She Let Go

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A New Year Called 2023

Our world is organized into many cycles – timing, seasons, days, weeks and months and in January, we celebrate a calendar cycle, a new year called 2023.

Cycles are noted for their beginnings and endings.

In A Christmas Carol, The 11th Doctor commented with his usual sage advice:

Everything’s got to end sometime, otherwise, nothing would ever get started.

Now is our time for an ending.

A New Cycle

We’ve been writing here for 10 years and we are now cycling down that process. We’ve had periods of lots of writing, not much writing, and then bumping along the road with everyone else as we all attempted to manage the Covid pandemic.

Now, as we leave 2022 and enter 2023, it’s time to let go as we travel on to more life adventures.

No More Words

Sometimes, there comes a time when it feels like all the words have been said. As if there’s nothing new left to say. At a certain point, it doesn’t make sense to just keep repeating the words.

Silence sinks down. It’s not a dead silence; it’s filled with dynamism and movement, but not with words that are said ouloud.

Silence is alive in its potentiality of manifestation, yet it’s holding still for the moment. It’s right on the edge of a precipice of action, yet it’s as relaxed as if lying with eyes closed in a warm meadow in the valley.

Silence settles around us. We’re comfortable here. There’s simply nothing more to say.

And in that silence, here is a poem called She Let Go, by Reverend Safire Rose.

She Let Go

“Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of fear. She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely,
without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a
book on how to let go… She didn’t search the scriptures.

She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go.
She didn’t journal about it.
She didn’t write the projected date in her day-timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.

She just let go.
She didn’t analyse whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
She didn’t utter one word. She just let go.

No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing.

Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort. There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore.”

A poem called She Let Go read aloud with soft music underneath it.

Cycles Of Life

Life is filled with cycles of beginning and ending. This website will be archived as I take a sabbatical from public teaching of The Radiance Technique®.

The Radiant Nursing Facebook page will also be archived and remain accessible. Scroll through the photos for hundreds of memes, quotes and ideas for inspiration as well as the many images of the Sun for Happy Sunday posts.

New adventures are calling, and off we must go. It’s time to don a fedora and discover the world.

If you want, you’re welcome to visit me on a new website and blog: LeslieAnneliese.com. It will be under construction for awhile. Check back for when it opens.

Thank you for being here over the years and sharing it all with me. What a journey we’ve had and I’m filled with gratitude for you.

In the meantime…

Be Wild.

Be Free.

Shine On.

Christmas Light

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The Wise Men Draw Near

“We Three Kings of Orient Are.”

A star fills the sky and wise men read the signs. After traveling for many months, their journey is finally drawing to a close. Exceptional gifts of frankincense, myrrh and gold are offered to welcome this miracle, this manifestation of Light.

A Star Beckons

“Do you see what I see? A star, a star, dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite.”

The dark night sky, unpolluted by any man-made lights, vibrates with an energy that is alive and substantial. Amidst the million points of light that make up the Milky Way, there shines a brilliant star to announce the miracle of this birth of Light.

Angels Fill The Sky

“Angels We Have Heard on High.”

Filling the sky with their dulcet song, the angels ring clarion notes to announce this Birth of Light. Their clear voices tell the shepherds to not be afraid, “For unto you a child is born.”

A Baby In A Manger

“Away in a Manger, no crib for a bed.”

A tiny baby is welcomed into this world. Out of nothingness comes everything, a manifestation, a form that embodies the Light.

Everyone Brings A Light

“Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella. Bring a Torch, come one and come all.”

We all carry the flame inside of us and we rejoice and honor the Light.

Merry Christmas. Let’s celebrate the Light.

Ballerina Unfurled

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The Many Robes

I tried on robes of all kinds in every shape, size and color.

Long and short, thick and thin, gentle and tough, mean and kind. Soft and hard, dark and light, fighter and peacemaker, young and old. The variations went on and on.

None of these costumes fit. They tugged here, bunched and scrunched there, wrinkled and pinched here, hung too loosely there.

Lifetimes Peel Away

After years of this, lifetimes really – suddenly, no, not suddenly – slowly, yes, slowly, one by one, the robes are starting to fall off of me. Now I stand en pointe, center stage, on the proverbial stage of life.

I am the ballerina fitted in pink leotards. performing an intricate pirouette. The robes lift around me and twirl on the air in a slow motion spiral.

Exit The Dance

The robes drop, scatter, litter the ground around me. I am spinning, slowly, circling across the stage, my arms flutter around me. I prance over all the robes now littering the stage with their multi-colored, varied fabrics.

On the tips of my toes, with tiny pointe shoe steps, I cross the stage to the waiting wings. Smooth movements of my arms up and down belie the exquiste, minute steps of the pointe toes.

"Exit stage left."

