine punishment for his inability to see reason and accept defeat with grace.

This is the price of pride. This is the price of looking at the divine and saying, “my way or the highway.” Pride cometh before the fall.

As an inversion of this story, I am struck by the true humility that the Christ showed in his ministries. This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, a day that Christians mark when Christ rode into Jerusalem.

How did Christ ride into Jerusalem? On a donkey.

I need you to get in the mindset of a citizen of Jerusalem back then. The Messiah was a promised figure who would restore Jerusalem’s independence. He would come in as a conqueror and expel the invaders who had Israel under their yoke.

What do conquerors ride in on? Horses.

Here’s a man – a man who calls himself the Messiah, the savior, who rides in on an ass.

What? That’s not what the Messiah is supposed to look like!

Less than a week later, Christ is executed – crucified for blasphemy. At first glance, you might think, “I don’t get it. He humbled himself and he was still killed. You exalt yourself, you humble yourself; death still comes for you.” In response, I’d ask you to look deeper.

The death of Christ is a sacrifice: it is an inversion of a man who carries the highest god-like vibration, sacrificing for his fellow man. It is the ultimate act of humility. This act of selfless sacrifice was done for humanity, and in the process, the Christ ascended. The lesson: selflessness and humility are righteous. They who exalt themselves shall be humbled. And those who humble themselves shall be exalted.

The Muslim month of Ramadan, coming up in April, is a month of fasting and introspection. The fasting is done to achieve taqwa, or fear of God. Fear meaning awe and reverence. An understanding that the divine is greater than we are, and yet that we encompass it. And this understanding draws us closer to the divine.

No matter your creed, we all understand that these tenets are universal: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Think of how many leaders and politicians we’ve seen whose pride has consumed them. Governor Cuomo? Last year, he was the Covid whisperer, with his talks being the fireside chats of the pandemic. Now, he’s battling an inquiry that he deliberately miscounted Covid deaths and sexually harassed employees. He thought he was untouchable. Now, he’ll be lucky if he sees out his term. Or consider “Ellen” who has lost over 1 million viewers, or over 40% of her audience, after acknowledging that there was significant misconduct at her business. So much for branding yourself as the “Be Kind Lady,” a lofty title indeed.

I too have had this very dynamic happen: who among us has not had the experience of pushing ourselves to the top, only to later fall to the bottom, where we have plenty of time to master humility.

Pride cometh before the fall.

I invite you all, as the warmth of Spring melts away the dark of Winter, to keep these truths aloft: those who exalt themselves shall be humbled, those who humble themselves shall be exalted.

Or, as Pinkerton would say, first is not always best.

Woody Allen Family

The Arc of Justice

Woody Allen indicted in the court of public opinion

I can’t imagine watching a Woody Allen movie these days.

Everywhere you look, there are fingerprints of a finely-hidden monster, scrawled like graffiti tags, pulsing in the background of every film.

Barely ten minutes into his old comedy, Bananas, he makes a joke about “advanced child molesting.” And that’s not the only instance, not by a longshot. His scripts are peppered with disturbing and obsessive jokes about abuse, sexual and familial. It’s a real red flag.

I can’t watch his movies anymore, but I did watch Allen v. Farrow – the new HBO docuseries that takes a much-needed critical eye to the story of Woody Allen’s abuse of Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow.

Now, many of you may not remember, but news of Woody Allen’s abuse hit the press back in 1992. At the time, this was a strange and salacious case, filled with “he said’s,” and “she said’s,” and “oh, she’s been coaching her,” and “this is blown out of proportion,” until the whole thing became a weird, unresolved footnote.

Woody Allen kept making movies and winning Oscars. Mia Farrow dropped out of the public eye. Then, in 2014, Dylan Farrow published a letter in The New York Times, pressing her case that Woody Allen had abused her. Again in 2018, she went public, detailing Allen’s abuse and asking, “Why hadn’t #MeToo come for Woody Allen?”

