Summer 2007

Greetings, Friends on the Way Up!

Have you noticed that the time for walking your talk is definitely here? Not that it ever wasn’t time for it, but now, it’s mandatory! Case in point: I’ve been doing a lot of writing and teaching about the concept of taking inspired action only, and, what do you know? I’m being called into complete integrity with living that. I have made a few missteps with it lately and boy, oh boy, have I experienced the consequences!

This newsletter is a prime example. While on the one hand, I have been excited to get it out as a way to connect with you, on the other, I felt a lot of resistance around putting it together. Because I decided it ought to come out on a certain date, I started pushing myself to get it done, and thus, something that might have taken only a few days stretched out for a couple of weeks of procrastination! Exhausting! Resistance is the most tiring activity of all. And that deadline? The reason behind the deadline turned out to be a non-event—a moot point. Ack!

If I had simply waited for the inspiration and energy to do it—if I had trusted that it would come when and if the time was right, and not worried about a specific deadline—I could have saved a whole lot of angst and time out of Easy World! I’m learning…

The photo is of the same tree as in the past 2 issues. I figured since we’ve followed it this far, we might as well see it through the year! Right now, it’s quite voluptuous with small apples, but it’s lightening its load quickly as it drops its rapidly ripening fruit for the enjoyment of creatures great and small. Roly, our elder dachshund, spends as much time as he can get away with, munching apples in the shade, and I’m sure he considers them his personal blessing from above! He’s putting on what we affectionately call his “apple weight.”

Enjoy this issue, which, as it turns out, I loved putting together once I moved into Easy World with it and let go of the “shoulds.” In addition to news and ideas for rising higher, it contains my newest articles and insights brought through from Source Wisdom. Create a beautiful summer, and consider approaching life as Roly does: staying in the moment, trusting in abundance and reveling in it, always living his truth (which seems to have something to do with eating!), and taking it easy.

Love, Joy, Ease,

Julia Rogers Hamrick
www.recreating-eden.com

In This Issue

• Don’t Do a Thing Until You Read This!
  Does living in Easy World mean you just do nothing? Heavens, no! But if you want to live a life of ease, what you do needs to comply with the Easy World guidelines for action. Find out what those are in “Taking Action In Easy World”

• Good is Bad (well, sort of)
  When it comes down to it, there’s really not a lot of difference in good and bad—both of them are problematical if peace and harmony are your desire. Read why in “A World Without Good, Please!”

• If I Hear That Song ONE MORE TIME …
  Can’t get that annoying song out of your mind? Don’t resist it—listen to it. It may just be a message from someone special! Check out who in this issue’s Power Tool

• Summer Instant Frequency Boosters
• Julia You are Quite a Talker
• Give Me a Break
• Easy World Takes Off
  
• New on Julia's Blog
• Share the Love

Taking Action In Easy World: Inspired and Energized Acts Only!

One of the primary tenets of Easy World is that you are not to do something unless you are inspired and energized to do it. If you perceive that something needs to be done but you are not inspired and energized to take action, then you can trust that one of three things is true:

• It isn’t yet time to do it (and the inspiration and energy will be showing up as an indicator of when it is time)
• It’s someone else’s task to accomplish and you need to relax and allow whomever is inspired and energized to handle what needs to be done
• Or, it actually doesn’t need doing at all.

If you do something for any reason other than that you are inspired and energized to do it, the result is that you automatically find yourself out of Easy World. And, no, there are no exceptions to this law! Taking action while feeling resistance is an express ticket back to Difficult World. Feeling inspired and energized to act is your cue that what you are doing is in alignment with The Flow of Life Force from Source, and in harmony with the Whole. It is a clear indicator that the timing is right. Feeling uninspired and un-energized are clear signs that taking action is not in harmony at present.

So, are you ready to trust that everything will be taken care of in Easy World if you are not feeling inspired and energized to take action?

Here is what is you need to understand in order to relax and allow things to work out on your behalf:

• Easy World—the Divine Design for Harmony—is set up to ensure that everything that really needs to be done is done effortlessly and efficiently and joyfully.
• Universal Forces in alignment with the Design for Harmony are intelligent, omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly coordinated, utterly reliable, and devoted to taking care of business.
• Your joy, ease, and fulfillment are top priority for Universal Forces in alignment with the Design for Harmony, as are the joy, ease, and fulfillment of everyone else.

