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Celebrate the ceremony of your life

~ Nicole Gnutzman
Ceremony creates change. Live your life as a ceremony, and this will lead you to a process of positive change, following a path of spirit, and allowing you to ride a different wave in your life.
~ Sandra Ingerman, Walking in the Light: the Everyday Empowerment of a Shamanic Life

I never was one much for ceremony. Sure, I cried at funerals and weddings, the emotion simply overcoming me, sometimes without warning and almost always surprising me, but pomp and circumstance would leave me dry eyed and even a bit bored. What was all the fuss about? What was missing for me was the meaning behind it all, a deeply felt connection to the true spirit of ceremony.

IMG_1545And then I discovered another kind of ceremony, and it involved chocolate, actually raw cacao. My life and my perception of ceremony changed forever.

I first came across cacao ceremony in the movie, Chocolat, with Johnny Depp (Roux) and Juliette Binoche (Viane)–I’m not sure which character I fell more in love with. In the movie, Viane’s father, a pharmacist, travels to South America to discover new remedies, and is introduced to cacao and seduced both by it and Viane’s eventual mother. I too found myself seduced by its power to “unlock hidden yearnings and reveal destinies.”

I trained as a chocolatier because of that one line in the movie (I truly wanted to find my destiny and thought chocolate was it), and I began to seek out cacao ceremony, which at the time was a hard thing to find. When I found it, and a teacher, I went deep into that world.

Cacao ceremony opened a whole new world to me–one of infinite abundance, connection to spirit, reverence for the earth, compassion for myself and others, and a deeper knowing. It’s hard to believe that all that magic can come from a little cacao bean.

I came to understand that in the indigenous world, ceremony is a part of daily life, honoring the connection we have with the elements (earth, wind, fire and water), life and death, and rites of passage. The meaning and significance of each ceremony is clear and is a way to deeply acknowledge and accept change as a part of life.

Ceremony, in reconnecting us to life itself, allows us to feel compassion for ourselves and others, deepen our connection to our true selves, and understand that we are part of something much bigger and more beautiful. It is then that the change we want to open ourselves to becomes truly possible. Our fears slowly drop away as we realize, as Sandra Ingerman so eloquently shares, that spirit wants to guide us through change and we can ride that wave through life.

What becomes possible when we honor the ceremony in our lives? For me, authentic, meaningful ceremony offers and creates an opening to true connection, compassion and change. And that is a reason to celebrate.

Your soul speaks

~ Nicole Gnutzman
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In the attitude of Silence the Soul finds the path in a clearer light. – Mahatma Gandhi

Sorry, folks, I’m reposting this (my first post) as my Blog page wasn’t refreshing and I had to reconfigure it :).

Ah, the dilemma of what to write in my inaugural blog post…. I’ve written many posts before on other sites and on different topics, ranging from effortless leadership to pairing wine with chocolate, so sitting down to write is not the issue. And it’s not that other posts haven’t come from my soul, they have, but from a different place and time.

Then I realized that all I really need do is check in with my soul, the supportive inner voice (not my eager ego voice or my inner mean girl voice) that guides me gently in knowing what to do or write about. I love that voice now that I’ve gotten deep in touch with her. She’s really the only one worth listening to.

So, let’s talk about her (the good voice). She’s a bit elusive because we’ve been acculturated to listen to those other voices that build us up or tear us down. The best way to begin knowing when she’s speaking to you is to know when she’s not. If the voice of your inner dialogue just tells you what you want to hear (“I’m right and they’re wrong”) or pumps you up with bravado (“look how clever I am”), well, I’m afraid that’s your ego talking. And if the voice criticizes you or belittles you (“wow, that was stupid” or “why can’t I ever say anything or do anything right?”), yup, that’s IMG (inner mean girl) taking you down.

The very first thing to do is start noticing what those other voices “sound” like in your head. Just notice the next time one pops up. What you’ll begin to realize is how often they talk to you; the chatter can be incessant and invasive. If you catch one of them in the midst of its one-sided conversation (it’s really a monologue), laugh and pat yourself on the back. Acknowledging they exist is a huge step.

The next step is a leap forward in your relationship with them and it’s really quite simple: ask them to stop. I had a hard talk with my inner mean girl awhile back and she went away for a very long time (I think she was away pouting). The beautiful thing is that when you know they’re there, you can stop them by laughing at yourself, doing a dance, or whatever takes their power away. It’s very liberating. And don’t worry about the strange looks you may get from other people. You are reclaiming your power.

What you’ll find is as those other voices lessen (I’m not sure they ever totally go away unless you are the Dalai Lama or Gandhi) and have less power over you, the supportive voice of your soul begins to come out of hiding because she feels heard, acknowledged and safe. Her gentle encouragement will be sweet to your ears. She’s the voice you want guiding you. You’ll know her when you hear her. Sometimes she reveals herself most in silence. It will be love at first word.

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Twin dreams

~ Nicole Gnutzman
twins
From Carl Jung’s Red Book

I dreamt–my Canadian English is showing–of twin girls twice. About two months apart. What is it about twins and the number two?

