Throughout our lives we go through stages. You can’t be expected to know anything about responsibility when you’re a toddler or young child. We have to learn what that means. Each little job, each small task helps us understand what responsibility is and the consequences. Your mother asks, “Will you pick up your toys?” They’re your toys – you’re beginning to be responsible for them so why wouldn’t you? And, then, you also experience the consequences when you don’t pick them up.

Slowly, we grow and as we encounter each task we learn more about responsibility, hopefully. This is in an ideal world.

Sometimes, we resist taking responsibility, even as a child, and this is where we begin spinning our wheels and going nowhere. We’re stuck. Marianne Williamson in her book, The Age of Miracles, says:

“A concept it has taken me years to embrace fully is that I am 100 percent responsible for my own life. 100 percent responsible doesn’t mean 34 percent responsible, and it doesn’t mean 96 percent responsible. Unless you’re willing to accept that you’re 100 percent responsible for your own experience, then you can’t call forth your best life.”

No matter what problem you are experiencing or what someone else has done to you. You need to take full responsibility for your part of it or it will keep repeating itself in some form over again until the lesson is learned. It’s time to stop blaming and judging and truly view the situation and release it through love and forgiveness. This doesn’t mean to become the victim and blame yourself. It means you need to find a way to change your thoughts and reactions and respond positively. I know some of the situations you’re facing out there are tough and no one said it was to be easy. But unless we really see how the situation is reflecting a part of us that needs healing and find a way to do that – through prayer or counselor – we’ll keep spinning our wheels. You have to find the way that fits best for you and a way that works so you know you have dealt with the problem and have been 100 percent responsible.

As Marianne Williamson goes on to say,

“You can live the rest of your life reacting to and replaying what went before, but that won’t serve you or deliver you to the shining place. And everyone you meet will subconsciously know how you’ve responded to your past. They will know whether you’re stuck there or better for having been there.”

From the kitchen table – Pat
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote:

“What if you slept?
And what if,
In your sleep
You dreamed?
And what if,
In your dream,
You went to heaven
And there plucked
A strange and
Beautiful flower?
And what if,
When you awoke,
You had the flower
In your hand?”
Photo by Wazari at www.sxc.hu.home
What would you think if what you dreamed appeared in this realm as in Samuel Coleridge’s poem – a beautiful flower? Isn’t that what we do when we manifest? We put a picture out there of what it is we desire and hold it and over time we create it in our lives. Only in the dream state, there are no obstacles, no second guessing and what you dream appears instantly. What if we could bring more of that dimension into our everyday waking life instead of excusing it away as nonsense?

Have you ever had dreams or visions that appeared to be giving you a message or guidance? Back in 1977, I was awakened by a dream. It came out of nowhere. I was asleep and all of a sudden off in the distance I could see a black and white newspaper spinning and it kept spinning as it came closer and when it got close enough it stopped spinning to where I could read the bold black letters AIRPLANE CRASH – DENVER BRONCOS and I could see a photo off to the side of a crashed plane still smoking. It woke me up instantly and I sat straight up in bed and with my eyes wide open I could still see the newspaper headlines and the picture of the smoking airplane. My heart was racing and all I could think was, “What does this mean?” and “What am I supposed to do with this?” My husband helped me settle down so I could get back to sleep but the next morning I couldn’t shake it. I found out that the Broncos were due to fly to San Diego that weekend to play in a professional football game and somehow I wanted to warn them. Instead, I called my pastor at church and he put out a prayer request and then that’s what I did – pray. I prayed and prayed until it released and I felt peace again. I don’t know what that meant on this side of heaven and the Broncos didn’t crash but I know to this day I can still see a vivid picture of that spinning newspaper and smoking plane.

Dreams and visions can reveal another world, another dimension and be used to enhance our thoughts, desires. Imagine what we could learn. Is the life we’re living real or is it a dream? Some think it’s an elusion. You be the judge. It’s your dream.

