We Need a New Model for Leadership.

My focus and reflection today is on the gift of life itself. In essence, life is nothing but awareness; and not just awareness, but self-awareness. We as human beings are not only aware; we have the capacity to be aware that we are aware, to be conscious of our consciousness. In this state of self-awareness lays our potential and power to direct our own future evolution and the future evolution of civilization.

We need a new model for Leadership. The old "survival of the fittest" culture no longer works for humanity; considering the overpopulation and over consumption of resources, the future might more correctly belong to a culture of “survival of the wisest". And perhaps wisdom becomes the new criterion for sustainable life on this planet. In saying that; I believe that wisdom is that knowledge which nurtures life in all its dimensions not only for us but also for the generations that follow us. The so called information revolution has not led to the wisdom needed to solve our world crisis in health and well-being.

Have we allowed our emotional and spiritual evolution to be outpaced by the evolution of our science and technology? Or is this perhaps simply another critical phase of transformation, whereby there is disaster looming on one hand, and on the other hand the potential to create a radical reorganization into something much greater than was conceived of before.

Mahatma Gandhi once asked, "Can you be the change you want to see in the world?"

In fact, there can be no social or world transformation unless there is our own inner transformation. In response to this question we might consider that there is no ‘you’ that is separate from the world. The gift of life, our own self-consciousness is our key to inner transformation and wisdom, and that in turn is how you will transform the world. To accomplish this we must first acknowledge that you are the world and that your transformation of consciousness will be the future of the world. For each of us; this self-transformation is the wisdom for our planet’s survival.

There are a few skills in self-awareness that I have learned and that I hope will serve you well no matter where your life and destiny take you.

Active Listening: Learn to be the best listener; listen with the senses of the body, the feelings of the heart, the logic of the mind and the stillness of your soul. As you listen deeply, reflect on the following questions: What am I observing? What am I feeling? What do I need in this moment? What is the best way to fulfill this need?

Open ours heart and bond emotionally with friends, family, professional colleagues and those we interact with daily. Understand that each of us is part of a web of relationships that is nurtured through love, kindness, compassion, empathy and joy. Emotional bonds create effective teamwork where nothing is impossible because we have a shared vision for service, contribution and success and because we complement each other’s talents and strengths.

Expand our awareness by knowing that all human beings have a hierarchy of needs that start with survival and safety and progressively expand through stages that include love and belonging, true self esteem, success as in the progressive realization of worthy goals, creative expression, higher consciousness and self-actualization. As you expand our awareness learn to harness our spiritual gifts that come in the form of the powers of intention, intuition, creativity, imagination & conscious choice making.

Remember the importance of action. Learn to be action oriented and know that there is no power higher than love in action. Remember that love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant.

Assume responsibility for our own well being in all its various facets. Your well being encompasses every aspect of our life - our career, our social interactions, our personal relationships, our community and our financial success. Take time to rest and play, to be with our family and friends, to exercise and nourish our body with healthy food.

Empower our self with true self-esteem. Learn to be independent of the good and bad opinion of others. Recognize the power of presence. Do not allow our self to be distracted. Know our life purpose and the contribution we want to make to society.

Know our true self. Our true self is not our self-image that is dependent on the labels we and others have given our self. Our true self is the innermost core of our being that is beyond all labels, definitions & limitations. Know that the human spirit is a field of infinite possibilities, a field of infinite creativity love compassion joy and profound equanimity. Remember that we will create peace only when we are peaceful and create a loving world only when we have learned to love.

Within us lies the potential for a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier and happier world. Remember that the goal of all other goals is to be happy. But what do we really know about happiness? Most people think that if they are successful in achieving their goals or have good relationships or if they are healthy, they will be happy. In fact the opposite is true. If we are a happy person we are likely to have healthy habits, and nurturing relationships and great success in life.

Choices for personal pleasure bring transient happiness, while selfless choices bring inner fulfillment through purpose and meaning; by making other people happy and nurturing meaningful relationships brings more permanent happiness. To really be happy we need to expand awareness and overcome our self-limiting beliefs and then choose selfless actions, or ways to be of service to others. This leads to true and lasting happiness and wisdom.

