Tag: soul

You Were Born Shining!

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
Claim your own life. Your soul knows what it wants from this lifetime. So does your heart. Your life plan is imprinted in every cell of your physical form. If you pause quietly for a moment or two, you can hear your inner wisdom speaking. It will guide you steadfastly to the destiny that awaits you.

Don’t think about it; just listen. Be silent and receive the download of God’s plan for you. You were born with it; it’s in your genes. You breathe it in and out every moment of your day. The key is to stop distracting yourself with the cacophony of other voices all around you, and pay attention to your own voice within. No one else knows you as well as you. When you align with the inner truth of your being, that truth lives through you into the world. You begin to sparkle and shine with authenticity.

Then you no longer need try to copy someone else’s lifestyle or follow the 10 quick steps to success in all those self-help books and articles. Success, in truth, is just being you. That’s why you’re here and why there is no one else exactly like you on Earth. Your soul knows this. You have a sacred responsibility to be your own true self, not a half-hearted imitation of someone else’s idea of what it means to be human.

We live in a culture that tells people they need an expert motivator or life coach to show them how to plan and live their best lives, but that just isn’t true. Times are changing. Towers and platforms are collapsing, and collaborative circles are forming in their place. Individually and together we are finding our own way to freedom of expression in the world. Within each of us is emerging wisdom that will guide us as we move out of the shadows and into the light.

Don’t unquestioningly follow anyone else’s well-intentioned advice, even that of a gifted spiritual teacher or advisor. Yes, there are individuals with great wisdom in the world, and they can remind and inspire us with their thoughts and presence. However, we don’t really need intermediaries between ourselves and our own lives, between ourselves and God. Because we are God, in human form, and we carry the wisdom of the universe within our consciousness, if we but open to it. The energy of transformation in the world is speeding up everything now, including our own evolution into highly aware, super-connected human-divine beings.

So take a deep breath and inhale the sweet fragrance of your own inner essence. You are so much more than you give yourself credit for. Every one of us is. The world around us often makes us feel smaller in our own eyes because of misguided societal ideas about how to live and ways to achieve worldly success. Many who follow this path are miserable because they are out of touch with their inner spirit. Don’t make the mistake of thinking superficial impermanent “achievements” are the real deal. To live your inner truth, your inner beauty, is the real achievement in life because that connects you to others and makes you one with the universal soul of humanity.

Look within yourself and discover your own uniqueness. Live the dream of infinite possibility that is you. No one else on Earth can do that for you. It’s why you were born. The entire universe is gently smiling on you and encouraging you to just be yourself. That is the gift that only you can give to everyone in your life and to the greater world as you pass through it with the light of inspiration shining in your eyes.

 

Life’s Essential Truth: Impermanence

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger

Recently, a dear friend told me that he is moving back to California, which he had left two years before for Florida, where we both live now. (This, only a few months after I moved here myself from Massachusetts.) A week later, I received news that a long-time friend in Boston had died of cancer. Hellos and goodbyes fill my life these days. Friends and family passing to and fro in my experience and my memory like vivid but ephemeral spirits. And I myself am moving with the flow of my own life’s journey, loving and letting go again and again.

Through the years, as I live through cycles of beginnings and endings repeatedly, I am discovering that one of the deepest truths in life is impermanence. Everything is born, and everything dies: experiences, thoughts, emotions, flowers, trees, birds, stars—each breath we take and we ourselves. Humans embody impermanence within their very existence here on Earth. We are born and we die, just like everything else we experience within our lifetimes. That can feel like both a curse and a blessing, but it is the basis of our very humanity, our evolution as individual souls.

My own experiences of joy and connection followed by sorrow and seeming loss have over time shown me that it’s all in how you perceive it. And our perceptions are always changing. What remains unchanging is change. Kind of a paradox, but it will guide you to inner peace and acceptance at the deepest level if you allow it to. At least that’s what I am finding. It is what my passage through life has given me, and I am grateful. I am learning, gradually, to let go of attachment to outcomes of any kind. That is freedom; that is how your soul experiences your life.

The idea of impermanence can at first feel frightening, but over the space of a lifetime’s experiences, it begins to feel like the key to all wisdom. Let go of expectations, attachments, plans, wishes, wants, mental machinations and emotional grasping. Let go of everything and just BE in each precious moment, free of everything that holds you to one particular outcome. Experience what is unfolding before you with an open heart and soul. This is what it’s like to live limitless possibility, to “hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour” (William Blake). Many, like Blake, who have traveled this path before us have reached this moment of illumination that takes them beyond one lifetime into the timeless expanse of being, which is soul, which is God. We are here to do the same.

