Confirmation and validation

Okay. I think we’ve FINALLY settled on our South Louisiana weekend date! After some aborted April dates, we were planning it for May 6-8, but today were alerted to the fact that the 8^th is Mother’s Day. Sigh...SO, we’ve moved it to May 13-15, and that’s that! Ellen (Kennon) is sending out a “save the date” email to her list first thing in the morning and, of course, if you’re not on her list, consider THIS your official notification to save the date! (We’ll be sending out more info. as soon as we get it.) We’ve reserved the utterly gorgeous “Hemingbough” for the workshop, and the owner is excited about having it there since he is very spiritually attuned and conceived the idea of Hemingbough with just such events in mind. You just have to see how gorgeous it is! Be sure to look at the amphitheatre, where he thinks we should plan to have at least part of our day. I am in total awe. Obviously Spirit wants only the most beautiful setting for a workshop devoted to Joy! I know it’s a distance for many of you to travel, but the beauty of the area alone would be worth the trip—and I just know the learning experience we co-create together will be transformational! From what I can tell, there’s nowhere to stay in St. Francisville that isn’t a beautiful B&B (there are many)! So I guess pushing it back to mid-May gives you time to plan...

I’ve been giving some thought to outer stimuli and its role in our feeling Joy. So, because I learn best when I’m “extroverting,” I thought I’d work out some thoughts by writing about it here on the blog…

I’m thinking that when you receive some kind of stimulus that makes it easier to access Joy (“good” news, a compliment, etc.), what’s really happening is that what you are receiving is something that helps you let go of your ego doubts and reservations, or whatever ego issue is pulling you out of union with your Spirit. The external stimulus is acting as a kind of validation or permission to let go and feel/experience the energy that your Spirit is offering you continuously and unconditionally. For example—and I’m going to make myself vulnerable here—in putting this book out to the world, I felt powerfully that it was a potent energy tool and I felt clear that my Spirit was saying, “Yes, Julia. Nice job! This will work.” And I felt joyful! This strong feeling kept me going through all it took to get it into form (published) and out to the world. But I confess, there were times before I got external validation when I started to wonder. When I really started to tap into Joy in a larger way was when people started giving me the feedback I had been longing for—the validation that what I had “heard” from my Spirit was correct. So my question for myself was “why?” Why wasn’t it enough that I was hearing it from my Spirit? Why should hearing it from others help me to feel Joy, when Joy is your feeling response to being in the realm of your Spirit?

What I have figured out so far is that, of course, as we are able to let go of our ego needs more and more, and move our default setting higher up the frequency “ladder,” validation will have less and less effect, because we will already be there. BUT maybe in the meantime, Joy being catalyzed by outer stimuli is a “substitute pattern” until we get to greater conscious union with our Spirits. We—our ego-selves—don’t yet trust God-In-Us completely enough—or, trust our ability to hear God-In-Us clearly enough, to totally operate on that alone. Our egos need evidence, and so, having validation—that external evidence that our egos love so much—for our egos to feel better about, might be just enough to help us let our confusion and guard down so we can feel that what our Spirit is telling us is true—to help us rise above our ego, closer to Spirit where the true joy is. There’s a danger of addiction to needing the external stimuli (and, indeed, we are probably all pretty addicted to it!). But seeking to experience true Joy unconditionally by virtue of our proximity to our Spirits is what we're about, and I believe if we practice rising in frequency for the pure love of unifying with our Spirits, we will just naturally be in Joy more and more and more and the external stuff will lose its ability to move us toward Joy, or less-than-Joy!

I realize this might not be totally clear yet, so I will continue to work with this within myself and will elucidate further when the time comes!