The most important thing I learned is to remember to be grateful. Gratitude opens the door to abundance consciousness. I send blessings to you on the hero's journey, the hero’s quest and may God speed……. Love and Light Christina

We are All Wealthy .... We Need to Spend Our Love

We are All Wealthy .... We Need to Spend Our Love

We have all have experiences with managing our bank accounts. We make deposits and withdrawals and as long as our deposits are greater than our withdrawals we have a positive balance. The more we have in our account, the greater degree of freedom we have to try new things and to create new experiences.

On the other hand if we make more withdrawals than deposits, not only do we not have money in the bank but our freedom is severely limited and we might also owe other people money and feel the pressures of having to pay back these monies. We are forced to do less, to limit our expenses and perhaps even increase the hours we work. Our freedom is limited.

Our relative freedom of movement depends on how we manage our bank account and the same relationship is true between our free will and our cosmic bank account. Consider that our cosmic bank account is a record of all our thoughts, words and actions. It is the depository of all the efforts, improvements, talents and abilities we’ve developed, as well as everything we have learned. It’s another way of describing the morphogenetic field or the causal body.

To build a healthy balance sheet, our deposits are selfless, altruistic thoughts, words and actions; and our effort to develop and improve physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Our deposits are all our efforts to develop spiritual discrimination, discernment and will power. Love is our greatest deposit.

Our withdrawals are our selfish thoughts, words and actions, the harm we’ve done to others, and the hours we wasted in laziness, our lack of self-development and our failure to develop discrimination and will power. Hate, anger, bitterness, jealousy, fear and selfishness are all withdrawals.

We need to make efforts towards the life and goals that we desire and value. Our freedom in choosing is not limited, but the results which we will obtain are limited by our effort and will power. For example, we can resist the experiences which our cosmic bank account sends us on a moment to moment basis. We may reject an event believing it is a mistake or an injustice and we can doubt the fairness and injustice of the cosmic accountant and blame him for not dealing fairly with our cosmic account.

We can become depressed; feeling weak and helpless, a victim of unjust external forces, believing that what has happened or is happening to us is the result of an accident or unjust God. Or we can realize that whatever happens or ever will happen to us in our life will always be exactly in harmony with our cosmic bank balance.

We can ask for guidance as to how to react to these events and situations in the most effective way in order to grow spiritually and improve our account balance. My favorite question is, “What would love do now?” We can accept each experience as an opportunity for self-knowledge, growth and self- improvement. There is a gift in every experience and we must develop our spiritual nature, to find the wisdom of the gift.

The collective Humanity needs each of us to build our individual spiritual bank accounts and as we learn to merge the individual will with that of the Universal will, the ego will have been diminished, the accounts balanced and strong; and we will experience true freedom.

The important thing to remind ourselves of is that we need to spend this wealth (love) to all those around us and further within our communities and out into our world so we can all live in peace and freedom; so that we can all live open, loving, and joyful lives. We do this through acts of kindness, understanding, compassion and love.

Life is soft, simple, easy, and each of us has something special to contribute to the whole. May we all become wealthy and may we all spend this love freely and wisely.… Love and light Christina

Something Else....Kati Alo

Dear Friends,

I would like to announce the launch of a loving project of mine which has been in development for the last 2 1/2 years. The company is called Kati Alo. “Kati Alo” in Greek means “something else”. Visit us www.katialo.org and please share this post with your family and friends. The site is being launched today as a soft launch, only supporting Canada right now and to observe any glitches that might come up on the site, however we do have plans for expansion to other countries.

Our mission statement is to provide FREE and good clothing to those who are less fortunate and to rethink how we clothe ourselves and our family and do it on-line from the convenience of our homes. Kati Alo was founded with a co-operative spirit and with a conscious mind set and we discovered a better way for our members to combat the rising cost of clothing while simultaneously minimizing unnecessary waste not to mention the toxic footprint that is becoming a great concern to the health of our planet. We call this conscious consumerism. We hope you will join us in this effort.