Now, three years later, here we are, with a withering documentary that strips away all of the “he said’s” and “she said’s” to reveal a stark and unflinching view of Woody Allen as a predator and a master manipulator. This is a chilling story of much more than rapacious pedophilia; it’s the story of the unbridled abuse of power.

It starts with Mia.

As I watched the documentary, I was struck by how insidiously Woody Allen dismantled Mia Farrow’s agency over their relationship. Over their thirteen years together, Woody cast Mia in thirteen of his movies. At first glance, that sounds innocuous. But then you realize that Woody Allen was Mia Farrow’s boss. He was writing and directing these movies, which meant he could nix her at any time. He changed her working arrangement so that his agent represented her. Think about that: her husband was now her boss, and she was required to use his agent.

He effectively had her under his thumb. Any money Mia Farrow made was through a Woody Allen project. This is a classic tactic of an abuser: cutting off independence.

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t stop with Mia Farrow. Through the documentary, it is clearly shown how Woody abused Dylan and then orchestrated a clever and forceful PR campaign to hamstring the investigation. To pre-empt the story of child abuse, Woody went public with his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn – Farrow’s other adopted daughter. This PR coup allowed Woody to reframe the abuse allegation as a form of retribution by Mia Farrow: the “spurned woman” who was trying to get revenge against Woody. For having sex with his other daughter. Seriously.

Look at that: Woody Allen turned an abuse allegation against himself into a weapon to hurl back at Mia Farrow. This is abuse of power on steroids.

It is difficult to parse out all of the wrinkles and turns in the investigation, but it becomes quite clear that the vaunted Yale-New Haven Hospital report, which proclaimed that Dylan Farrow was not a credible witness, was a sham. Nine times, a seven-year-old girl was forced to be interviewed by investigators about Woody Allen’s abuse to determine if her story had “any inconsistencies.”

Nine times!

If the story matches nine times out of nine, they cry “coaching.” If anything is inconsistent, they cry “she made the whole thing up.”

Tellingly, all the notes from each of these interviews were destroyed – something very much out of the ordinary. As this part of the documentary aired, it became quite clear that there were serious missteps in the execution of this report. While the documentary hints at potential cover-ups and potential political pressures by the Dinkins mayoral administration in New York City to quash the Allen inquiry, we don’t have the evidence . . . yet.

Woody Allen weaponized this Yale-New Haven Hospital report. He wielded it like a cudgel, suing Farrow for full custody of their children, and suggesting Farrow had coached Dylan and was an unfit mother. The judge, thank God, would have none of it; the court confirmed Mia as a fit parent and said Woody was a threat to Dylan Farrow’s safety.

Look at that. When Allen’s smoke-and-mirror defenses were put before a court of law, they came crumbling down. Which is why it was so disturbing that Woody Allen has never been tried and convicted. For the last thirty years, he’s used his celebrity power to dodge the court of law and has confused the court of public opinion.

This is why Allen v. Farrow is such an important documentary. Through this unflinching lens, the series dismantles Allen’s defenses on small screens across the country, cutting his defenders off at the knees.

It is said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Woody Allen has managed to keep that arc at bay for thirty years. But thanks to perseverance from Dylan Farrow, and the investigative journalism of Allen v. Farrow, that moral arc has broken back toward justice. Once again, the court of public opinion has become the court of last resort.

When Mia Farrow and Woody Allen were in the midst of separating, he told her that she’d never work in this country again. He blacklisted Mia Farrow for speaking out against his abuse. To this day, she still fears him.

Now, the truth has finally caught up to him. As a result, he’s not found an American distributor for his recent movies. His publishers have pulled out of book deals. I don’t know if he’ll ever see the inside of a jail cell, but, with this documentary, that’s okay, as sunlight is the best disinfectant. The light of truth is wiping away the obfuscation of his abuses against Mia and Dylan. And in bringing these charges to light, Allen’s power withers away.