As I live my life, as I grow older year by year, I find that deepening awareness and wisdom rise from my soul like mist in an open field on a summer’s morning. And I see it happening to others all around me. I feel blessed to live at an extraordinary time of collective spiritual expansion and expression, foreseen for millennia. As we come to recognize that we ourselves are God in human form, we realize that we carry divine wisdom within us. When we see the transitory experiences of life as the gifts that they are and receive and release them without attachment, we begin to love each day and everyone in our lives completely and whole-heartedly. We are no longer held back by regret or fear. We are fully present, fully alive. We are living the wisdom of impermanence.

Seeing God’s Face in an Orchid

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
Does God have a face? Absolutely. But not just one—an infinite number. As many faces as there are humans, animals, birds, and insects on Earth. As many faces as there are trees, flowers, bushes, rocks, and sand particles. As many faces as there are mountains, deserts, plains, oceans, rivers, and glaciers. Cells, molecules, and atoms. And then there’s the entire universe with every planet, star, asteroid, and constellation a different face of God. You can’t count the facial manifestations of God in the cosmos because God is infinity itself.

This morning as I watered my plants on the lanai, I looked into the variegated purple-and-white face of an orchid I had recently bought. Orchids are new to me as a gardener. In Massachusetts, it wasn’t an option I considered. Here in Florida, they thrive in the year-round warm weather. They have an exotic feel to them, and I still am in awe of their exquisite other-worldly beauty and almost-human facial features. Something made me pause and study every detail of this orchid’s “face” until I felt I was gazing into the very heart of creation, all in one flower. This was the face of God. And the gift was that, with tears in my eyes, I recognized that unique expression of divinity before me and within me simultaneously.

Moments like this one are powerful reminders of all the ways that God expresses beauty in this world. Each flower, each bird, each butterfly, is an emissary of delight from the Divine. We humans are the recipients of this incredible limitless bounty every day of our lives. How could we walk by all these beautiful manifestations of love in the world and fail to see them as miracles? We lose our way and forget. But now is the time of awakening on this planet. A time to recognize the sweet presence of spirit that surrounds us at all times and to be grateful. Indeed, to live each moment of our lives as a prayer of gratitude for all we are given. Life can be painful, yes. But it’s also heavenly. One flower, one birdsong, one infinite blue sky, can turn your day around and make life feel livable again. The beauty of the Earth can uplift our souls at unexpected moments.

Yesterday, on my morning walk, my body was feeling listless and tired because I hadn’t slept well. Just when my thoughts began to take a turn toward sadness, three huge pileated woodpeckers flew by me, calling loudly, and landed on a tree branch above me. These birds are 15 inches tall with striking black-and-white crested heads—you can’t see them without stopping to stare. Immediately, I felt excited energy race through me, and I stood there smiling in sheer delight as I gazed upward. I knew God had sent me a reminder of life’s wonders at the very second I needed it.

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger

There have been so many times when I am outdoors walking quietly somewhere in a natural setting and I feel the spirit of God rise within, filling me with a profound love that seems to light the world around me. Everything sparkles with vibrant energy, and I am uplifted and renewed. At those moments, I can feel Mother Earth herself moving in synchronicity with the stars, and I know this is why I was born—to see this light and be it in the world myself. Every one of us is here for this. We are God’s orchids, embodying the rainbow colors of divine light, so that the planet itself shines brighter in the cosmos.

 

What Does Unconditional Love Really Mean?

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
We hear the term unconditional love a lot these days, especially in spiritual circles. But what does it mean exactly? At first glance, it seems to mean loving without conditions. Yes, it is that. Yet it is more than that. As I live my life, I begin to see other levels to it. Something that involves seeing clearly someone’s human vulnerabilities and seeming faults as well as their divinely sweet magnificence–and loving them for all of that. Holding it all in my heart at the same time, seeing it as part of this particular individual’s soul journey. And seeing myself that way too. I’ve found that viewing everything as perfectly lovable in just one other person unlocks the ability to do the same for everyone in my life—and then for everyone on the planet.

