Tag: awakening

Flower Child

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

I went to San Francisco. And yes, I wore flowers in my hair. I was one of those young beaded, bell-bottomed kids who moved to California in the late 1960s, drawn by the irresistible call for “Love, Peace, and Flower Power.” 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famous San Francisco “Summer of Love.” Hard to believe that that much time has passed. In some ways, I still feel the same inside as I did when I left the Midwest for California, suitcase packed with utopian dreams. I still have those dreams. And I’m still a flower child at heart.

During 1967’s Summer of Love, it didn’t really matter where you were—that powerful energetic vibration affected you. In Michigan, I was preparing to leave for six months studying in France, but San Francisco was where I longed to be. All summer, I stayed up late into the night painting psychedelic posters and listening to Dylan, Donovan, and the Beatles. My longing continued right through the fall and spring at school in Europe (a French version of Scott McKenzie’s song about San Francisco seemed to be playing everywhere). Finally I reached the promised land in 1968. Was it all I hoped it would be? Yes, and more. It wasn’t exactly utopia, but it was a beginning. It brought me new adventures, new friends, and inner transformation, and that was just what I wanted.

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

The key component was the Dream. All of us who headed west in those years were dreamers, free spirits awakening to a global movement for universal love, peace, freedom, and radical change that is still streaming live through this world today. California was/is a state of mind, the psychic birthplace of possibility, of expansion outward beyond limitation. I was one of so many who undertook that journey. Some lost their way, but others, like me, are still journeying, still choosing love over fear every day of our lives.

California has felt like “home” to me for most of my adult life. Even though I grew up in Illinois, it is on my return trips to California that I begin to cry when I look down from the plane and see the landscape and ocean beneath me. I loved my years there. It was a time of transition, from small-town girl to flower child/activist in the larger world. I was a beginner, innocent in many ways, learning about life, love, poetry, politics—and figuring out who I was within all those frameworks. Of course, like others of my generation, I never wanted to be just one thing, live just one place, so after a few years on the West Coast in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s, I moved to the East Coast for graduate school. San Francisco called me back once again for several years after that, but then I returned to Boston. Since then, I visit California; I don’t live there physically.

Still, my soul is somehow timelessly connected to California. Perhaps I lived there in a past life, in addition to those key years in the 60s and 70s. Now, when I return, I stand looking out at the Pacific Ocean, and my mind quiets, my spirit rests. My heart recognizes “home.” The home that transcends time and place and links up with something intangible in the universe, in myself. The home that I found among those sweet youthful souls with visions of a better world. I will always be one of them.

 

Freedom, Justice & Radical Love, 2016

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot and killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The grand jury decided not to indict the officer. It’s a story that has repeated itself again and again, with variations, in the two years since then, and indeed throughout this nation’s history. The daily lives of people of color continue to be defined by racism, violence, and injustice, and the dream of an equal, just society has not been realized. When will black lives matter enough that the killing stops? In the past week, the violence has been escalating: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Then five police officers shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Guns everywhere that divide us even more. Anger, fear, hatred, grief. How do we bridge this huge chasm that separates us from one another?

Yes, we have evolved and grown in many ways, but the tipping point that would shift momentum toward completely ending separation and “otherness” has yet to be reached. It gets down to the fact that people carry silent preconceptions about other people based on race, sex, age, and gender all the time, even if they don’t believe they do. Racism and all the other “isms” have permeated our collective unconscious mindset and inform how people see and act in the world. What we need is a radical awakening and heart opening into conscious awareness that at the level of our souls, there is no difference between any of us. We are one. Our hearts and souls need to supersede the collective mindset.

How does this happen? Can it happen? If ever there was a time in which it could occur, it is now, when global change and transformation are rocking our planet. It’s up to us to remember the dream of freedom and justice for all and live it. To speak up, reach out, and fill our lives with radical love for all people everywhere. The truth is that there is no “other.” We are one consciousness living the illusion that we are separate. Our minds tell us we are individuals, alone, pitted against everyone else for survival. Our hearts and souls see only oneness, only Being that takes a multiplicity of physical forms.

The “costumes” we wear in our lifetimes are temporary. Beneath our transient skin color, gender, and physicality is an unbroken stream of consciousness that fills all living creatures equally. Whether you call it Spirit, Source, God, or Infinite Intelligence, something beyond physical form ties us all together on this Earth. It is this living spirit within that moves us to march in the streets for human rights and to join together in compassion and caring. When our hearts are fully open, it becomes impossible to see another human being as separate from us. The world becomes a mirror, and we see our soul’s reflection in everyone we encounter.

It is way beyond time to put down all weapons and at last be grateful for the miraculous gift of sharing this world with so many other extraordinarily diverse yet infinitely similar human reflections. Let’s end all Fergusons and Dallases by making “love your neighbor as yourself” a reality in our lives. Love everyone, even those you think you disagree with. Sound impossible? Think you can’t do anything to change the status quo? Don’t think, just love, radically, one person at a time. True lasting freedom and justice arises from the love that connects every human heart.

 

Let Your Soul Shine

Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2016 Peggy Kornegger

The energy of this new year 2016 feels so powerful. I was completely flattened by it in January. And then uplifted to a new level of opening and expansion in February. To me, 2016 feels like the year when the cookie-cutter constraints of our social programming fall away, and we stand fully embodying our soul’s presence in the physical world. We emerge from the shadows of fear and uncertainty and experience the power of our own true essence. Courage and inner vision will carry us forward into a new paradigm of Being on this planet, one in which full-out soul expression is celebrated instead of stifled. Our liberated minds and bodies will support our complete creative unfolding. Now is the time for each of us, in our own special way, to play the music of the spheres for all to hear.