Knowing this is really helpful when something needs to be done that you’re feeling resistance toward and your ego has convinced you that you’re the only one who can do it, and, of course, that if you don’t, the world will end! (Your ego is not an Easy World entity!)

So how do you get to this level of confidence in Easy World? How do you learn to take action only when inspired? The way is through choosing Easy World and exercising trust in it. The more often you let go of the illusion of control and allow yourself to be provided for in Easy World, the clearer it will become to you that doing so is the way to ensure that everything that needs to be done gets done with elegant efficiency so that you—and everyone else—have more energy and joy instead of less.

As you let go of the habit of forcing yourself to do things that you have resistance about, you will find that your energy will greatly increase, your inspiration for doing things will expand exponentially, and you may even find that activities you once felt resistance toward are things you are now excited to do! How easy is that?! Such is the magic of Easy World.

A World Without Good, Please!

I have a request for you, my sisters and brothers in the human family: Please, please, please stop revering good. It is a trap! It is the most powerful trap there is. If you want to be free to experience more joy, more peace, more harmony, and more authentic power than you ever knew possible, and you want that for all of humanity, then for Pete’s sake (and yours), just let go of the notion of good! It is poison.

That may, indeed, sound like blasphemy to you, as you have been indoctrinated to revere good. You have been taught all your life to prefer good. You have been admonished to be good. You have been impassioned by your political and spiritual leaders to fight for good. You’ve been told if you don’t take a stand for good, that evil will overcome the world! Even many of your contemporary spiritual teachers are cheering you on to “allow more good into your life.”

But I simply must tell you that the idea of good is leading you down the primrose path to disempowerment and continued imprisonment in a world of pain and suffering.

Good is Not Real

“Good” is an opinion—a judgment. Good is nothing more than your ego-mind’s assessment of something, based on its observations or programming. Good is not some sort of pronouncement by God—at least, not God, the Source. Good is purely manmade in origin. All the religious and political wars fought throughout human history, with all the lives lost and misery inflicted, have been fueled by someone’s opinion of what is good, and what is good’s counterpart: evil. One human being’s idea of good is often another’s idea of “evil.” Good and evil are truly just ideas.

The concepts of “good” and “evil” are thoughtforms created by the limited aspect of the human mind, making determinations about things that it doesn’t have a comprehensive-enough perception to be able to accurately make. Ironically, participating in judgment diminishes perception and wisdom, which ensures that human beings will never be proficient at judging. Actually, even God is not proficient at judging! Indeed, God, the Source, does not judge at all. While there are natural laws in place, and built-in consequences for violating them, there is no judgment involved—no opinion handed down from on high. In fact, the first natural law given to humanity is that of “no judgment.” Why? Because the Creator knew that judging would lead to big, big trouble.

The Concepts of Good and Evil Are Born

Remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? They were living in Paradise, in total bliss and Oneness—no good, no evil, just pure beingness—until the event that caused their exile from Paradise. What was that seminal event? They disobeyed Divine Guidance, listened to the serpent, and “ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” What is the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? It is judgment. It is the practice of determining what is good and what is evil, and all the many permutations thereof.

When these archetypal first humans allowed themselves to be seduced into making this judgment, they activated duality, the creative matrix that supports forces in opposition. Duality is the flipside of Wholeness and harmony. What more primal forces in opposition are there than good and evil? At first, neither good nor evil had much power, because they were only concepts. But as the concepts were given energy by human beings continually making judgments to determine what was good and what was evil, they began to strengthen and the web of entrapment was spun. Today, good and evil have reached what would seem to be maximum polarity.

Talk about a consequence of violating a natural law! This violation has kept human beings trapped at lower vibrational frequency in the realm of pain and suffering for eons! You see, joy, ease, wisdom, peace and harmony—the hallmarks of Oneness—are high-frequency phenomena, but duality is a lower-frequency phenomenon. The key to moving higher in frequency is in transcending duality by giving up judgment and its concepts of good and bad. It is the hidden key out of the pain and suffering of duality.

