We're Back

 Hello All,

Zoom Groups are back starting this week. I hope you will join me and others in exploring the wonder that Life can be. Just because it is wild and wooley out there doesn't mean there is not bliss available to experience.  

Please RSVP to join Tuesday evening 7-9 pm, Wednesday 10 am or Thursday evening 6 pm. All times are Pacific. If you are new please email me at janetb@janetandbeyond.com for the registration packet. All groups are sliding scale donation per weekly group. Please have registration packet returned by Tuesday 3pm pacific so i have time to send the Zoom invite just before the scheduled group meet time. 

All the best to you and yours,

janet

Janet Barrett

Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet

www.janetandbeyond.com

janetb@janetandbeyond.com

The Mask It's All About You by Bill Protzmann

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay 

A friend and past guest on my podcast, Bill Protzmann. of Music Care Inc. sent this out last week. I so enjoyed it I thought I would pass it on to you.

 Whenever I hear people feeling challenged to wear a mask I am noticing how they hold the reality of Oneness. I am claustrophobic myself so wearing one is not my favorite thing to do but I do it anyway. As I get ready for my upcoming surgery I will appreciate the masks worn by the medical staff around me. They do this to help keep their stuff clean of mine. IT is all about mindset. For me it is not about control. It is about politeness, courtesy and respect towards each other. All which are forms of Love. 

"This article originally appeared at PracticalHeartSkills.com and is used here with kind permission of the author."

“Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing…once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” – famously misattributed to Sir Winston Churchill

My Dear Friend:

When you see me wearing a mask these days, think of me as you would think of a slightly eccentric but kindly uncle who only wants the best for you until you can inherit some of my considerable wealth.

When you wonder why I mask up like this or suspect I might be towing someone else’s line out of sheer dogged compliance, just know that when I wear a mask, it’s really all about you.

I could really care less what some high government official or healthcare expert says about wearing a mask. I don’t have much regard for either of them these days.

I could really care less for what you think of me, too. Please don’t take that the wrong way: this isn’t about me. It’s about you.

You see, I’m not the first one to wear my mask for you, and I won’t be the last.

The thing is, you matter to me. What you think. What you do. How you live in your corner of our crazy world.

It matters to me that you enjoy your culture, your home, your friends, your family, probably as much as anyone else does.

It matters to me that you think, feel, act, sing, pray, meditate, stream videos, vote, work at some occupation that matters to you, hold to your convictions, act as if…and it matters to me that you do all those things to help you belong in our world in the way that works best for you.

It matters that you do many of those things differently than I do. Yes: differently.

If we were all the same, what a boring place this world would be.

Yes, I know: underneath it all, we are all basically the same, but that’s not the point.

The point, my friend, is that I’ve run out of ways to honor you.

I’ve been locked down, quarantined, circumscribed, mandated, and browbeaten into compliance with arbitrary rules no one could have imagined last year. And so have you. We are, in this pandemic-infused moment of history, together in so many more ways than we are apart.

Except when we aren’t apart.

In those limited moments when I pass you on the sidewalk, or in the pharmacy or the grocery store, or on the subway, train station, bus, café, or empty shopping mall, most of my safe ways to honor you have been masked. You can’t always see me smile from my eyes. You can’t always see the compassion there, too.

And sometimes, my dear friend, you don’t want to. I can’t say I blame you. Things are fraught, and you might just find me offensive for any number of reasons that I don’t know and can’t guess.

But here’s the thing: I love you.

Doesn’t that just sound trite, pithy, and useless?

Honestly, sometimes it’s all I’ve got to give you. I can’t say it to you, can’t offer you my hand in greeting, can’t hug you like a long-lost parent or prodigal child.

Not because I don’t want to, but because I love you, and you deserve love, honor, and respect, and the usual ways I had for offering that to you aren’t options for me now.

I’ve had to invent a new way to show you that I care for you and for who you are. I’ve had to open what’s left of my much-battered heart and offer something to you from that vulnerable place. We are, after all, united in our pain right now more than in any other way.