Ballerina Unfurled

Perpetual movement propels me forward. Now, even the pointe shoes unlace and fall to the wayside.

With bare feet, I twirl into the ocean waves.

I look up to see that an earthly robe is draped over me. It’s familiar and unknown all at the same time. Flesh bound to the worldly plane, subject to the rhythms and cycles of earthly demands and limitations. Yet, the spirit is etherial, boundless, free.

I’m simply a beam of light, a sparkle on a crested wave. Was that a flash of light we saw or our imagination?

Water Is All There Is

Water is all there is in this ocean whether it is crashes as waves on the surface or barely moves as thick, dense depths of dark glass.

Sounds of eternity travel through the water, but these tones are unheard by our limited human ears. Blue whales are singing primordial tones to each other across hundreds of miles.

An ocean throbs. Constant movement. Lifing up. Pulling down.

Water is all there is and we are the water.

No boundaries.

Only being.

Ballerina from Pacific Northwest Ballet

Words

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Word Sparkles

Peering forth at the light of existence, you could almost hold it cupped in your hand. You try to describe to someone else, even to yourself. The very moment you speak a sound to capture that wide, great light crystalizes. With the first utterance of sound, the whole shatters into thousands of reflected lights, like when a crystal is caught in a sunbeam. Sparkles fling off into multiple colors, dancing in the dust beams.

Whole To Part

You hold a vast wholeness within you. Words, by their own nature, are composed of tiny bits and pieces. You say the sky is blue, but at the same time, you also know the sky can be black, grey, and even red or orange. The problem with language is that you can’t say all of that at the exact same time. So, only a partial truth is expressed at any given moment.

As words spill out of our mouths, we enter the realm of partiality. It can’t be helped. It’s the nature of language. Chopped-up little pieces attempt to capture the wide world around us. That’s hard enough as it is. Now imagine trying to use words to capture inner dimensions that are not bound by outer forms. That becomes a “horse of a different color,” as they say.

The Perils Of Our Guides

On the path of greater consciousness, this is one of the challenges for teachers as they guide their students. Students are only capable of hearing from their own perspectives.

Yesterday, the teacher said the sky is blue… and that was accurate for that precise moment in time. But, today, we are in a different time, another moment of existence, and it may no longer apply. We are different, the teacher is different, the sky is different.

Now, the student sees an orange sky. The student insists, “No, the sky is blue, the teacher said so, and I refuse to see this sky of orange.” Or, faced with an orange sky they can no longer deny, the student then feels as if the teacher lied to them and rejects the teaching of the teacher entirely.

Clinging to the words that were previously uttered is how we enter into dogma. It becomes a “truth” frozen in time, locked in the dead past.

As students, we need to remind ourselves that the words of any teacher are only signposts, pointing in a direction, to a dimension on an inner path. Words can never define the teacher and, by the same token, words cannot define us either.

A Lot Of Words

Some of us have a lot of words. We’re looking at you, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Both men were filled with words of passion and sentences of history that consumed vast pages of books stretching into infinity. Well, infinity is a slight exaggeration, but it looks like that when you’re still on page one of their books.

Words are good. They delight, entertain, provoke and encourage. Words tickle our fancy. Some of us word-smiths are enamored with words. We gather cherished words and phrases around us like little children. Two favorites of mine are “as is my wont” (thank you, Shakespeare) and “gird your loins.” In addition, some of us bulk up our repertoire with beloved words from different languages.

Ernest Hemingway shaped his writing style with “clean words.” No flowery prose for him. He wanted his writing to be as clean as the cold, crisp white wine he quaffed in copious amounts in his novels. Nothing sticky or cloying about his drinks or his writing. He wrote like an Anglo-Saxon language warrior, short and to the point.

His clean lines have a haunting quality to them. From his book, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway crafted one of his most lovely string of words:

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Joyful Words

Words guide, inspire and inform us. Well-turned words can lift us up to higher realms. Words that are connected with awareness to a higher consciousness can stir us awake like drops of milk added to our coffee, forever changing its hue, forever changing us.

Still, in the end, each of us has to take our own steps into awakening. Along the way we realize that the words themselves are not our truth, just tiny sparks of it, ever-changing in the very moment we find ourselves.

Let’s rejoice in our words as we smile privately to ourselves, all the while knowing that vast universes stand behind all the sparkles of light.

New Year 2022

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Happy New Year!

We hope it will be a happy one, just as we have hoped every year since time immemorial. New Year’s celebrations are always filled with high hopes.

I write “time immemorial,” but we’ve only been celebrating the “new year” since Babylonian times, about 4,000 years ago. To us, as tiny humans, that seems like time immemorial, but you could ask the dinosaurs from millions of years ago and I don’t think they’d have much to say about the new year. But, I digress.