So sing your song, write your book, share your vision, dance your unique soul self into unlimited being. Give yourself over to everything that is longing to be expressed through you. This is your life—claim it. Live it to the farthest edges of possibility. Together, we are shedding old externally imposed self-images and stepping into a new world of infinite expansion at the soul level. The old separations between body, mind, and spirit are dissolving. The deepest truth is that every part of you is sacred and filled with light. The curtain of illusion is falling away, and we see clearly who we are: eternal divine beings in human form. Shining, sparkling, embracing ourselves and one another with love and gratitude.

Faced with the world’s uncertainty and fear, we choose to walk bravely into the unknown, trusting in something greater that is carrying us forward into the flowering of our inner spirit. Let it happen. Don’t hold anything back. This very moment in eternal time is your moment, our moment. It’s why we were created and why we are here on this planet at this particular miraculous time of transformation. Let go completely of everything that has come before. It is a new planet, a new paradigm, and nothing is as it was….because we have changed. We are allowing the powerful energy flowing through us to completely shift our lives.

With each breath we take, we are blessed with a new beginning, a rebirth. May our collective breaths bring us all together in the deeper realization that we have always been one, and separateness and the judgments that accompanied it were just illusions. Within oneness, within the unbroken stream of light that is cosmic consciousness, there is no “other.” There is only love, infinite and unique manifestations of love. May we see that so clearly that we never forget again. May this be the year that we look into one another’s eyes and see stars of infinite magnitude—the reflection of our own shared brilliance.

So let the light of your soul shine. Let your spirit flower. Let nothing stand between you and your inner magnificence. It is the time of sweet awakening, of the full remembrance of who we are. In our hearts and souls, we always knew this day would come….

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway!

kornegger-loseyourmind-cover-front-final-150pxIf you don’t yet have a copy of my new book Lose Your Mind, Open Your Heart, here’s a chance to get one free. For one month, it is part of a Goodreads Book Giveaway. Enter to win a free signed copy! Ten winners will be chosen on August 19. Link: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/145991

Awakenings

Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2014 Peggy Kornegger
We live in a time of awakenings—people coming to a greater sense of who they are at the soul level, beyond the ego or personality self. Many spiritual masters throughout history (and, increasingly today, ordinary people) have experienced pivotal moments when they in essence “died” to themselves and awakened to a connection to something greater—God, the Divine, Source. The separate personality-self falls away, and an experience of oneness with All That Is moves to the fore. Sometimes these events involve an actual near-death experience, or individuals can feel like they are physically dying when they are not. Actually, it is the individualized self that is dying, allowing for the dissolution of all separation and the unimpeded flow of pure divine energy and unconditional love.

In these life-changing moments, people begin to live as their soul more than as their ego—a kind of death and rebirth in life. Radical awakenings do not have to be dramatic one-time events, however. Many individuals have a series of awakenings over many years, and this latter process is becoming more widespread now as our individual experiences spark other people’s, and the collective consciousness awakens itself through us. What has been called enlightenment can be instantaneous, gradual, or a combination of both, and we need to acknowledge the unique truths of our own evolving lives—and be open to awakenings that are ongoing, leading further and deeper into divine connection.

Looking back, I see a combination of experiences within my own life—in actuality, multiple phases of awakening, which continue to this day. At 18, I had a near-death experience (burst appendix) in a hospital in Italy on my first trip away from home alone. When I returned to the United States and began my freshman year of college, I felt as if my small-town-girl persona had died in Venice, and I had emerged newly born, trying to figure out who “I” was. From this identity crisis came an individual awakening within the larger generational awakening of the radical 1960s and 1970s. It was an extraordinary time that shaped so many of our lives and planted seeds of fledgling awareness. A sense of global transformation and magical possibility carried us forward into our lives.

Later in my life, I began to consciously explore spirituality as a way to understand life and death and address my own fear of eternity. When my parents grew older and eventually passed away, this search became even more compelling. Sitting beside each of them as they transitioned, I experienced another level of awakening: to an all-encompassing loving Spirit that softly enveloped my parents and me and connected our hearts. Several years after their deaths, when I first met spiritual teacher Panache Desai, I encountered this same divine presence in an even more intense way. It came directly through him and vibrationally shifted everything within me. At one of his gatherings, in deep meditation, I experienced myself as pure, intense inner vibration, my soul’s essence within the physical body—cells pulsating with an almost electric charge. It was an extraordinarily powerful opening to spiritual awareness. Frequently thereafter, I would feel the loving presence of the Divine, and it always brought tears to my eyes and shivers to my physical body.

Over the next few years, I kept moving forward, sensing there was more awakening to come but having no idea what that would mean. Eventually, I stood in a raw place of “not knowing,” letting go of mental questioning and attempts to figure everything out. Essentially, I embraced the “Great Mystery.” If Oprah had asked me, “What do you know for sure?” I would have had to answer, “Nothing.” Only mystery. Yet that mystery is everything—God her/himself, the Divine in infinite beingness. Indefinable. Our minds can’t know Spirit, but our hearts can experience it through our souls. This is the global awakening we are in the midst of, each of us affecting all those around us. In this amazing time of profound planetary metamorphosis, we are individually and collectively awakening to the sweet mystery of our own inner spirit. Together, we breathe soulful conscious presence into the world.