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
Across the doors where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

– RUMI –

From the kitchen table – Pat
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My timing is off. I probably should be writing this in October at Halloween time. But I wanted to share some personal stories from spending time at my grandmother’s. We just watched a movie tonight on the Hallmark channel called, “The Good Witch” starring Catherine Bell and it reminded me of the magic and mystery of things unseen. I believe there’s energy in everything and we’re connected to it. Sometimes, we can’t explain it in logical terms but it happens nonetheless. I grew up having a grandmother that had that mystery about her. She intuitively knew things other people didn’t pick up and it was no big deal to her. But my sister and I and 5 cousins grew familiar with the unusual happenings that would occur now and then as we all spent each summer with my grandmother and grandfather in a small town in Virginia. My mother, the eldest of my grandmother’s children, told us of spooky things that happened in that same house when she was a child. So, it’s no wonder the same things would continue for the next generation to take claim of and pass along. I don’t think the house was haunted. It was mostly its geographical setting enhanced by the fact that Grandma was psychic. Their backyard was connected to a funeral home and Grandpa’s tool shed and a small storage building belonging to the funeral home separated the yards. From our side, the small storage building was built with wood and had a window with drawn blinds. There was also some sort of door with an ivory door handle and a key hole. We always tried to peek inside to see if we could see anything. This was mostly where they stored the caskets but I think at one time it also was where they used to prepare the bodies. Given all that drama and children’s imaginations you can believe we scared ourselves to death. On top of that, Grandma had her stories about people she loved who had died and how comfortable she was in being in tune with them from the other side. There were times a noise or something would drop and Grandma would make her declaration, “There’s going to be a death in the family.” You never knew what would trigger it. To her it was second nature – peaceful and surreal – not creepy like it felt to us. It added more fuel to an already over-worked imagination. Sure enough, we would always get that phone call in the wee hours of the morning that a distant aunt or uncle had died. You can read another story I told about my grandmother in a previous post, That Special Someone.

I remember one night everyone was out in the living room watching TV and I went into the kitchen to get something from the refrigerator and I heard the back screen door slam. I called for Grandma,“because I wasn’t going out there alone”. She and I went out to the back door from a porch-type addition to the house with me stuck close by her side. She unlocked the heavy door and checked the screen door and it was hooked. Ugh – here it comes. She made her declaration and we got another phone call that night.

Because we couldn’t sleep at night, we would sit up on the floor under the front bedroom window where the street light was shining and play cards. After Grandma and Grandpa went to sleep we would sneak downstairs in the dark to the kitchen to get something to eat. My grandmother had a large oval picture with a gilded frame hanging on the wall in the living room as you came down the stairs. It was a picture of her 2-year old son, Billy Bob, who had died of pneumonia and the sepia picture was of him lying down as if he was asleep. Actually, in that picture he was dead but as a child he looked peaceful and sweet. You never noticed the picture at other times until you came down the stairs in the dark and then it seemed to illuminate. That was enough to move us swiftly right along to the kitchen. Night after night, throughout the whole summer you would find us sitting up whispering and playing cards until daybreak. One night, as usual, we were down in the kitchen. I guess we were talking a little loud telling each other spooky stories and giving gory descriptions of the food, as we ate it, when all of a sudden the lights went out and we took off running in all different directions. Then we heard Grandma, she had flipped the breaker switch and it worked. She got us all back upstairs and in bed.

I miss her dearly and feel her spirit with me every day. She talked of loved ones and spirits and it was a world that was not foreign to her. Because of her and these experiences it opened up the spiritual world to me early on and influenced a strong faith in a higher power that I carry with me today. Are there ghosts? I believe there are souls who for some reason at their death are unable to cross over and are caught between worlds. I also believe our loved ones and animals that have died come to visit. Some people are open to see them but most are not. We’re living in an age now where more of us are exploring this phenomenon. We’re no longer burning these gifted souls to the stake instead we’re intrigued and asking questions.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you ever had a strange experience you couldn’t explain? Given the saturation of the teachings of spirituality and energy it would be interesting to hear more discussion on this as people become freer to accept our connection to everything.

From the kitchen table – Pat
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How many of you have heard the lyrics to Bob Carlisle’s song “Butterfly Kisses”? It warms the heart of every girl and woman to feel their Daddy’s love as expressed in this song. What child wouldn’t laugh with glee and excitement as their Dad takes their hand and says, “Let’s go play?” The image a Dad portrays of strength and tenderness is held close in a daughter’s soul throughout her whole life. It’s what begins at birth and grows as she grows.

What started me thinking about father and daughter relationships was something I read from Marianne Williamson’s new book, The Age of Miracles. She says:

“As long as we think our biological parents fundamentally sourced us, we’ll feel the need to distance ourselves from them because on some level, we know it’s not true. When we see that in fact they’re simply fellow souls who gave us a tremendous gift by bringing us into this world, then (hopefully) did their best to take care of us and raise us right, we realize the significance of the debt we owe them. Understanding that God is our true Father/Mother, and all humanity our brothers and sisters, counterintuitively delivers us to a more, not less, respectful attitude toward our biological family. Knowing more deeply who they are in our lives – and who they aren’t – frees us to love them more.”