Back to our celebrations. Do you have some new year’s resolutions to mark this one-year journey around the sun? Read more books? Walk in nature on a regular basis? Reach out to friends and family more often?

As we clink our glasses, our celebratory cocktail has a touch of bitters in it, doesn’t it? It reminds us of all that was regretted, lost, or mourned in the past year.

The Virus And 2022

Will 2022 be the year that COVID begins to fade away? Everyone hopes so. When will the day come that the virus no longer dominates our news, activities and movement? It does cause one to pause and wonder whether we should be jet-setting all over the planet after all.

Perhaps we were never designed for that. Could it be that taking the slow-boat is a more natural way to move on this planet? Maybe a slower, more natural rhythm is what is ingrained in our DNA.

At The Portal Of Time

Time. We measure it, count it, divide it, and add it up. Sometimes we have too much, other times, too little. We cling to the past, or fret about the future. We think we know what time is. As if it were tangible.

In fact, time mostly exists in our minds, entangled in our thoughts.

There’s nothing wrong with the acknowledgment of the changing seasons and picking out dates that we celebrate on our man-made calendars. On the New Year, we celebrate a point that we call “last year” and rejoice at a point that we call “next year.” We might want to keep in our awareness that it’s all just one big flow of energy.

We’re always standing at a portal of time. In every minute we stand in the center of the present moment of consciousness and yet, the weight of our human lives often dims this realization.

Still, we sense it. We feel it. We almost see it. Just out of view, at the corner of our sight, it reminds us to look closer. Perhaps this year we will. This year, we won’t just stand in the gateway, we’ll step through to the other side.

Wherever You Go

Wherever you go, there you are. You start to realize that more deeply with each passing year.

In this manner, we share the world of the spider – wherever we go, we spin our own web. Whether our web is humble or glittering with jewels, it’s still created with our fantasies, illusions and deceptions.

Sure, we might change some different ornaments on our web depending on our location. A French croissant, a German beer, an American hamburger (webs are, after all, all about catching food), but it is still a web of our own making with all the sticky traps of the unawakened mind.

Changing the decorations on our web will not change the web itself. Once we recognize this self-made construction surrounding us, it helps us to break free. Our awareness expands and we become more clear about our reactions and conditioning. We still have a web, we need one to live, but it no longer defines us, limits us. It’s only a part of being on this planet, not the core of who we are.

New Year Wish

This last year, we didn’t publish many blog posts. Words seemed limiting, inadequate. However, words help us to communicate, so maybe we’ll talk a bit more in the year to come.

For now, as we usher in 2022, a heartfelt wish is captured in this illustration by Pamela Zagarenski.

“My wish for you... a holiday, a winter, a year, a life full of joy & peace.”
— Pamela Zagarenski

Let’s also add, may it be a year full of good health – with healing on all levels.

Happy New Year 2022.

Flowers At Home

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Flowers To Brighten Our Days

During the pandemic that started in 2020, we have spent a lot of time in our homes. When I lived in San Francisco, there were flower shops near my workplace, so fairly often, I would bring a small bouquet home to decorate my apartment.

As the years passed, I did this less and less. It seemed to be money better-spent elsewhere and, at the time, it simply seemed a bit extravagant.

Fast forward to the pandemic of COVID-19. Staying home as much as we did, having a vase of flowers in the house was a way to bring a bit of nature inside and to brighten up the space with a pop of color.

Flowers From The Supermarket

Where I live now, I don’t have the dedicated little flower shops of an urban environment. My flowers come from the local supermarket. However, these little flower faces have proven to be just as sweet. They provide an uplifting spot of color, a breath of a living vibration that graces the center of the table.

And I’ve found that I don’t have to spend a lot of money for a small bouquet to decorate our room.

Flowers From A Neighbor

One day, a neighbor stopped by and gave us a bouquet of dahlias. These had come from a specialized grower of dahlias. The song of these gorgeous, full blossoms filled the room with their vibrant melody. The variety of the flowers made for a rich harmony of colors and shapes.

Dahlias, with all their variations, are a magical flower changing shape and color with abandon. They are also the “city flower” of Seattle.

Flowers To Mark Our Journey

All of the flowers that have filled our home have their own song to sing. Sometimes they match the feel of the season or they mark the various celebrations passing by on our calendars. Colors of autumn, Christmas themes, a celebration of hearts, a way to bring warm colors inside our homes during dark, winter nights.

Flowers Bring Nature Inside Our Homes

We decorate our homes with flowers even while remembering that the greatest of nature is outside. Of course, we know this. Yet, to have a tiny bit of nature, albeit in cut flowers, inside our room has the vibration of nature. It calls to us, reminds us of the life-force at the center of these colorful little beings. The sap rises in the stems and suffuses the petals with its energy, its life force. We are reminded of our own pulsing “sap” in our veins, carrying life to all the cells of our bodies. We are a part of nature.