We believe it’s important to show others, especially future generations through example, that consumerism doesn’t have to rule our lives. What we already own is valuable to us and to others. The need for recycling in this age of toxic waste is more important than ever. That’s a big part of our mission.

“How much clothing is thrown away every year?”
Wiki answers: “85% of recyclable clothes are being needlessly thrown out.” It’s worth noting here, that clothing waste is also at record levels. Canadians average about 15 lbs. of textile waste (clothes, bedding, etc.) annually. Another article that we researched agreed that 15 pounds of textile waste per family is tossed in landfills and it sounds crazy, but 90% of this clothing is perfectly good. Yet people keep buying new stuff.

For every trade that takes place on our Canadian site, we donate money to the David Suzuki Foundation towards the Blue Dot movement for their extraordinary efforts in helping to create a sustainable healthy environment.

Kati Alo is positioned to go global and is already busy translating the site into other languages. We are currently looking to partner/license with someone for the US market which will be launched later this year. We are already partnered for launching Australia and New Zealand, and Greece in the spring/summer of 2017. For any interested individuals in the USA or other countries, who wish to become part of the project, contact us by email: info@katialo.org

I give my sincere thanks to the Kati Alo team, their dedication, patience and persistence has been appreciated. I also give thanks to our early members who signed on during the beta testing phase and helped to uploaded many beautiful boxes of clothing.

It’s easy and it’s fun! Thanks for your support.

https://katialo.org/katialo/

Acceptance and Effort

Christina Reeves

 June 13, 2016 · 

 

Acceptance and Effort
Some of us are seeking continuously and dynamically to improve the quality of life for our self and others, while at the same time, we need to remember to accept at every stage the results of those efforts. We need a delicate balance of making efforts to improve ourselves and our surroundings and at the same time, accepting ourselves and the results of our efforts at every stage of that process.

Learning to accept and love ourselves and others despite our faults, weaknesses, habits and mistakes is a powerful means for healing ourselves and others. We need to transform any feelings of isolation and loneliness, mistrust, misunderstandings, competition, antagonism and the whole series of health destroying emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, bitterness, resentment etc. These negative emotions build up a personality complex of their own, and grow out of the control destroying our health and relationships. By developing more deeply rooted feelings of security and self-worth, we enable ourselves to understand, forgive and love others and ourselves in more and more situations.

We are all souls in a process of evolution. We are all controlled by our ignorance and fear, which cause us to function in less than perfect ways. Thus, it is logical to accept and love ourselves and others even though we are not perfect and make mistakes.

Some of us are seeking to improve our selves or our health, relationships, economic situations, professional position, life in general, or spiritual awareness and we might be seeking to improve the same for specific others or society as a whole. Sometimes when we are absorbed in such efforts we naturally become attached to succeeding and when we do not or until we do, we feel a tension and often reject ourselves and feel inferior because we have not yet succeeded.

Others of us are complacent and uninterested in improving ourselves, our lives or society. We have stopped growing. We prefer to remain in our old familiar situations – even if they are unpleasant and painful – rather than to change and move on into the unknown – even when that holds the promise of greater happiness, peace and love.

Our destiny is to change, evolve, grow and improve ourselves and the world around us until we become perfectly harmonious, beautiful and powerful beings. The force of evolution will never allow us to rest. We can ignore it for periods of time, but eventually life events and situations will force us to awaken and emerge from our slumber.

Being attached to any result inner or outer experience, for ourselves or others is a major source of anxiety, tension and conflict with ourselves and others. This attachment also often acts as an obstacle to success. We need to learn to accept ourselves at each stage of this effort exactly as we are and also to accept our life situation as it is until we are able to change it.

One major life lesson is to free ourselves from the beliefs that cause us to be dissatisfied with ourselves and what we have. When we are seeking to improve ourselves because we believe that we will then be more worthy and more accepted and respected by others. Such a motive is based on the illusion that our self-worth depends on how others perceive us or on some other social programming concerning self-worth, security, freedom and happiness etc.

Thus there will be times, when we will need first to feel worthy and secure within ourselves and our lives as we are and then proceed to make such changes. So the question is how can we combine these two aspects of evolution – effort and acceptance?

