Posts Tagged ‘Berry Family’

Who knows what is going on in the larger collective?  Lots of folks claim to, but I tend to think that we each have a slice of the pie, rather than the whole pie….a peek at the global story through our own filters rather than a completely objective viewpoint.  My subjective experience is valid for me, but not necessarily the truth for everyone!

My subjective experience has been telling me that there has been some extraordinary energy moving through the collective these last few days.  What I’m hearing as I report in from my corner of reality is that many are feeling this larger wave of energy, but some experience it as very difficult and others very lovely.

Thursday is when I started to feel that rise begin…it feels to me like being in the ocean, out beyond where the waves break.  You can feel that a wave is coming because you get lifted off the bottom of the sea, and your body bobs up to the top of the lump that begins a wave, then you are dropped down and toes make contact again with sand.  The wave continues onward towards the shore, where it crests and crashes down, becoming one with the larger body of the ocean again.

Thursday some extraordinary things happened in my life.  My beloved husband confronted an oooolllllddddd habit passed down to him by his ancestry and brought it into consciousness, breaking the pattern and freeing himself (and us, his family).  When it happened, there was a palpable feeling of something having changed.  Our whole family felt it.  A few hours later, a professional opportunity came his way, literally dropped in his lap, which has invited more good feelings in our family. 

Then, Friday some folks looked at our house in Colorado, the one that’s been on the market for 1.5 years, and promptly feel it love with it and made an offer.  We signed the contract yesterday, the day identified by astrologers in the know as a profoundly lucky day of 2010 due to Jupiter and the sun being in alignment.

The current energy wave is intense, don’t get me wrong.  It’s not all sunshine and daisies; the recent earthquakes would indicate that there are folks who are in great distress as a result of the energy movement.  And I have been hearing that some folks are having difficulty navigating the current energy.  They feel anxious, pregnant, full, like they are ready to explode.  Sometimes it feels just plain bad, and we want to hide under a rock until it’s over.

I do believe that what is within is also without, and vice versa, so to me it makes sense that we would see manifestations in the physical as well as emotional worlds of the internal or invisible universal energy waves that wash through us.  I don’t think this is going to change; my sources tell me that these kinds of experiences are going to continue, and that the intensity will lessen a bit as we cycle through, until we get to the next wave. 

Are we being cleansed?  Are we being shown where we are putting energy that doesn’t serve us?  Are we getting the opportunity to trim out the deadwood and let go into a life that we are truly meant to live?  And why is it easy for some and not for others?  Is the difference that sometimes we cooperate with the flow of the energy and other times we cling to the rocks, refusing to let go into that larger life?  What keeps us attached to those habits and beliefs that threaten to take us under, even those that we love? 

My sweet husband has had direct information for 3 years (via myself and my invisible helpers) that his unconsciousness was causing a major energy drain on himself and our family, creating havoc and despair, putting him crossways to his own soul.  But he wasn’t ready to hear it until Thursday, and when he let it go, the energy wave that was building already bobbed him (and our family) up to the top of the wave, instead of holding us down at the bottom.  The relief and feeling of rightness is unmistakable.

So now we are coming through this wave…the full moon today feels like an apex to me, and perhaps things will smooth out a bit for awhile to allow the next wave to build. This will allow us time to integrate the changes that have been made during this last part of the cycle; the deadwood having been trimmed (don’t go trying to pick it up and stick it back on the trees!), we will hopefully find our ground and center in a new way.

"Under the Wing", photo collage by Dascha Friedlova, 2009

(Author’s note: It is interesting to me to see how my thoughts and writing style have evolved over years of time.  I see that there is still some use to the writings below, so offer them for your perusal.  Perhaps an updated version will follow!)