For students of The Radiance Technique® (TRT®), we can connect to the marvels of nature with our Radiant Touch®. By using our TRT® hands-on, holding the flowers, lightly touching their petals when we greet them in the morning, we connect with the essence of nature. “Hello,” we say in our hearts as we add more water to their vase, “thank you for being here with me. Thank you for your existence.”

Even in the toughest of times, we say thank you. We lift our eyes to the sky and whisper our gratitude for this day, for these flowers, for our lives… even while we stay at home.

Big Tech Censorship

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Censorship

Houston, we have a problem.

First off: this is not a political blog. As soon as you open your mouth about one side of the political landscape, you alienate the other half of the population who disagrees with it.

Along that same vein, this is not a political blog post. I am not here to debate who is right or wrong or who won the election, no matter my personal feelings about it.

This post is about censorship and Big Tech. Censorship is being exerted by Big Tech right now and it’s deeply troubling and alarming.

Big Tech

Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey along with the others at Google, Amazon and Apple are in the power game of a lifetime, of several lifetimes actually. Let's be clear, they are not enlightened. I don’t want another person running my life. And even if they were enlightened, I would still not want them running my life. Nor would an enlightened person want to do so!

These unawakened and unenlightened people actually think they can tell us what to think and what to do.

I did not elect, vote for, ask for, nor do I desire Big Tech to decide who or what I can hear or see. We have ego-driven people deciding what is “fact-checked” and then forcing it down our throats. And they know nothing about what is real, about the deeper dimensions, about the Whole.

Learning From History

This type of censorship cannot sustain itself. Communist Russia and Europe could not be sustained. But unfortunately, millions of people were murdered by Stalin along the way. And no, that is not hyperbole, it was literally millions. I don’t have any illusion that I couldn’t be swept up as one of them.

What will happen when it is deemed that people cannot work with energy techniques? When meditation is banned? What makes anyone think that couldn’t happen? We are a hairbreadth away from losing everything and becoming a totalitarian country.

Censorship, suppression and repression do not work. Thoughts and ideas need to bubble up and be exposed to the light of day. They need to be examined and criticized in the full noonday sun and if not honorable, they will eventually fade and lose strength.

No Safe Haven

If we think we’re safe because we’re running with the "in" crowd, because we agree with them, or because we’re mindlessly shuffling along, sure that no one will notice us, we need to carefully clean off our glasses. We need a clearer perspective.

If we think it’s okay to censor The President of the United States because we "don’t like him" – we need to grow up. Not meaning to sound harsh, but honestly, living life only driven by likes and dislikes is a childish approach.

If we expand our awareness to hold simultaneously both our likes and dislikes, we have a greater chance of seeing with expanded vision and wholeness. An even more advanced level is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. Are you ready to take the leap?

With Or Without Tech

People of my age grew up and lived the majority of their lives without social media and even without the internet. We did just fine. Sure, the internet brought excellent advantages like online banking (along with the disadvantage of identity theft) and the movement and transfer of documents. I’m old enough to remember when sending a fax was an event and in the legal field the debate was, does the signature on a fax have the same validity as a real ink-on-paper signature?

Having the internet to stay in touch with our loved ones during a pandemic, or at any time for that matter, is a blessing. Ordering online is such a convenience. Being able to gather information swiftly, without needing to “go to the library” is a delight.

However, I fall-on-my-knees in gratitude that I did not grow up with social media.

Teen years, and even the 20s, are difficult enough without having it dominated with "likes" and on-line bullying. If I were raising children today, I would not want them on any of the social platforms. Only text messaging to coordinate times to pick them up after class, for example. Fat chance that would be successful, but one can dream.

So, do we remove all technology from our lives? That seems like throwing out the baby with the bath water as they say. Our lives have technology deeply embedded in it now. It would be nearly impossible to eliminate technology in our modern society which is a strange statement when you think about it too much.

Perhaps we do step back from some of the social media. At a minimum, we need to hold Big Tech’s feet to the fire and demand benevolence. We need fewer monopolies. We need other options.

What To Do?

So, what can we do? Here's the difficult part: I don’t know. It’s why I hesitated to write this post. Why present a problem if you don’t have a solution?

However, to start the healing process, we have to have awareness of what is happening. Seeing it is step number one. Students of TRT® can direct energy to a situation to support an alignment in Wholeness for all that is taking place. We can direct energy to clarity – first, within ourselves.

We can hold the process in our hearts, expand our understanding and yes, our universal love for all that is.

In the end, we may not understand everything at the mental level. But, we know that these present-day energies are out of balance and need re-alignment.

Stay aware, stay awake. Keep your lamp filled with oil so that your light may shine brightly.

Namasté.