In the first dream, they were clad in black robes (a bit scary) and in the second they were in a basement (a Jungian therapist would have a heyday with that) and I could not get to them because I was blind–clearly I was not seeing something.

In dream analysis, when a dream figure or scenario recurs, it means the dreamer has not understood and integrated the message of the dream. Dreams tend to exaggerate for effect. In other words, if we don’t get the message the first time, the next dream will be even bigger, bolder, and always more dramatic, so we pay attention.

So, I played around with the idea of twins. First, I’m a Gemini. It could be related, but this felt deeper and more significant. After all, the twins were either clothed in dark robes or in the darkness. Geminis tend to be more lighthearted than that.

Darkness, in the Jungian sense, connotes the world of the unconscious, the shadowy aspects of ourselves that we tend to ignore, repress or negate. Hmmm, there could be something there.

A bit intimidated by that and not really wanting to go there, I thought of Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers in Roman mythology, who became the constellation Gemini, but they are the wrong gender, well, only wrong in that they weren’t female. No aha’s there.

Perplexed, I decided to drink some cacao (I’ll be writing a post about my passion for raw cacao soon) and reflect. It was early evening and I decided to sit out on the deck of our cabin nestled in the redwoods. As I sat down and took the first delicious sip, two black buzzards (known in South America by the more majestic name, Condor, which I quite prefer) circled above me soaring and floating on the wind. Their twin flight was so devastatingly beautiful that I began to tear up. And then just as suddenly as they came, they were gone.

And do you know what? I made no connection whatsoever in that moment to my dream. It wasn’t until I told my husband, Scott, about the buzzards, ahem Condors, and he started laughing that I made the connection. Again, twins in black, only this time they were “clothed” in feathers and appeared in real life.

What came to me next in my cacao bliss was the concept of duality. Not duality in terms of good and evil, but rather in terms of emotions or states of being: joy and sadness, innocence and what? What exactly is the opposite of innocence? Wisdom? For an adult, yes, but, in the case of children, the opposite of innocence is a term I will loosely call, “grownupness.” And the twin girls were clearly children–about the age of nine or so.

And then it clicked. When I was nine, my father became very ill, suffering from kidney failure. He lived, but was on dialysis for many years until he finally received a kidney transplant. And everything in our lives changed. It felt as if a part of him had died. And a part of me. The joyful and innocent part. I had to grow up very fast.

The message that I deciphered from my dreams was that I needed to acknowledge and reclaim all my twin feelings to feel whole again. There is such awesome beauty in that.

Dreams can be such wonderful teachers, showing us where we are and where we need to go in terms of our self-development. My twin dreams became a beautiful gift to my soul.

 

Synchronicity & the soul’s unfolding

~ Nicole Gnutzman
“To ascribe an intention to chance is a thought which is either the height of absurdity or the depth of profundity–according to the way we understand it.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Ganesh
The soul unfolds itself like the lotus of a thousand petals. – Kahlil Gibran

When you travel all the way to Guatemala on a spiritual whim (one might more politely call it a quest) in search of clarity about your soul’s path and meet by seeming chance or coincidence someone seeking what you are creating and who offers to be your first client, that quite simply is the beauty of synchronicity….

Intrigued by my encounter with synchronicity, I delved deeper wanting to understand its meaning, and began reading Carl Jung, who intimately explored the concept and coined the term synchronicity to explain “meaningful coincidence.” And then just the other day, I came across a book in the library entitled Soul Moments, a delightful collection of real life stories about synchronicity by Phil Cousineau.

Cousineau describes an experience of synchronicity as “marked by elegance, symmetry, vividness, suddenness, poetry, or a truth that speaks to the heart.” One could add the word “profound” to his list of evocative terms to echo Schopenhauer.

Of course, there are those of us who vehemently deny meaningful coincidence, claiming it to be random, pure chance or patently absurd. Chances are that synchronicity might not show itself to that person, perhaps in fear of being mocked, or if it did, the person might be carelessly dismissive. Then there are others, who are oblivious or blind to synchronicity; they have lost the ability to gaze in wonder at the world and the mystery of life. I was one of the oblivious ones not all that long ago; in fact, it’s been exactly 10 years. And that was when my life began to unfold in mysterious ways. But that’s a whole other story for another time….

It is precisely when we are lost and most vulnerable and in our deepest, darkest moments that synchronicity most often shows up. Cousineau suggests that these synchronous moments are “the times of sheer grace when an outward event coincides with inner changes and it feels as if our very destiny is affected.” We receive an outward sign or an answer, sometimes that seems ridiculous and other times that is definitive and sublime, which informs us of what we must go do, often healing us in the process. And thus begins the unfolding of our souls.

If you have a personal story of synchronicity you would like to share, please send it along to nicole@soulscapecoaching.com as I would love to read it! And if you are still one of us who does not believe or is blind to it, perhaps synchronicity will come upon you in such a way that you are seized and gently shaken by the moment and see its grace.

This post is dedicated to a dear friend, who just yesterday shared a personal story of healing synchronicity, and who just happens to have known Phil Cousineau many years ago. To the beauty of synchronicity and her soul’s unfolding.