Sometimes we fail to understand that many people who we perceive as lazy, irresponsible or negative and even immoral have in fact two of their "emotional legs" broken. They may have seriously impaired emotional legs of "inner security" and feelings of "self-worth".

Their insecurity and feelings of self-doubt cause them to behave in negative ways. We, too, might be such persons who have had their inner strength handicapped by unpleasant childhood experiences. Thus we would do well to understand and love ourselves and others even when we are not able to be who we would like to be.

Accepting ourselves does not mean that we do not recognize and admit our mistakes and weakness and seek to improve ourselves and free ourselves from those obstacles so that we can manifest our inner potential on all levels. And accepting others does not mean that we do not assertively explain to them the types of behavior that we need from them. We simply hold a sacred space for others when using our voice to express what we feel are our needs, and we can do so without sacrificing tenderness. 
Balance is the key that unlocks the door of peaceable coexistence and if it is to be an affirmative force in our lives, it must be tempered with wisdom and committed to the path of peace. 
 ……. Love and Light Christina

Kindness is Our Loving Spirit in Action......

Kindness is our loving Spirit in action......

The greatest joy the Spirit knows is to share its light and love with others. Unlike the ego –which is driven by the question, “What’s in it for me?” Spirit feels complete and wants to share its satisfaction with as many as possible. To share our spirit with another is one of the most healing and empowering experiences we can create.

Kindness is our loving Spirit in action; it is the act of our Divine nature to take over and lead our lives. When we are kind, we embody this nature and use it to feed and fuel the light in our world.
To be kind is to live with grace, dignity and elegance. It means taking an interest in life and caring about it enough to make it better for us and for others. It’s a powerful and profoundly self-loving choice because the kinder we are to others, the more love and kindness will return to us.

One of the best ways to be kind is not to stir up the emotional waters of others. When we rouse someone else’s emotions causing stress, anxiety, defensiveness, worry and fear to erupt from that person’s ego, we create some of the most painful vibrations to course through our nervous system as well as set these turbulent waters into motion in others and we often do this in such subtle ways that we aren’t even aware we are doing it.

Being kind takes discipline and only flows with ease if we are committed to loving and living our Spirit over our ego. In fact, one way we can definitely tell whether we are disconnected from our Spirit is to notice if we are being unkind. The Spirit is sensitive and aware of the Divine in all, so it chooses only to be loving and caring. To act in an unkind way only appeals to our false, impatient ego self. To be genuinely kind to others we must first be kind to our self. If we are insensitive and impatient with our self our internal vibration will be stressed and resentful and this will ripple out towards others in our life. To be kind to our self is to value and love our Spirit and fuel our inner light.

Kindness is a choice to honor the Divine in all, including our self. This action from awareness takes practice until it becomes a habit and we have the will and discipline within us to develop the habit of kindness, easing the harshness of life and feeding our Spirit.

Another basic aspect of kindness to self is to create and honor healthy boundaries and to be clear and direct in communicating them to others. Many of us were taught that we have no right to personal boundaries and that saying no or respecting our own needs is selfish. Fortunately, that old school of thought and programming of self-sacrifice is starting to dissipate, and we are now learning to be clear to ask for what we need without hesitation or guilt. When we live with healthy boundaries and we feel free to express them, we create the opportunity to connect with people honestly, without confusion or manipulation. Everyone feels safer and more grounded.

Another aspect of kindness to self and others is simply pacing our self and managing our life and our affairs in a realistic timetable so that there is no rush and we can relax into life leaving the stress and entering the Spirit of grace. This is love in action. It is the accelerant for our soul’s desire to grow and expand our peace. Slow down, relax and allow quality rather than quantity to be our highest goal in life. Kindness is less doing and more of an allowing. It allows mistakes, it allows time and patience. It allows encouragement and forgiveness. It allows us all to pursue our life path without shame and fear. It allows the dignity of Spirit to lead us in life. Know that simple kindness begets kindness and ripples into the world like the waves in the ocean.

May we all allow ourselves more kindness and afford more of it to others. It is the one self-loving expression of Spirit that keeps on giving. Love, Light and Blessings ……Christina