That is why we are here, to do just that. Our greatest challenge and our greatest gift is to love and be loved in return—unconditionally. When we do so, we form a sweet circle of reciprocity that lifts everything on the planet to a higher vibration. Vibration is the key, because everything in the cosmos is energy. When we up-shift the energy within us, the world reflects back to us a higher vibration. And love is the highest vibration of all. It dissolves the fear or negativity that may be keeping you (and everyone around you) stuck in one place. Love yourself, love another, love everyone—no holds barred. That’s the sequence of unconditionality. That’s the global shift we are now a part of.

I recently felt this happen within me quite powerfully with someone I have known for years. I thought that I already loved them unconditionally, but I found that I still held certain life-path desires for them. When I suddenly became aware of this, and then consciously and intentionally released those expectations, I felt my heart open wider as I surrendered everything to God’s greater wisdom. Even the most well-meaning wishes for someone else’s life can be an unconscious limitation for them, as well as a limitation on love itself. Because unconditional love is not about the depth or strength of the love but rather it is total allowing, complete acceptance. Compassion. Within that framework, it doesn’t matter what someone does or doesn’t do on their life journey; you still love them completely.

This is soul-level love. This is the way God or the Divine Mother loves. The mind doesn’t enter into it at all. This love is pure heart, pure soul. A sacred open embrace. And this is the unconditional love that the new Planet Earth is moving into. The hatred, judgment, fear of difference, self-loathing, abuse, and violence that we thought was the only reality are gradually crumbling as the light of unconditional love shines fully on them. When our shadow side is spotlighted, we see the truth of who we are behind the shadow. That truth is unconditional love: the shining diamond at the core of our being. We were born with it, and now it can be fully seen and experienced as the shadow falls away.

Our so-called “flaws” make us sparkle even more. We are beautiful in our humanity and our divinity, and when each of us can see the full spectrum of beauty in everyone we meet, there will no longer be a distinction between Heaven and Earth. That is oneness; that is unconditional love.

 

Accentuate the Positive, My Mother’s Gift

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
A song written and recorded in 1944 that was popular with my parents’ generation had the refrain: “Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative.” Those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II often developed one of two responses to life: fear or hope, or perhaps a mix of both. You can see hope in songs like this one. And I definitely saw it in my mother when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Without fail, she always looked for the positive in any situation, person, or event. If someone behaved in an unpleasant manner, my mother’s response was inevitably, “She means well.” And then she would find something nice to say about the person.

She looked for the good in the world around her on a daily basis—the beauty of the sky, birdsong in the backyard, music and poetry, my dad’s sense of humor. She framed life this way. It wasn’t just a coping mechanism for the times; it arose from deep in her soul. I came to realize this fully later in her life when she was hospitalized and had to have a serious operation. I flew to my Illinois hometown from San Francisco, where I lived at the time. I sat by her side for three days and nights, our hands inseparably clasped in a lifetime of mother-daughter love. I watched her face, pale and drawn with pain, light up when she turned and looked at me: “You’re always there,” she whispered.

And I watched her eyes scan a basically ugly hospital room and finally light on the one thing she could honestly see beauty in: “Isn’t that a lovely walnut door?” That was the essence of my mother. That was who she was at the deepest level, beyond pain, beyond medication, beyond hospitals. From her soul, in every waking moment of her life, she looked around to find beauty—and she always found it. This was her legacy to me; I carry that positivity in my genes. I carry the memory of her waking me each morning with “Good morning, merry sunshine” and then at breakfast: “Another beautiful day!” From the beginning of my life, I was imprinted with that ability to love life fully under any circumstance.

My mother didn’t live a life free of all pain and difficulty; like all of us, she faced challenges. But she lived a life of appreciation and gratitude for the moments of love, beauty, and connection that are always present if we but open our eyes (and hearts) to see them. My mother lived with an open heart. She found happiness in loving the people and the world around her. At this time of great change and great challenge on the planet, I look to her wisdom to sustain me and uplift me through the rest of my life. I know I was born for a reason, and I know she was my mother for a reason. There is an ancestral line of positive energy that runs through our lives. She passed it on to me to sustain me—and as a reminder, so that I never forget that we all have positive energy within us.

We are each alive at this key transformational juncture in world history to remind each other of that. No matter what disturbing events in the external world show up each day, we still carry hope in our hearts and souls. We can listen to the voices that say “We shall overcome” and “All you need is love” instead of those that speak separation and hatred into the world. Whatever is occurring now is part of our evolution, as a species, as a planet, as a universe. We are not done yet. There is always, always possibility and positivity within us. We can breathe that into the world in all that we say and do. And that becomes our legacy of love…