Oh yes, I know you put on your brave face and walk it into the world every day as if pain isn’t a factor in your life, but that’s not why I love you. I love you, you see, because I used to be that person, too, and I have learned to live in this world “with its harsh need to change you” as the poet David Whyte writes.

The world has changed me, my friend, into that possibly-wealthy, slightly-eccentric, kind, (mostly) tolerant and accepting uncle you wish you had.

Well, you’ve got me. And you’ll know me when you see me. I’m the one wearing a mask.

Sincerely –

Bill

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet
www.janetandbeyond.com 
janetb@janetandbeyond.com

JIE Episode 40 Let Go. Really, Why?

Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet 

Podcast releasing Tuesday July 14, 2020

Episode 40 Blog/ Let Go. Really, Why?

Probably the hardest challenge for any of us is embracing any perceived pain as useful.  We tend to hold on to things and feelings and if it doesn’t feel good, we don’t want to feel it. So, we decide to never feel that way again and then we create often elaborate patterns of avoidance and rules. We build huge powerful rule sets that we think will protect us from the hurt again when in reality, the rules trap the energy dynamics into place and keep us chasing our tails. We never are dealing with our part of our own set up, our joint creation in honest ways and there is a failure to appreciate what our lives are about.

 We miss valuing our lessons about relating to our Selves and others and our own creations. 

 We get stuck in continuous looping holding patterns of pain. It can be challenging to be grateful for one’s pain. John J. Murphy my guest this week mentions that Egos don’t understand appreciation. We are in our wounds and can stay there. Unless something happens to bring awareness. It takes honesty and intention to look at what we are creating and making our reality. It takes us getting out of our blindness in perspective and role playing. This is an act of love towards Self. To look. 

Stuff happens in our lives, all the times. Acceptance is useful here. It will bring us face to face with what we value about life, as contrast, in gentle or most often, traumatic ways. We might never have seen it coming but on reflection we can often see our setups. Those times and spaces where we weren’t paying attention, where we failed to stop and where we listened to what sounded convenient and took the easy way out. Which is different than appreciating one’s own flow.

Most of us are not in strong enough daily congruent states to build in a flood plane and then not be surprised when the rain comes and the house floods. We might wonder sometimes why a neighborhood can be decimated and one house is not. Perhaps there is something different about the energy of the owners that keeps them safe in a sense of higher ground. Why is it that some get a disease that can kill many and it just dissipates in another?

Only when we realize what our feelings are letting us explore, from within our non attached sense of Consciousness, can we own our feelings and then shift gears, intentionally if wanted. There is nothing wrong with being unhappy. It can be a useful state at times. But who wants to be unhappy for more than a moment?

There is nothing wrong with feeling like a warrior vanquishing the bullies and protecting the weak. And felt, with righteousness and belligerence can wear a soul down. When it is coming from within a rule set of victim/abuse/user etc. it may be a sense of power/loss of power that is active. And it keeps creating realities of happening again and again and the highs and lows of joy/misery.  The pattern is set in place and the people and circumstances may change over the years, but the same dynamic is playing out for the lifetime.

Employing our ability to manifest our love of Self and others takes maybe many different moments of wanting to and choosing to BE Love. Is it Love betrayed you are feeling or is it your ideas of what Love means to you, your illusions of what Love is, that you are in resistance with? How is your pain helpful in supporting your wounded beliefs of Love and what you think you deserve to experience? We can say we want Love but if is with attachment it is not Love, only our illusion of Love.

Letting go means one can experience something else without the poison of the past. It is how we transcend our wounds into the gifts that they are if we are willing to unwrap them.