The Gift of Gratitude

How Giving Thanks Raises Our Vibration

By Licia Berry, 2004, originally published on www.liciaberry.com

The woman feels herself sinking into the familiar deep well of despair as she watches the nightly news.  She knows where this will go; she will be hit in the gut with absolute hopelessness, and in response she will find something to eat to fill the gnawing in her belly or she will pour herself a glass of alcohol to numb the pain.  Or, she will go upstairs to her bedroom and cry, wringing her hands over the state of the world, and fall asleep in tears.  This road is all too familiar to her; it goes nowhere good.  Then, something quietly dawns on her.  She hears a subtle voice; something tells her that she doesn’t have to choose this road, that there are others.  She makes a small move that begins to break the pattern she has lived over and over.  She goes into the room where her dusty sewing machine sits in the dark.  She pulls out a pattern she abandoned a long time ago and begins to sew, with devout attention and precious care, as if her very emotional well being depended on it.  She feels a bit better, a little at a time, then notices when two hours have flown by that she has been completely absorbed in her creative work.  She hasn’t thought about the horrific state of things for even a moment.  By making a leap out of the familiar, she has cut a new pathway.  She has made a new choice.  And the more often she takes the small step to do something different each time she goes into reaction about something, the easier it will be to have power over her response.

What happened when this woman made the choice to do something positive in the face of her despair?  Her body and mind were accustomed to going down a particular road…in fact; our bodies begin to expect us to go down certain path in the face of certain stimuli.  It is as if we train ourselves from an early age how to respond to emotional stimuli, mental challenges, physical difficulties, and even trauma.  But we always have the choice in how we respond, no matter how automatic our responses may feel.

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present — love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure — the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”
Author: Sarah Ban Breathnach

We all experience moments in our day when something unexpected arises, or we don’t achieve a desired outcome.  We can perceive these situations as negative, positive or neutral.  Our attitude towards the event is not pre-ordained or automatic, although it may feel that way due to its being conditioned in our bodies for our entire lives.  In actuality, how we respond is our choice.  When faced with a potential shift in our attitude, there arises a single moment of decision about how we will handle it, what I call a “choice-point”.  We can choose whether we will tumble down the rocky hillside of victimization, ending up bruised and battered at the bottom, or we can choose to look at the situation as a learning opportunity, asking ourselves questions like, “What is the gift in this situation?  What message has the universe brought to me?”  By examining the situation from a larger perspective, we realize that we do indeed have a choice about how we respond.  And if we do go down the victim road, we can always stop and focus on what we are grateful for to bring us back up.

Scientific studies have confirmed what the sages and mystics of earth’s history have been telling us all along.  Gratitude, prayer and love carry a high vibration, whereas despair, anger and fear carry a low vibration.  Our bodies carry vibrations that change with our thoughts and with the vibrations we encounter as we move through the world.  A person whose body is wracked with disease is suddenly cancer-free after several hundred people prayed for him. A partygoer may show up grumpy and feeling anti-social, but winds up giving up the grumps because everyone else at the party is having a good time.  I may intersect with a rude person in a store, whose vibration is quite low due to their anger.  My body’s vibration may fall into a lower state if I allow myself to be triggered by this person.  Or, I can consciously choose to respond to the situation with love and maintain a high vibration in the face of the rudeness.  If I am around this person long enough and I focus on maintaining my high vibrational state, the other person’s body will be affected by MY vibration.  By the end of our interaction, whether we have said anything to each other or not, his vibration may have risen to the point that he is not angry anymore. This is the principle of resonance.  In layman’s language, the principle of resonance says that when there are two differing vibrations, one will rate of vibration will soon resonate like the other or they will move towards each other and meet in the middle.  This can mean that a lower vibration cannot remain constant in a sustained field of higher vibration.

This principle of resonance is played out beautifully in our physical bodies in the phenomenon of kidney stones.  We know that kidney stones are hard little calcifications that have to be passed through the body or surgically removed.  However, a recent technology now uses very localized doses of high vibration, aimed at the kidney, to actually dissolve the kidney stones.  The kidney stones are reduced to their smallest particles and passed easily through the body.  We can think of this as an example of how a low vibration, no matter how solid it appears, can be changed by focusing high vibration onto it.