Good is an Addiction, But There’s a Remedy

I am completely aware that giving up an addiction to good (and bad) may be a challenge. It has been for me! So here is what I’ve been doing to wean myself over the last several years. I have become aware that what I perceive as good is merely my preference, so I am changing my language, both inner and outer, around it. Instead of saying, “Such and such is good,” I substitute, “I like that” or “I definitely prefer that,” or “that seems right to me” or “that doesn’t seem right to me,” with seem being the key word. I often preface my declarations with “in my opinion.”

It’s still a shade of judgment, but it’s “judgment lite” compared to the pronouncement of absolutes that “That’s good” and “That’s bad” connote. It’s the beginning of untying some of the threads in the web of conflicting energies that billions of human minds create with their absolute pronouncements of “good” and “evil.” Imagine the difference if we all loosened up the web a bit by a shift in our thoughts and words around this!

The stance that removes energy from the harsh polarities created by the concept of good and evil is neutrality; is acceptance. Acceptance is an act of Love and is like neutral in the car. It is not condoning something, it is simply allowing it without resistance. The more you resist something, the more you empower it. Acceptance allows the Love within you to continue to flow. Judgment, on the other hand, stops the flow. So whether you’re decreeing something to be good or to be evil, you are still diminishing the flow of Love through you, and that keeps you at lower frequency.

The Coin Always Has Two Sides

You know the great irony about being on the side of good? Good can’t exist without evil, or “bad.” As long as good exists, so will evil. They are duality-based conceptual and energy partners that require each other for their existence. When you add energy to one thoughtform, the other automatically receives a complementary amount of Life Force. So when you energize good with your thoughts, you are actually also energizing “bad.” You can never sufficiently empower good to overcome or eradicate evil. In fact, the more intent you are on increasing and empowering good, the more you increase and empower evil!

This is an understanding that came to me at a time of highest attunement with Source Wisdom. I was shown that opting out of judging good and evil is the long-overlooked linchpin for authentic empowerment and the liberation of humanity from the realm of pain and suffering caused by polarized forces in conflict. All the pain on the planet can be traced back, not to evil itself, but to the conflicting energy currents of good clashing with evil.

So, I ask you to consider loosening the grip of judgment in your life by giving up “good,” giving up “bad,” and letting Love flow freely. Love is the way out of the trap.

For a more thorough understanding of this, read Julia’s book, Recreating Eden: The Exquisitely Simple, Divinely Ordained Plan for Transforming Your Life and Your Planet.

Power Tool: Song Messages From Spirit

Your Spirit, the aspect of you that is always in perfect alignment with Source, and therefore, omniscient, is continually beaming messages to you. Like a radio station that is always broadcasting whether you’re listening or not, the broadcast of your Spirit is always offering you Source Wisdom, whether you’re listening or not. The key, of course, is tuning into its broadcast.

There are infinite ways your Spirit uses to communicate with you, and one of them is through sending you songs—songs on the radio, songs from TV, songs stored in your head from past listening, even songs that seem to compose themselves in your mind without your active participation. When we pay attention to the songs that are present in our experience, we can receive answers to questions, both consciously and unconsciously asked; we can receive practical solutions to current problems; or simply learn something about our current state of being.

I began noticing this intensely about 20 or so years ago. I was going through one of the many crises of my earlier years about whether to continue with what I felt called to do—to be a fulltime spiritual writer and teacher—or to be “practical” and “get a real job.” I felt torn between totally having faith in what I was experiencing within—the message that I was to totally trust in my Spirit to provide for me—and the fearful, societally influenced voice that was telling me I needed to beat the bushes for a job and re-enter the “real world” of 9-to-5 where the money would be steady.

