My house is half packed.

I’ve sold or given away about 10 percent of my possessions.

The major change is still yet to come.

We’re moving, selling our house and moving to another city a few hours away.

Saying goodbye to so many people. Saying hello to so many new opportunities.

The movers come in two days, on Friday, to help pack up what we haven’t already. Which is a lot.

From the perspective of someone writing about awareness and change, there are so many themes and ideas at play. So much in flux. So much that will make sense, after the fact. Only after the change, can you understand the change.

Home

Letting go of the house we have lived in for 6 years is difficult.

Both of our children were born, right here in the living room.

We built garden beds, constructed a shed, planted fruit trees. We made this house a home. Now we’re making this home a house.

Letting go

So much time spent gathering things. So many things taking up so much mental space that you don’t even realize they are all there, till you sit down and analyze whether you need the thing… Upon full reflection you realize it is just a thing. Let it go.

I am not a pack rat. I’ve seen what pack rats do. Maybe I’m a pack mouse, a smaller scale pack rat.

In many ways it is easier to throw something away than it is to sell it. The garage sale was an exercise in frustration. Don’t they know my stuff has value? Don’t they know the care I put in to collecting those things? To have someone turn up their nose at an item when you ask 1 dollar for it… Well, it’s insulting. My stuff is precious… But in the end you realize, it’s just stuff.

Let go.

It is a good practice to allow things to flow away from you. Hold on too tightly and your hands will be full when what you really need floats by.

Practice letting go in order to be open to what you need next.

Situational Compassion

It’s easy to be cranky when you’re under this much stress. You pull inside and get defensive because you only have so much energy to go around. “Don’t they know that I’m already overstretched?!!”

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we are all in this together.

Remember, what you are going through, so are the people around you. My wife, my children, they are all experiencing the same level of stress and tension that I am.

If we lift each other up during this time, then we’ll all come out with our heads a little higher. It’s easy to think you’re alone when the schedule has your back against the wall.

Remember to practice extending that which you need and you can look for it reflected in others around you.

It’s easy to make mistakes. Release the errors in judgment. Take a breath. Share a hug. Reset. Be the compassionate person you are.

Transition

When you experience a transition, remember to mourn.

You are losing something and loss generates grief. You don’t need to feel guilty for experiencing grief. Sure, there are other people experiencing “real” loss, Death, Marriage disruption, breakups. It’s easy to think of 100 different things that would be worth grieving over… But not your transition.

Why not your transition?

Don’t belittle your experience.

Don’t downplay the experience of now.

Don’t undermine the value of your emotion.

What you are experiencing is real and present.

Be with your grief. Experience you transition in its fullness.

Only then can you let go and be open to what’s coming next.

What’s coming next is going to be wonderful.

But remember it’s also going to the same.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Namaste,

Kevin

I’ve just started keeping bees this year. I’ve learned quite a bit in my studies leading up to my first hive. But I’ve only had my bees now for 2 weeks. It’s amazing to observe their behavior and learn about how a hive operates.

The most recent epiphany in my study of bees comes in relation to a bee swarm.

To begin with, most people freak out at the idea of seeing a giant ball of bees on a tree. It turns out that bees in a swarm are very docile. They don’t have a home to protect. They are huddled around the queen waiting for the scouts to report back that they’ve found a new home.

As part of this swarming and leaving their home and safety they take as much food with them as they can, so they fill their bellies with honey from the old hive. When a bee has a full belly, it makes it very hard for them to sting, because they can’t bend their abdomens. So a bee with a full belly is much less likely to sting you.

But the thing that amazed me most about bees is the story behind the swarm.

When a hive starts to get crowded and there isn’t enough space for all the bees to keep growing and thrive, the queen bee in collaboration with the workers, starts growing a new queen. When the new queen is about to hatch, the existing queen takes about half the bees with her and leaves the hive in search of a new home.

The old queen doesn’t know if their search will succeed, she doesn’t know where they will end up. She’s leaving her home and her honey stores behind for the new queen and the remainder of the hive.

This is equivalent to your parents leaving their house and possessions to you when you graduate college. Then picture your parents heading off to find a new home and start over. Can you imagine?

So when you see a bee swarm, remember the sacrifice this represents. Giving up their home, their safety and risking everything for the benefit of their family.

Namaste,

Kevin

There are certain subjects that are more difficult than others to talk about. Part of the reason for this is ownership. When I completely own and believe an idea, I don’t have a problem sharing it. And if I come across an idea that I don’t own, but want to share, I can always present it as an idea, or a theory. But there are still topics that I’ve come to own, but I know are “out there”, somewhere in the fields of ridicule or things spoken about only with friends behind closed doors.

Aliens, Reincarnation, Near Death Experiences. These tend to fall into the edges of our consciousness and experience. They have a fantastic impact on the big picture of our lives and our existence. But from a day to day prospective they don’t always seem to apply. Additionally they tend to be very difficult to prove. So they fall into personal belief.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been exposed to the idea of Soul Fragments as a means to the universe balancing itself.