Janet Barrett

Podcast host Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet

www.janetandbeyond.com

janetandbeyondpodcast@outlook.com

Journeys Into Enlightenment Episode 33 Blog/ Going Deeper Into BEing

Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet Podcast 

releasing Tuesday April 7, 2020

 Episode 33 Blog   Going Deeper Into BEing  

Many things are happening in the world as I sit to focus and write this blog for this Episode 33 with George Thomas. It is easy to be distracted by the emotional turmoil present in those who are compromised to pay their rent and my medical friends on the front line dealing with the realities of those in distress. All doing their best to keep themselves mentally and physically healthy and the rest of us safe.

My sense is to go deeper, below the clamor to my sense of my own Essence for the quiet and sacred I hold within. Which is what this episode and every episode in this podcast is about: going beyond the clamor of Self into Consciousness. And the going beyond is not so much an outward experience but an inward sense. Within.

This is what we all can know. That what we are looking for in connection is not out there but in here. In our social distancing more are becoming aware of our true nature as Oneness. How, without the distractions of busy and doing, what things look like, we share in this collective experience we call Consciousness.

We invite what we have not been paying attention to, to express. It is our fears, it is our love and appreciation about life and being present in what we have collectively created in our clumsy ways this reality we find ourselves in.

It is a time of immediacy, not something to think about. There is no time to process except in real time and it feels like time can be running out. It is not. We can expand it instead. Shift to our inner Essence where our time and space senses are malleable. As the days tick off the calendar, as illness gestates for some and passes by others. Create time to catch up with breathing into awareness twinkle lighted particles of wonder. Breathe in wonder and Life, breath out the dissolving stickiness of fear and compromise. Interesting. Compromise is in the air.

We are experiencing what happens when we don’t listen. When we let the fear in Life dictate our thoughts and manifest into reality.

This is a great time to sit in awareness.

Many were so busy during our formally regular days that we lost awareness of our internal messages at the time they were happening. In these non regular days we are now in, what are you thinking about? Just hear your self talk. What did you just think? Then notice how you feel when the thought repeats. Does it upset you? Does it calm you? Does your gut tighten, does your heart twinge, does your neck ache now? All are clues to your inner health and harmony.

You can go deeper. Your breath will take you there without thinking.

IF you knew, in tangible ways that what you sense and feel and think produced results immediately would you pay better attention to those senses, feeling and thoughts? IF you understood that we are all creating our reality together?

You may have your rules about life set to follow others in their awareness and you might check that setting. Life is about immediacy, in the moment. We organize with our senses of time and space to slow things down and create a sense of over time. Shift and change can and do happen in a moment and a week is lots of moments.

In particular this episode is about how it can be easier than you think to Love and Appreciate yourself in new ways. That it can be easier to let loose the fear and sense of entitlement that has blossomed in the air as virus.

If we use our wisdom and pay attention now we will see around us those who think small, think keep out, think that they come before others, that worthiness has a price. We need to remember that future projections are just that, projections and not fact. They are playing the odds. They are set in the reality is that IF NOTHING CHANGES THIS WILL HAPPEN.

So join me and George and others in understanding what it takes to get from here to there. Feel. Without attachment to what we think we know, into your inner realm that IS. Right in this moment your truth.

WE ARE THE CHANGE. IT IS HAPPENING NOW. BE PRESENT NOW.

Janet Barrett

Podcast host of Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet

www.janetandbeyond.com 

janetandbeyondpodcast@outlook.com 

JIE Episode 32 Blog/Today's Chivalry

Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet 

Releasing March 24, 2020

Episode 32 Blog/ Today’s Chivalry

My youthful awareness of Chivalry was of stories of King Arthur’s court and a code of behavior and of a knight in shining armor participating in jousts with the acknowledgment of a favor from an observing lady. And it was important as it was a signal to the others watching of her strength as he represented her. He was her knight, a symbol of her power and strength among the court.

I was reminded of it again this past winter in the people of the military and diplomatic corps speaking their truths without question, demonstrating fearlessness, willing to take the consequences from powerful forces around them. It struck me deeply these heroic men and women of all backgrounds and accomplishments, their heads held high, their gazes direct. Sitting not in defiance but in Grace. It went beyond gender.  

