I was just thinking how the holidays elicit the adjectives MERRY and HAPPY. It’s so easy to think that means twinkling lights, presents with bows, tinsel, silver bells, noise-makers, champagne, and a cute array of decorated cookies. Perhaps I’ve been watching too many Hallmark Christmas movies? Anyway, nothing at all wrong with merry and happy. . . I just started to feel into a deeper function of this “turning of the year” ritual time, which we often forget to notice.

Knights-errant striving to attain the grail labor toward an ideal of chivalry which, contrary to the ecstatic rapture of Amor, exposes them to difficulties, trials, and suffering, the very experiences that prepare them to apprehend the sublime. Chivalry may well be the generative, procreative quality of the heart, and it gives birth to individual expressions of courage, nobility, mercy, curiosity, patience, and charity. 

We need to get past the idea that we lose energy or that we don’t have it. When the mind stops paying attention to the energy that’s in you, you feel “absence.” When the mind pays attention to the energy within, you feel “presence.”

She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”

We need so badly to shift from worrying that what’s happening is going to ruin us, into a deep relaxation that comes from having some techniques to navigate the rough waters and get to the beautiful calm lake. It’s all too easy to picture a negative future, especially since we’re in the part of the transformation process where we’re tired of resisting the profound changes, and are giving up the fight, surrendering to just being with things as they are (without getting hopeless). We’re realizing that the old institutions and security-providing ways of thinking aren’t working. In fact, they’re crumbling to dust, and hanging onto them is becoming almost laughable.

By taking a moment to focus on what’s going on just below the surface of the object-and-event world, you can prevent unnecessary mistakes and wasted time, find accurate answers more quickly, communicate without distortion, light upon workable innovations, and market yourself more contagiously. Here are a few shortcuts to tune in to your intuitive self. . .

When I feel lost in the undertow of my dominating mind, just let the motion go and look someone in the eyes. Just let the motion go and let another motion be. Any motion. The motion of the mind is just another Wind among many, blowing, blowing.

John Lennon had just been assassinated (12/8/80) and I remember feeling so incredibly moved by his death, as though it were a sacred event somehow, even though I wasn’t an avid Beatles fan. John the Beloved, speaking through Kevin, said that it was indeed a powerful event and that the worldwide meditation for peace, organized by Yoko Ono afterward, was an even more powerful event.

The planet, our bodies, and our reality have been accelerating for many, many years, and we are reaching a point where the old dense way of life, where suffering has been the norm, just doesn’t cut it. At this higher frequency, we naturally think there must be something better, lighter, more free, more loving. We want to be free of the opacity and fear—and many of us actually are finding the doorway through to the reality we have always called the “ideal.”

We are each subtle citizens of Subtle America. In the physical world, being a citizen means I am engaged with the laws and democratic processes of the country. As a subtle citizen, however, I engage not with laws or political processes but with the subtle energies generated by me and my fellow citizens through our thinking, feeling, and actions. 

The path of transformation is what people often call the Hero’s Journey—it’s the quest to “find oneself.” This has traditionally been seen as a male process, popularized by Joseph Campbell. When asked if there was a female version, a Heroine’s Journey, Campbell was said to have responded with the idea that women “are already there” and don’t really need one.