The definition of a soul fragment is simple and easy to understand. But it requires a number of correlating beliefs, the lack of any one of these correlating beliefs can make you dismiss the idea utterly and move on with your life.

A soul fragment is an experience from your life that is unprocessed and breaks off when you die. When you die, this experience, this energy, must be accounted for, so the fragment breaks off and goes into a universal pool of unfinished business. When a soul returns to the earth to live another life, a portion of these fragments can be attached to that soul to process in their lifetime. Sometimes the fragments are your own, things that you’ve experienced in your past and haven’t processed. This would often be referred to as karma. Sometimes these fragments are from other people.

I’ve often heard of reincarnation and processing your own experiences from a past life. I’ve even come to believe that the model of reincarnation makes sense to me. I believe that the universe seeks balance and that balance could be more easily accounted for through the process of reincarnation. I can expand on this in another post. But the idea of processing someone else’s experiences was new to me.

I was first introduced to the concept during a session of body talk in the fall. For those not familiar body talk is a combination of eastern practices designed to aid in healing.

I had recently experiences a recurrence of my asthma. It was something that started when I was 12 years old in the 5th grade. During one of my healing sessions it came up that this was a soul fragment from a man that had lived in 1849. He worked at a factory in town that produced a large amount of pollution. When his daughter was 12 she came down with asthma as a result of the pollution and she died shortly thereafter. When the father passed away many years later, he had still never dealt with the guilt of causing this. This memory, this traumatic energy, become a soul fragment, and attached to me when I came here to live this life.

This soul fragment lingered with me until I was in the 5th grade, when I was 12 years old, and manifested in a major asthma attack. I’ve dealt with asthma on and off throughout my life, ever since that first attack.

During the session the soul fragment was identified and the energy released. I was still uncertain about the soul fragment concept. But I can tell you I haven’t had an asthma attack since.

I’m still processing. Still trying to understand what I believe. Lack of evidence is not proof, but it certainly is compelling. There is more to this story of soul fragments, and if enough interest is shown, I’m willing to share. But I’m sure I’ve stretched a few of my readers enough for now.

Namaste,

Kevin

The word agnostic comes from the Greek language and means “Without Knowledge”.

Specifically, when the term is applied to spirituality it is defined to mean: “A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena.”

I’ve been meaning to learn the Greek for “knows too much”. I often feel that I’ve lost sight of the wonder of the world around me. It’s very obvious when I interact with my 3-year-old. She sees wonder in the most mundane objects. The other day she was completely mesmerized by the bandage on my finger, she had to have one of her own! It was simply the best thing ever.

In many areas my knowledge has become a liability. Knowing too much has caused me to think I understand all, I have lost sight of the wonder that is all around.

When you are learning about a topic, there is a point where you are at the right level of information to understand the object and start to use it. If you continue to dig beyond that level, you may learn more, but the value of the topic may become overwhelmed by your knowledge of the topic.

There is a point where you have the appropriate level of knowledge and digging deeper is not beneficial.

Here is an example. If you were to look at a simple tool like a spoon, you could quickly ascertain the purpose and utility of the device. You can use the spoon to eat, or shovel dirt, or do whatever you feel like. This is an appropriate, or at least practical, level of knowledge. You understand the tool and can understand it’s purpose with the information you have.

Maybe you find that you really like spoons and you start taking spooning classes. You get all sorts of new ideas about what else you can do with a spoon. Transport water, pry open lids on  jars, etc. You are learning about the utility of a tool.

Imagine, that at some point in the future, you have learned all the potential uses of the spoon and you still think it is the most wonderful invention ever. So you try to dig deeper. You start to learn about where spoons come from and spoon making. You break the spoon down to a list of materials. You may now be delving into a realm that will break the mystery. The deeper you go, the more you begin to own it. The more you began to own it, the less you wonder at it.

Often we get so wrapped up in completely understanding things, or even just wrapped up in using a tool, that we lose sight of the wonder of if all.

It’s like losing sight of the forest because you’re so focused on the individual trees.

When it comes to God I am truly agnostic, or at least I attempt to be. I have been told a lot about God over the years. Interestingly, the further I dig into any given ‘truth’, that I have been told, the more those ideas fall apart. I find that I know nothing of God. The knowledge that I do have is really suspect and usually muddies my experience of the mystery of God.

I am in favor of further study of life and God and, well you name it. I love philosophy and I want to know more. But I have also found that the more I know, sometimes leads to, lessening of experience. There is a powerful value in knowing where to stop.

There is a time to stop, accept and appreciate certain things in life without digging so deeper. If you’re not careful you can get buried in the atomic structure and miss the bigger mystery.

If we approach life with the idea that we know nothing, we are much more likely to experience life itself instead of our own idea of the thing.

Take a few moments after you read this and think about a place where you know too much. Then take a few steps back, from your massive accumulation of knowledge, and look from the trees out to the forest. See if you can recapture the wonder that pulled you into learning in the first place.

Namaste,

Kevin