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Video Summary: I want to talk about the feeling of security, the internal security of feeling safe and secure. I'll start with the premise that we were conditioned to find security and even safety outside of us. The way we were raised in our families as little kids, we were very much reliant upon our parents. And so security and safety were outside of us in a very real sense. And as life went on, we found things outside of us, such as a job, a place to live, things, friends,

Video Summary: At some essential level, everything is a relationship. Obviously, we have our relationships with our significant others, family, friends, and community. And then that extends spiritually to a relationship with nature, a relationship with the planet, and a relationship to God or Spirit. And at some level, we have a relationship with ourselves in terms of how we treat and relate to ourselves. And what came next in my inquiry is that each of us tends to have a pri

Video Summary: I'm going to talk about projection. It's a term or a concept that was invented by Sigmund Freud, and then later developed by Carl Jung and other psychoanalysts. Projection is when we take part of ourselves and project it onto another person. And we're unconscious that it's actually that issue or thing in me that I'm seeing in the other person. I want to break it down into two types of projection. The first is when we take someone from our past, such as a mother

Video Summary: I want to talk about a concept that I called attachment to the outcome. Here I'm using attachment similarly to how Buddhism uses it. The Buddha was big on non-attachment and taught that attachment creates suffering and bondage. Accordingly, the intention of this video is to learn about our attachment to the outcome, and how it creates suffering and bondage- so we can experience more freedom and liberation. For the outcome part of this, the first part of an inte

Video Summary: Happy Summer Solstice! My favorite word for the energy of the summer solstice is dynamic. It's energetic, life-generating, and active. And it has clarity. The time of the day that it would be is high noon, when everything is in the light. During the time of the summer solstice, we can draw upon the dynamic energy of the earth and ourselves. It's ultimately a way to align yourself with the dynamic energy of the time and inside yourself so you can access it and b

Video Summary: For this week's video blog, I included one last clip of a Q-and-A session on Zoom for Chapter 4 of my book, Natural Way of Being, which happened on May 4. It begins with Kate asking me a question regarding thought-based emotion and pure emotion. Kate (summarized): So it sounds like anger tends to be thought-based. And passion too. But then, as you were talking, I started to think: well, can't any emotion be both? For example, fear can definitely be thought-base

Video Summary: I spoke about collaborative creation in last week’s video. By this, I mean when we offer an intention, the energy of our intention goes out and interacts with the universe, life, or spirit. What really struck me is that this is already happening, because it's the natural way of things. Even if we didn't offer this formal intention, it's still happening. And so even a thought or idea is an intention. Even if you didn't sit down and light sage or do a meditation

Video Summary: The reason I call it collaborative creation is that I'm collaborating with the universe, Life, or Spirit. When I offer the energy of my intention to the universe, it presents doorways and resources that I might need. An advantage of using collaborative creation is that Spirit can see all kinds of possibilities that your conscious mind can't see. All these other dimensions of life, including knowledge of the way things are linked together, become available to yo

Video Summary: For this week's video blog, I included a clip of a Q&A session on Zoom for Chapter 4 of my book, Natural Way of Being, that happened on May 4. It begins with me answering a question that was emailed in: Can you provide more examples of pure feelings versus thought-based feelings, where anger and passion fall? I want to talk about pure feelings and thought-based feelings in a different way. Perhaps you've heard the concept of top-down versus bottom-up processing

Video Summary: The other day, someone shared how something that I said really touched his life. And, as he went on to explain it, I discovered that his takeaway was totally different than what I was trying to get across. I had to hold myself back. I was almost ready to say, "You didn't get what I meant by that." Thankfully, I didn't do this. So the trick is letting go of how people take the things that we say. We're responsible for speaking our truth. In my book, I call it my

Video Summary: For this week's video blog, I included a clip from a Zoom Q&A session on Chapter 4 of my book, Natural Way of Being, held on May 4. It begins with Tasia asking a question: Tasia: I was hoping you could give us a little more advice on strategies for allowing energy in beyond just asking questions. Michael (summary of my answer): Well, the way this was taught to me by my teacher is that the first step was to stop pushing your energy out. In our culture, we're con

Video Summary: I want to talk about a tendency to externalize our beauty and our love by projecting it onto people, experiences, and things outside of us. We no longer see it as our love, which can cause problems spiritually and emotionally. An excellent example of this is when we fall in love. What often happens is that we meet someone whom we see as beautiful, and we experience love. It's really important to understand that when we fall in love, it opens our hearts, and we