Another example of this phenomenon of changing the vibration of something that seems unchangeable is the study done in 1993 by the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy in Washington DC.  This National Demonstration Project to Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness brought approximately 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs to the United States national capital from June 7 to July 30, 1993. A 27-member independent Project Review Board consisting of sociologists and criminologists from leading universities, representatives from the police department and government of the District of Columbia, and civic leaders approved in advance the research protocol for the project and monitored its progress. The study, led by John Hagelin, PhD., showed a 25%-48% decrease in violent crime during the time period of the study.  The conclusion that can be drawn was that the high vibration of the 4000 meditators infiltrated the DC area, and that the low vibration of the aggression causing violent crime could not be sustained in the high vibrational filed created by the meditators.  (For more information on this study, go to http://www.istpp.org/crime_prevention/ )

A beautiful example of how our thoughts change vibration is evidenced in Dr. Masaru Emoto’s work.  He has documented, through remarkable photographic techniques, water’s response to positive and negative thoughts.  (Remember that positive feelings such as love, gratitude and prayer carry a high vibration, where as anger, sadness and fear carry a low vibration.)  In the case of a highly polluted river in Japan, the water photographs show a diffused, disorganized water molecule group.  When the very same water was blessed with prayer, the water formed exquisite, organized crystal shapes.  His research went further when he placed written phrases on bottles of distilled water and left them overnight.  Water responded to these phrases similarly; the water which sported the label “Thank You” formed beautiful symmetrical crystals, where as the water that carried the “You Make Me Sick” label responded with a discomforting display of pockmarked blobs.  As is evidenced in Dr. Emoto’s work, our attitudes and thoughts are reflected perfectly in the structural integrity of the water.  The really interesting implications of Dr. Emoto’s work lie in considering that human beings are more than 70% water.  If these thoughts affect a bottle of water so powerfully, how do our thoughts affect us and each other?  (See the website www.hado.net )

Even when some things may not be going the way we want, we can find other things in our lives that ARE supportive and be thankful for those.  And this will raise our vibration.

I was in a situation recently where I was reminded of this truth.    My family and I have been traveling now for almost a year in a motor home.  We recently encountered issues that have necessitated taking our home in to a dealership for repairs.  What was supposed to have been a simple overnight repair became a two-week ordeal.  Because we are living in the RV, we have been unable to access the things that we normally need to live our daily lives.  After a week of “not having a home”, I became triggered into feeling “homeless” and victimized.  While this would seem a reasonable response to the situation, I was miserable.  Life looked a whole lot less wonderful because of the state I was in.  I was in a low vibrational field of hopelessness, anger and depression.  After a few days of hanging out in this state, I remembered that I had other choices. I looked around me and was reminded that home is where the heart is; I have my beautiful family, we are together, and we are healthy and well.  AND, I was reminded that my Spirit is my true home, and that nothing can ever take that away from me.  Choosing not to identify with the low vibrational state, I slowly felt my perspective shift as I focused on how grateful I am.  It literally took me 10 minutes for my perspective to shift radically into feeling like I was basking in a ray of warm love.  I could not wipe the smile off of my face (nor did I want to!)  I see now that if I want to be happy in my life, there is great wisdom in choosing to be grateful and look on the bright side!

In addition to feeling better, being in a high vibrational state brings a clarity and focus that is not present in low vibrational states…we can think of acting out in anger and regretting later what we have said, or how people who are depressed feel fuzzy headed, as if they cannot think clearly.  This clarity that comes with high vibration suddenly brings everything into focus.  What is important becomes very pointed and clear!  And from this place we can make better decisions in our lives – decisions that make a positive contribution to our own well-being as well as the well-being of others and the planet.