The relationship we have with our Dads transfers to the kind of spiritual relationship we have with Father God. What if this human relationship fell short, would it reflect how we look to our Creator?

Several of us in the blogging community have been talking about stories and if the stories we tell are truly serving us or not. I talked about stories in a different perspective in my last post, “Plain Talk” but as I read this passage from Marianne Williamson I realized that, in part, this is a story I’ve been telling. The story of seeing God through the filters of who I saw in my father. My Dad would show his love at times but had his own human issues to process and work through while he was alive and I translated those issues into the way I viewed God. I realized that I really didn’t know God as a Father. As I reflected on this, I felt a shift and the old beliefs and false truths dropped away and I felt the beginning of a new spiritual relationship with a loving Father.

What kind of relationship do you have with your Dad? Were you Daddy’s little girl? If you were, you were blessed with a joy all children should know. I hope you will come to realize, as I have, what a blessing it is to have a human father to impart their love in the best way they know how and for being a part in bringing me into this world. Though I know my Dad loved me, I shouldn’t let it determine the kind of love our Heavenly Father can express. Realize the pure love God has to share with you that it is everywhere – all the time – and picture Him giving you butterfly kisses after your bedtime prayer.

From the kitchen table – Pat
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In my earliest childhood memories at my Grandmother’s I can remember family gatherings around the kitchen table and it wasn’t just to sit down for a good meal. We sat down for a glass of lemonade or a cup a coffee and visit to catch up with what everyone was doing. Sometimes, late at night when I was little, my cousins and I would have to go up to bed and the adults would remain sitting around the table, laughing and recalling events and telling stories. I wanted to be a part of it then and I do now. I carry the feel of that gathering with me throughout my entire life. It seems when people get together like that around something as simple as the kitchen table is when the barriers go down and something real emerges. It isn’t so much what is being said as it is the energy and the connection everyone has with one another. The conversation takes on a life of its own and you don’t know where it will end – it is like this invisible force takes all of you on an adventure.

To me this exemplifies my connecting roots; it’s when I feel most comfortable being alive. I think this is a place where, if we allow ourselves to participate, our authentic selves are truly revealed and accepted. It’s like Ram Dass explains in his book Still Here where he says,

“This is an opportunity for people to share their own wisdom and to contribute it to the collective group wisdom. Many people flower in the richness of this process, as the group becomes aware of how each person holds some part of the complex mosaic that is elder wisdom.”

Stories are told and the lives of generations of people are kept alive by the conversations at gatherings similar to sitting around the kitchen table. For the youth, as we listened to the adults, we learned about our ancestors, what they did and how they lived. As time went on, I had my own stories to tell and I passed them onto my own children. Before the printed word, stories were the only means of communication.

Christine OKelly in her recent posting in Self Made Chick, “How I Ditched My Job and Never Had to Come Crawling Back” asks, “What do you do today that is “second nature” that others would gladly pay to know?”, which is an interesting topic alone to ponder. I thought about that for myself and what I came up with is what Stephen Hopson is doing in his blog called “Adversity University” where he shares his personal stories. Immediately upon reading his story called, “How I Almost Let FEAR Stop Me From Accepting a $4000 Engagement” I was transported back to that kitchen table. It had the same feel of authenticity as I read his personal accounts of how he arrived at the decision to accept the engagement and what he felt and how he struggled. I didn’t feel like I was alone in questioning myself only to experience and share my own personal accounts of how God showed me the way. Here was someone with a different set of situations sharing their own story on how they followed Divine guidance – and I felt connected.

Stories are how we relate to one another. They’re different and somehow the same and even though the time and circumstances are poles apart we can come together as if we had the same experience. This is the energy, the life of the adventure you are taken on when you share around a kitchen table or put it out there in the internet world. We feel the connection to one another through stories.

Looking at it from a different perspective than what I was talking about, Andrea Hess recently had an interesting post on her Empowered Soul Blog entitled, “What’s Your Story?” She talks about the stories we tell about ourselves – are they are true or not and how you use your story to either continue your pain or use it as an excuse to not live your life fully. I can see how stories are used to further our cause particularly if we want to draw attention. And Slade in an older post, expands on Andrea’s thoughts on how we use our stories in his Shift Your Spirits Blog post on how to release “The Stories That No Longer Serve You.”

It’s all good. That’s what stories do. They give us different perspectives so we can participate and offer our piece. It’s neither right nor wrong. It just is what it is. Let’s gather around the invisible kitchen table of the internet world and connect and allow ourselves to take the adventure of our lives.

From the kitchen table – Pat
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