Chivalry is really an umbrella word in meaning. It encompasses many desirable qualities including Courage, Honor, Courtesy, Justice, and a readiness to help the weak. In my conversation with Bill Protzmann of Music Care Inc we found our conversation also was inclusive of Love, Kindness, Compassion, social behaviors and gender concerns.

Courage, honor, courtesy, justice, a readiness to help the weak never go out of fashion. They help define us as a society filled with individuals living together. Our evolution of our awareness of Chivalry comes in recognizing all those before mentioned qualities to include what happens between the sexes and that it is not only men who demonstrate Chivalry. We all are and can be champions for our partners, the elderly, children and community.

We each know when someone has helped us in some small way be it holding the door or the anonymous donor or have our boo-boos kissed and we feel better. It may be the highlight of the recipient’s and giver’s day. We are demonstrating an enriching connection between each of us. Compare it to rudeness and non-engagement. They feel different. 

I don’t think of Chivalry as dead or just happening only in the Middle Ages. My sense is that out of that time in history of civilization it came into being recognized as a powerful social endeavor. Life was as dicey then as it is now but without the technologies we enjoy. Culture was building around those in power and dictating behaviors and forming societies based on that marshaling of title and power and the holding of resources.

Many of the quotes I looked up for the Ageless section of our podcast episode seemed to focus on the current loss of Chivalry. As though it was a long-ago forgotten concept in our age of mechanization and technology.

Since the women’s movement in the late 60’s we gained much in male/female disparities but maybe also a loss in gender courtesy. Women are still being treated as second class citizens in many fields of endeavor and Rape is nothing new in society. But the rules that we look to govern our civility between the sexes are updating in this age of #MeToo.  

Our challenge would seem to be bring it into the modern era of interacting with one another. Gender contains so much bias and its changing awareness in influencing modern societies is slow in manifesting, in recognizing our biases in others and how that is reflecting our own. How the sexes treat each other comes out of internal directives of hormones and behaviors, values, learning and socialization.

How do men treat women and how do women treat men? How do both men and women say one thing in social intercourse and mean another? How do we behave towards each other?

Men and women balance each other. One is not better than the other. We embody the same qualities in our different forms. Men will protect women and children. Women will protect their men and children also. As will children trying to protect their parents and families. What ever we love or have a sense of connection to we will do our best to keep safe.

Bringing the qualities of Chivalry into this moment: Courage, Honor, Courtesy, Justice and extending a helping hand to one another is not that difficult. Not when Love and Kindness and Compassion and the willingness to stand in front, on the front lines of human interactions and life around us is present. 

When BEing in our truth comes from within where there is no self-agenda or fear, there is only the triumph of Spirit. Not the pettiness or righteousness of Self disguised as Spirit but the Grace of BEing.

Janet Barrett

Podcast host of Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet

www.janetandbeyond.com

janetandbeyondpodcast@outlook.com 

JIE Episode 30 Enjoying the Other

Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet Podcast

releasing Feb. 25, 2020

Episode 30 Blog   Enjoying the Other

How we relate in our relationships is a lifelong dance. We are always in relationships as that is our inherent state whether it be with another person, or thing.  What kind and what we do with them and how they will guide us is individual in our stories of BEing in form.

Our family life, of whatever kind, is foundation. We are first a child with two parents or with only one parent present or in and out of exposure or missing. Or, we may have no parents guiding us, only a revolving band of characters imposed by the state.

We may have siblings older and younger in our house to share life with or only on weekends. We may love each other, we may like each other, we may fight, we may not know each other, we may feel something else.

Our feelings will come and go and change and develop and enrich in any sort of emotional range.

We have our” perfect relationship” meter running all the time to be satisfied or not. We can feel loved but not part of the Others. Separateness is powerful. Lack of trust is powerful.

We can feel what we call loved but not understood or validated for our individuality. We sometimes are valued only as part of the Other’s reflection and not for our own. We fall under another’s shadow. We can feel we are not important enough or only as important as they let us feel. 