And, if you don’t have enough reasons to consider feeling gratitude on a regular basis, consider this additional benefit, noted by Christiane Northrup: “Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.”  Here we see the principle of resonance yet again, as well as the law of attraction.  If we hold a high vibration, not only do we shift the rate of vibration around us, we attract similar vibration.  If you want more true love in your life, radiate true love.  If you want more kindness shown to you, overflow with kindness towards others.  If you seek more abundance in your life, look for the abundance that you already have and shower gratitude upon it.  (And remember that abundance is not only measured in money!  It is also love, health, freedom, creativity, wisdom, experiences, inner satisfaction, caring, giving, receiving teachings, giving teachings, blue sky, rain, good food, friends, time, togetherness, good books, options, loyalty, growth, family, manifestation, spiritual help, wide open vistas, sunrises, sunsets, trees, birds, animals and plants, air, water, fire, space, the stars and planets, and this beautiful earth which holds and sustains us!)

So what can you do to raise your vibration?  There are many resources you can draw on.  Some examples are mediation, reading holy texts, creating, dancing, singing, moving your body, celebrating, laughing, praying, making a list of the things in your life you are grateful for and thanking each of them, and of course setting the intention to raise your vibration.  Almost anything that takes you out of your usual pattern of heading down “Victim Road” will point you in the high-vibe direction.  And you and the world will be a better place for it.

It seems that if something is moving, alive, and on a journey of any kind, then it will meet with obstacles, unfriendly winds, dangerous weather, or sudden and unforeseen changes that cause a slight (or major) shift from the originally intended direction. 

I am of the belief and knowing that everything is alive, even the things we call inanimate….I see that a rock or a book or a star dissolve over time, and so are on their own journey of change.  Even at an atomic level, one of our most basics parts, where there is agreement to come together to act as a table, to organize as a body of water, to serve as a piece of fruit, there is motion and expansion and evolution of self, or a journey towards fulfillment of purpose. 

But a journey constitutes movement, and movement constitutes change…..and meeting up with the rest of All Creation….and therefore the “wild card” of Course Correction.

I capitalize Course Correction here because sometimes these surprising reminders of our connection to everything in the web of creation come in degrees. 

Sometimes they arrive in mini packages….like a notice in the mail that we are slightly overdue on a bill, or a test score returned to us that reveals our knowledge of the material as less than the A-plus we thought we’d achieved.  Ah, we say, no big deal, I’ll take care of this now….I’ll make a slight adjustment to my behaviors and choices and will get the desired outcome.

Moving up the scale are the middle of the road Course Corrections….the difficult relationship in the office that causes you to seek a promotion to a different department, the house roof that won’t stop leaking until you break down and re-roof, the car that goes flat after a slow leak…..this type of course correction gets your attention in slightly more demanding ways, requiring a little more effort and conscious awareness to change your behavior and choices to get the desired outcome.

And then there are the larger Course Corrections, the GrandDaddy of the Course Corrections, the ones that make us stop in our tracks, the ones that cause our brains to pause thinking and our hearts almost to stop beating….those proverbial “divine 2 by 4’s” to the head.  I tend to think these occur because we weren’t paying attention to the little course corrections before the big Course Correction had to occur to finally get our attention.  Some examples of the Big Course Correction may be the auto accident, the unexpected divorce, diagnosis of ill health, the loss of our retirement stock portfolio or loss of any kind…the kind that will bring you to your knees.

Course correction of any degree is a necessary partner of any journey….when you start out on a journey of any kind, you state your intention in the beginning about where you want to wind up; or if the journey is just to go with the flow and be in the moment, without any arrival point, that is an intention, too.  But inevitably, we can get pulled off course, by lack of attention on our part, like the captain of a ship falling asleep at the wheel and being blown off-course….or because we have driven ourselves in a direction which is not congruent with our stated intention or purpose of the journey.  In that case, the universe will obligingly remind us of our original intention and ask gently (at first), “Are you sure this is where you want to go?  You seem to have made a wrong turn back there.”  Of course, then it is up to us to choose to listen or not.