I invite you all to watch Allen v. Farrow to fully understand how serious and credible these allegations are. Then shake your head that, once again, we, for a bit, let celebrity trump our own instincts for truth. Now, may the truth heal Mia Farrow and her children.

Breathing like ocean waves

Divine Utterance

How nature reveals the hand of our creator

Breathe in. Breathe out. What do you hear?

You hear the sound of your breath.

What does your breath sound like? Breath sounds like breath.

I was thinking about how “breath sounds like breath” as I was walking along the beach, listening to the waves crash on the sand. They have a push and pull. A roar and a groan. Like your breath. In a way, it is your breath. The oceans produce some 50 to 80% of the oxygen in the air – allowing you to breathe. It’s amazing. The oceans are the lungs of your world. You breathe in what they breathe out.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breath itself is an act of transference. Oxygen is brought into your blood and carbon dioxide is returned to nature. The oxygen in your blood is used to break apart chemical bonds in your cells, providing you with energy. It’s the fuel that powers you. And the waste, carbon dioxide, you transfer to all of the plant matter around the world that use carbon dioxide as their fuel. Transference.

This transference is fascinating. Because while your inhale and exhale breaths are opposites, they facilitate the inhale and exhale of others. You are taking reciprocal breaths with nature. In short, your breath out and the ocean’s breath out cancel each other. There is no opposite. There is just breath.

Breath sounds like breath. Breath is breath. It just is.

Sanskrit, the oldest language in the world, spoken some 5,000 years before Christ, gives us the yogic mantra, Soham, which literally translates as “I am [s]he” or “I am that.” In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad there is a verse that describes how, at the beginning of the universe, the Self became aware of itself as “I” (slightly modified):

In the beginning this universe was the Self alone…
[S]he, the Self, reflected and saw nothing but the Self. [S]he first said,
“I am.” Therefore, [s]he came to be known by the name aham.

The name aham indicates that God experiences itself subjectively as “I.”

In the Old Testament, when Moses meets the burning bush in the wilderness some 3,000 years before Christ, he asks, “Who are you?”

The response is “I am that I am.” Not “I am God” or “I am the creator.” Just “I am that I am.”

Jesus said some 2,000 years ago, “Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58)

Why would the “I am” define itself this way?

The sound of your breath is the same concept. Call it God, call it the creator, call it the universe’s divine force, whatever it is, it is so all-encompassing that it cannot define itself except by itself.

We call this tautology. Defining something by itself. I am that I am. Breath is breath.

Breath is breath. Why do I keep bringing this up? It’s because we can see the shadows of the divine tautological creation all through nature. In the ocean. In your breath.

The ancient Sanskrit word for God – Soham – describes God in two syllables that mean “I am.”

Two syllables. Two beats. In-out. In-out.

Like your breath. Like your heartbeat. Like the ebb and flow of the ocean’s waves. The name of the creation is reflected all throughout nature in these push-pull moments of transference and creation.

I thought about this as I finished my walk along the beach, as I listened to the roar of the ocean reflect back the divine utterance. I thought about how each heartbeat and each breath we breathe are unconscious prayers, connecting us to the source of eternal creation.

Isn’t it magnificent? The sound of our breath is the same sound of our ancient, divine verb “to be.” And that ancient divinity reveals itself as “I am that I am.”

What this means is that the act of being yourself is divine. Existence is all-encompassing. This is why we see the word Soham reflected back through all of our existence. Our breath and our heartbeat reflect back “I” and “am,” which means “existence.” It means “to be.” And our heartbeats and our breath are the key fires of our existence. Each breath sings “I am. I exist.”

I am that I am. Your existence is boundless. Any attempt to define “I am” for yourself, with anything other than “I am,” will be confusing.

Don’t let yourself be defined in confusing terms. Don’t allow yourself to be boxed in by any definition that removes a single element of your boundless self. Instead, listen to your breath.

Each breath you take, repeat the ancient phrase, Soham, “I am that I am.” You are what you are. Embrace your limitlessness. Embrace your divinity. God is within you.