Our sense of Love is bandied about and held cheap. It is not and we all know it and that any sense of connection is priceless.

We come to find that birth family is only one way to experience family. Found friends and community create family be them street gang or bowling group.

When older, our interactions with others will trigger the old references we have for those beginning relationships. Themes develop in our interactions. Love and our ideals of love play out in ever expanding directions but still nourish the core story we have of engaging and connecting with others. 

Relationships are fixed positions. One way to change your position and role is to start relating to another and not role play. For instance, the relationship of Wife and Husband comes in all shapes and sizes unique to each couple. Hopefully it is an enriching experience for both. This relationship is wrapped up in many outside influences of society that shift. When we relate to each other, respond not react, we have more autonomy. And that helps our relationship and our definitions of what works for us personally.

It is very possible that the Other doesn’t get your change. They are busy in their mindset story of Life. And, it doesn’t matter, unless it does.

Others are not responsible for how we feel about them. We are. Courage is that quality often connected to change of viewpoint. Challenge does not have to be in your face, defiant. It can be a subtle ease of being.  You have it in you. It just might not be the strongest awareness you have in this moment. But being able to be in Heart centered Awareness, and to listen to your inner authentic voice can happen easily when you realize it is already there and now is the time to listen and take inspired action.

Enjoy the Other from within Heart Centered Awareness and see what happens.  Be present now.

Janet Barrett

Podcast host Journeys Into Enlightenment with Janet

www.janetandbeyond.com 

janetandbeyondpodcast@outlook.com 

There is No Thing to Do, only BE

In Western societies we are so often organized in competition, accomplishment, growth, success, achievement. We have become doers. We put value not on how we contribute to society but how much we make our way in society. We judge each other and keep score in many ways through jobs, wages and money, title, power, and in the things we have, the things we don't have and in the things we want.

Our self-identity is not coming from our own centered sense of Being then, but from our interactions of outside influences and performances and a separated self identity develops. When we lose any of those parts of this outside constructed sense of self identity, we can feel it as a loss and we can be weakened and at risk for enjoying our lives.

This is what can happen when one loses a job or a loved one. Our construction falters on its borrowed foundation stones. 

Being able to call upon our centered sense of Being makes it easier to live through the challenges that Life will offer us. Realizing that we are part of the whole, as Consciousness, supports and provide connection at our deepest levels and is sustaining.  

Self is part of Essence. It is the human interface of Essence or Soul or connection as Spirit. We each set up the rules and definitions to be explored in being who we each are as part within the collective that Consciousness is, potential and energy in motion.

There is no separateness ever. That is only the human Self's illusion.

In this physical realm of contrast, it is how we hold Self that is important. Self is a creation, a projection. The more it is aware of its connection to its own Essence, its BEingness, Self and its world view perspectives engage differently. Realities of Oneness, that we all share in BEing and Wholeness, the Grace in what happens with all in that sharing, operate. 

We are not who we are because we have. We are who we are because we BE. 

If you look at who you are on a DNA level you tap into this reality. Those chromosomal combinations have the entire human story encoded in them. Mental DNA, emotional DNA, psychological DNA, psychic DNA, spiritual DNA are all incorporated in our Physical DNA. Every state of reality and perception throughout mankind’s history is in your DNA as shared information. Every disbelief, feeling, thought of the past is in your DNA.  But that is too big a reality to deal with, so we don’t. And in cutting ourselves off we often cut ourselves out.

Don't let yourself be bored by Life or in Life. Have the courage to change things up in your habits of quiet resignation, subversive passive aggression and the never ending patterns of unworthiness and not enough. Change your reality your Self has projected into being. It manifests your worst fears so you can notice them and let them dissolve out of existence. 

Celebrate BEing Alive right in this moment. 

BE. 

Janet Barrett
Life in the Beyond/ Journeys Into Enlightenment 
www.janetandbeyond.com
janetb@janetandbeyond.com