I am of the mind that the universe is actually supporting us when it throws up the course correction….that it is invisibly cooperating with us in our efforts to get somewhere.

I believe the global economy is going through one serious Course Correction; we were certainly given the messages prior to the Big One we are getting right now that things were not working in integrity in the financial sector.  I guess not enough of us were paying attention, and so the 2 by 4 was prepared.  Many of us are really scared right now….and I understand that.  But I also believe that this was a necessary part of balancing out what couldn’t continue.  I do see it as being a good thing in the end.

Many times in my own life have I experienced the occasionally upsetting, certainly confounding and always, in the end, rewarding inevitability of course correction.  I have found that if I pay attention early to the little, mini course corrections, and shift accordingly, I don’t have the major pain and upset that comes with dealing with the Big Course Corrections.  Call it selfish, I call it self preservation….I don’t favor pain much, so I choose to be alert to the messages the universe drifts my way early and often.  When I haven’t caught the messages early, I have been given the opportunity to learn a hard lesson.

Our family also knows to be alert to course corrections as we journey, both inwardly and outwardly.  Within the spirit and psyche of each of the four of us, we are taking many journeys….and the physical journey we are undertaking is an apt metaphor for those other journeys. 

We found the last time that we did this that we did not wind up going where we thought we would….our intention was to be present, to be soulful, to love one another…..and so our journey was shaped and charted by those holy intentions.  In our minds we thought we would go all over the country, here and there to places we wanted to visit, but the greater intention overrode those egoic desires.  The universe supported our original grand intention and corrected us when we veered off course.  We eventually got into a rhythm of being so present and alert that we had very few course corrections by the end. 

But over the couple of years that we settled in Colorado, we got a little unconscious again….it took a few course corrections to get us to this point, where we are on the road once more.  Now that we are here, in the familiar RV that has a different backyard every place we go, and in such close proximity to one another, the old awarenesses are flooding back.  We are listening deeply again for the pulse that guided us so exquisitely before…and I feel us getting closer and closer to it.      

In what ways have you observed course corrections work magic in your own life?  Are you experiencing one right now? 

The Wanderin’ Berrys, Chapter Two

Greetings!

Those of you who have followed our story since we left our “normal” lives in Asheville, NC in 2003 know that we took an epic 2-year journey in order to re-grow the connections in our family; it resulted in phenomenal restoration of our love for each other, intense emotional, mental and spiritual growth, and attention from around the world via our family website, www.berrytrip.us.  Our story was even published by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen in their book, Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction (not the title when we submitted the story!)

Berrys at the Beach, 2008-Cape San Blas, Florida

Since our trip ended in 2005, we have been living in a lovely remote area of southern Colorado, high in the Rockies…it was a perfect place to land after being mobile for such a long time.  We needed the boundless quiet, the profound, jaw-dropping beauty of Nature, and a really, really small town to start to make our way back into civilization.  We thought we would be there for several years, but we quickly outgrew it!

View from our front porch in Colorado, March 2006

When we all started to experience boredom and restlessness, we knew that we needed a change.  At first we thought we would relocate somewhere new, like a bigger city, or a different landscape.  We considered Florida and Texas due to the proximity to the Gulf of Mexico (one of our favorite playgrounds)….but the more we got still to listen to our deep inner voices, the more we started understanding that it wasn’t time to move into a new place…..it was time to MOVE.

And so, we begin Chapter Two of the Berry journey….we left our 40-acre serene Colorado homestead on the market and have taken off for parts unknown…

We begin in Corpus Christi, Texas where we left the RV (whose name is Jude….the Wandering Jude, get it?)  We will travel westward, listening to our inner guidance each day for direction and feeling our way around until……well, until we stop!

Join us here for our thoughts as we travel, artistic and thoughtful contributions by the boys, and my observations as a Mother whose soul longs to offer the best children to this world that I can.

Welcome!

Xoxoxo

licia