After churning on this for quite awhile,  I noticed (finally) that a song had been running through my mind that I couldn’t seem to shake, and I felt an inner nudge to listen to the words. I was dumbstruck when I realized where it was coming from and why. The song? Michael Bolton’s “Soul Provider,” the title and hook, obviously a play on the phrase “sole provider.” The lyrics are as follows; read them as if Spirit, not a co-dependent human being, is singing them to a young woman in need of reinforcement of her sense that she is to “let go and let God” and that there is a larger divinely designed plan at work for her life:

Soul Provider

Talk about love, talk about trust
Talkin’ ’bout forever baby
When I’m talkin’ ’bout us
I give you my word, stick to my guns
Believe when I tell ya baby
That we’ve just begun
You don’t understand, no
The full intent of my plan

Chorus:
I wanna be your soul provider
I wanna stay that way
For the longest time
I wanna be, your soul provider
Just say you’ll let me
And darlin’ I will
I know you’ve been hurt, I know you’re love shy
You don’t have to say it baby
It’s gonna take some time
Ya got my heart, in the palm of your hand
Swear it’s gonna stay there baby
Give me half a chance
You don’t understand
The full intent of my plan
I’ve been waitin’ for a long time for somebody like you
To give my love, all my love day and night
Just say you’ll be mine for the rest of your life
Baby I’ll show you why

Perfect, eh? I got the message, and, of course, once I got it, the song I hadn’t been able to get out of my head was gone!

So instead of resisting them, pay attention to those annoying songs that get stuck in your head. Even commercial jingles. When you make a point to see everything as a potential message from your Spirit, you may just be amazed at the ways it finds to guide you, and songs are among the most potent and fun of all!

Summer Instant Frequency Boosters

I’m recycling Instant Frequency Boosters for this issue. For those of you who are recent subscribers to Rising Times, they’ll be new to you, but if you’ve been a loyal reader for a few years, and remember them from before, they’ll be effective reminders to actually put them into practice!

1. Take your shoes off, stand barefoot in the grass, wiggle your toes, commune with Mother Earth and exchange energy with her.
2. Appreciate a flower. Notice the color, the shape, the fragrance, the perfection. Appreciation, in and of itself, is an express elevator to higher levels of frequency, and the colors, shapes, fragrances, and energy of flowers are not only easy to appreciate, they tune you into nature’s perfection, and remind you of the Divine Design for Harmony, where you, too, are designed to operate.
3. Hug a tree. I know this is a cliché—but clichés are clichés for a reason—there’s something to them! Put your arms around the tree’s trunk, or lean your back against a tree, and you will feel the pulsation of Life Force in it. This helps you feel your Oneness with all living things, which is definitely an instant frequency booster! From experience, I can tell you, if you ask the tree a question, you may just find a highly intelligent answer forming in your mind…

“Julia, you are quite a talker”

That, (or something close), was the comment made during my interview with Kala, host of the popular radio show, Explore Your Spirit. Recorded at the end of June, it is available for your listening pleasure without charge in multiple formats, including mp3, so you can listen to it wherever you go and whenever you like! I managed, as usual, to get swept up in the energy and cover a lot of ground in a short time--hence, Kala’s comment--so you may even want to listen more than once!

Give me a break!

A little vacation, that is. There will be no teleseminar in July. But after July’s hiatus, my next f’ree teleseminar will be August 14. The topic is “The Only Kind of Action That Works in Easy World.” For details, click here. Talk to you then!

Easy World takes off

The idea of Easy World is really taking hold, with several bloggers picking up on it and writing about it on their blogs. Be sure to see what Sonora Jayne Case, Raymond David Salas, Lola Fayemi, and Robert Monteux had to say about it. Easy World was also featured in the latest issue of designer and full-spectrum paint wizard Ellen Kennon’s newsletter, “Living Well.”

New on Julia’s Blog

If you haven’t visited my blog lately, be sure to check out the newest offerings there. I’ve just added a link to a new f’ree, downloadable mini-poster with a simple meditation called “I AM,” there’s a review of Michael Moore’s latest cinematic challenge to the status quo: Sicko, and, as always, there are tales of my experiences (some even have tidbits of wisdom woven in!) and photos of my garden, fun trips to the mountains, and whatever else inspires me to grab the camera. Just go to Julia’s Blog and scroll on down!

Share the Love

I create this seasonal newsletter for the Love and joy of it and I hope that shines through! If you can think of anyone in your circle who might enjoy this issue, please forward it on! (If you get a message about not being able to include a file, just click “yes” where it asks if you’d like to send it anyway.)

©2007 Julia Rogers Hamrick
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