Choose: your cart or the horse
You know that moment when an idea penetrates your being, rearranges your brain, and everything—everything—changes before your eyes?
In one moment you pivot from here to there.
From knowing this to realizing that this other, completely different thing, is actually the truth. That moment when you go from walking with certainty in a world you think you recognize, to realizing you are learning to crawl all over again in a whole new and much more beautiful landscape.
I live for those moments. Because I know they are not moments of learning. They are moments of dropping.
The floor opens and I drop into a whole new level of The Mystic. Where everything has changed.
I love those moments. But I never see them coming. Suddenly a sentence will fly off a page or someone’s voice will crash through the speakers of the radio or a song lyric will erupt into tears on my face. My heart stops and my poor mind races to grasp what is happening.
If I could react fast enough, I would look down and see those words landing on my chest and cracking my heart open. I’d watch in wonder as those sacred words enter my body. And then, when I could finally look up again, I’d see that everything around me has been rearranged.
I’d see that in that moment, life let me in on one of her little secrets. It was always there, I just never noticed it before.
I know now that this is love. This is the love that changes everything.
I had one of those moments this week. Actually I’ve been having a lot of them. There was a time when they were rare. I remember each one. And I cherish how each idea cracked me open and rearranged my world.
Like on January 1, 2010. I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s You Are Here when it happened.
I’d been reading for several hours. It was all quite lovely, but nothing dramatic had happened. Until I turned a page and this sentence leapt up and sent me staggering around the room:
“The Buddha said, ‘When conditions are sufficient there is a manifestation.’”
That sentence still blows my mind. Because it is diametrically opposite from everything we’ve been taught about manifestation.
We’ve been taught to put the cart first: get clear about what you want, focus on what you want…you know all those admonitions. And you’ve probably tried them. I did. But by November of 2009, despite plenty of positive affirmations and vision maps, I was bankrupt. All those intentions and visualizations had somehow failed to pay my credit cards.
I felt like a failure, but I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
None of the popular law of attraction books could explain how I ended up in such a mess. It took The Buddha to show me I had my eyes on the wrong end of the equation.
It’s not about the cart at all. It’s about the horse—the magnificent powerful horse pulling the cart.
In short, it’s not about materialism. It’s about mysticism.
You want a beautiful, abundant, love-filled life filled with service and joy? Then, get to know your horse. Your mystical magnificent horse. Love your horse. Commit to your horse. Feed your horse. Cherish your horse. And follow that glorious divinely-directed horse where it wants to take you.
Only later will you realize you have arrived exactly where you always wanted to go.
As our solar year draws to a close, we can’t help but wonder about the year to come. Or really, the whole decade to come.
t’s an exciting time. But look around, it’s also scary. America appears to be falling apart at the seams. Britain and Europe can’t figure out how to live in the same neighborhood, never mind the same house. Fascism is rearing its ugly head. Mother Earth is on fire. And millions of her children are trying to outrun suffering.
Against such a volatile backdrop, is it wrong to focus on your one little 2020 life?
It might be if you were only focused on your cart. If all you wanted for the new year and the new decade was to win at the material game.
Have you figured out why that doesn’t work? The game, as it’s been played for five thousand years, is the game of patriarchy. The rules are written by patriarchy. For patriarchy. For the very few, the big winners.
Do you know what patriarchy wants of you? Patriarchy wants what patriarchy has always wanted. Shut up. Obey. Keep consuming. Keep looking the other way.
So what can one person do?
The single most radical, magnificent, and loving thing you can do right now is change the conditions.
Your conditions.
You change the way you live and I change the way I live, and eventually, we become a critical mass of people who see another way of living together. In reverence. In cooperation. In love.
And you could not have chosen a more perfect moment to do this. Because we are at a pivotal moment. It’s not just the end of a year or even of a decade.
We are entering a time when the very structure of the game is changing.
If you pay attention to astrology you know that astrologers are all abuzz about Saturn—who teaches us how to create structures—and Pluto—who represents power—coming together starting in December to teach us how to create abundance and wealth in service to a higher good.
These two planets come together every 20 years, but after dancing together in Earth signs since 1802, they are coming together for the first time since the 1400s in an Air sign.
And if that weren’t startling enough, in 2020 there will be 6 eclipses instead of the standard 4.
What does all this mean? What does it portent? What evolutionary doors are opening?
Well, we’re going to explore all this together in The Lotus and The Lily with the brilliant depth numerologist and elemental astrologist Emma Kupu Mitchell, who is in deep study with several leading astrologers.
But here’s my sense of it right now:
- Patriarchal structures of religion, power, and hierarchy are collapsing
- We are entering a window of time pregnant with the possibility of creating a whole new way of living
- Replacing one kind of power with another kind of power won’t work, it never has
- The moment has arrived to create a reverence structure
What will that look like? I don't know. But I trust that the horse does. The Divine Feminine knows. And She will show us the way.
She will crack open all our hearts. She will open the floor between worlds. And we will all fall in love with life once more.
That's what The Lotus and The Lily is about this year. Perhaps it's what this intense mystical exploration has always been about.
As the Buddha taught 2600 years ago, it's about creating ripe fertile holy conditions in our lives so that we can create a sacred way of living on earth.
Do please look at the landing page for The Lotus and The Lily. It's full of insights on the astrological and numerological support we are receiving. And be sure to watch the video.
Please don't wait. We open on November 11. But you can get started now watching the bonus videos Emma made for the intensive. When you register click on the link in the 2nd column of your receipt. It will take you to a special information filled thank you page with a link to the password-protected Resource Page with the videos.
To creating a structure of reverence, beauty and love,
Janet