New Year's Blessing: Keeping Your Vision

Happy New Year! May you be truly blessed in 2009!

For years I have promoted the importance of intention, of looking for where you want to go and can go, rather than where you don't want to go and can't go. I've oft employed the analogy of rock climbing. Managing intentions is a practical day to day skill. Not long ago I came across a practical example of intention management that is relevant in current times.

I have worked with a local non-profit clinic for nearly a decade. A few weeks ago, news of city budget cuts hit the clinic. The proposed budget cut could potentially remove about 40% of the clinic's operating budget. For many non-profit directors, this could be taken as a cue for closing the doors or severely reducing services. When I heard the news, I even fell into thinking perhaps this might mean an end of the clinic, if not a significant reduction in services.

Yet, instead of contracting and giving into a vision of failure, the executive director proposed plans for an expansion in services. She had reviewed the budget and found several years of ideas and plans that had been sitting on the wayside, sidetracked in the process of consensus. A range of potential revenues included tapping into state health care programs as well as simply asking for donations or sliding scale payment at time of service. Over the years, the demographic of clinic participants shifted towards free care for primarily homeless peoples. And yet there is a broader range of potential participants, many of whom could pay for service and might be interested in appointment based services rather than drop-in services. It's clear that the number of people who could use the clinic's services will certainly not diminish in the coming year. Perhaps the new model for the clinic will result in great income than the limited city funding. Now have no way of knowing how the decisions and new plans will pan out. But verily I tell you, if the director decided to cut back, or close, it would result in a reduction or elimination of services. Clearly the director was focusing on where she wants to go, rather than where she doesn't want to go. Meanwhile she also worked at asking the city not to violate their contract with the clinic.

This is the power of vision, and of intention. This illustrates great awareness in what background beliefs we surrender to... or choose not to surrender to.

Tales of scarcity abound in the collective consciousness. And yet if we transmute the stories, we can find great empowerment. Take energy. Allegedly last summer we were using oil as fast as it could be pumped out of the ground. Perhaps there is a limited amount of oil that can be mined from the earth. One way to transmute that is by doing meditation and prayer to shift to a reality of magical, unlimited supply, for if we indeed are in a world of consciousness, perhaps our Newtonian consciousness has been limiting us. Another way is by conservation, to look at how much we can do with what we have. The number of bicyclist commuters increased drastically in the last year. Another way to play with it, is to relax our intentions from oil supply to "energy supply". The USA is the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, so I have heard. If all the exercise treadmills in the gyms were hooked up to generate electricity, think how much we could produce. When I reflect on my travels about the world and look at people living simply, I realize how much excess we have in the USA. Think how much energy we could conserve by turning off all the appliances that run needlessly in the background...all the redundant clocks on the microwaves, dvd players, and computers. Or take the example of money. Even in a depression, there is still money flowing, it's just a matter of tapping into the flow. If everyone relaxed and gave a little bit, proportional to what they had, we could easily grease the economic wheels. We could also "relax" our view of economy to look at the wealth of homes, food, and community that we have; the money economy is more speculation than hard tangible reality. It's not as if there are fewer homes or fewer squash plants out there. If we look at what we call the basics in life: food, shelter, friends, family, and health, the current economic speculations have little to say, in an absolute sense. It's not as if there are less homes or food out there. Because of the games we play with money, there certainly are and may continue to be problems of flow and allocation. The more we fear, the more we inhibit the flow. But the more we exhibit generosity, the more we will stabilize our communities. The more of us that choose to embody the vision of abundance, the more we will live in that reality.

Just as personal illness metaphysically implies a time for personal change and transformation, a global "crisis" is a wake up call to look at what is out of alignment globally. It is a time to recreate, rebuild, and regenerate ourselves and paradigms. Metaphysically, the collapse of the World Trade Centers marked a change in corporate world trade. It is now time to rebuild world trade in a healthy manner. Global economy reflects our global consciousness around how we manage our households individually and collectively. We are going through growing pains as a world culture and world economy. It is a time to pray and be Unconditional Love, Joy, Abundance, and Empowerment and to pray, Be, and live a sustainable abundant economy.

And so my New Year's wish for you is that you courageously hold your highest visions well, that you Be sustainable economically in the highest sense of the word, rich in friends, family, food, and shelter, and, as always that you are blessed in Unconditional Love, Joy, Abundance, Empowerment, with a healthy dash of Fun as you experience the joys of the physical form.

You may gaze at an image charged with this blessing at http://soulempowerment.wordpress.com

Blessings,
DhamiBoo RTurnbull

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