Behold the lotus flower that is your unfolding life. Every petal, a chapter of your life, carrying a lesson, purpose and unique beauty. The key to self-realization rests equally in the desire to open your petals and awaken to your innate wisdom of being AND in the constant uptake of nutrients from the living environment around you. Who you are is equally inner and outer. Who you are is equally the light and the dark.

Often we don’t see the value of the complex design of our life until we have reached our mid-way point or later.

One year ago, January 2016, I had just graduated my 2nd cohort at Sacred Future School, and I was unsure where the energy was going to come from to fill the next class. My students were 50/50 happy with their program, and my ego struggled with this imperfection. This brought up confusion about my next steps with my business. Was I doing the right thing? Plus, I was feeling disheartened after all the self-healing work I’d done around my sexuality, and I was still suppressing my sexual energy and rejecting my new husband in bed.
My life was moving in the right direction, don’t get me wrong… but I was definitely hitting a wall, which was actually a long awaited growth edge. My Soul was asking me to take a huge risk, but I didn’t know how to make the shift.

By July, I had managed to bring in a small 3rd cohort of students. I resorted to my habitual devaluing of my work and gave almost everyone a discount or scholarship. At this time, my husband and I flew to Costa Rica to attend my last of 3 private sexual healing retreats with our mentors.

When it’s time, it’s time. 
Three huge shifts happened in Costa Rica that broke me through my fears and launched me on a whole new life track that was ultimately more aligned with my Soul Mission. Simply leaving North America was a huge support for me to see myself  more clearly! Costa Rica offered an amazingly pure energetic field for major quantum shifts to happen in a short amount of time (4 days).

The First Shift:  The negative entity hiding in my energy field and belly was outed and cleared completely. I felt like I was myself again and my sexual energy returned immediately.

The Second Shift: I was invited to release everyone, everything, every idea about myself and expand into the most vast consciousness of my pure presence. This completely cleared me of all other people’s energy that was hanging out in my field, grasping at me, as well as cleared my grasping at others.

The Third Shift: I was asked what I really really wanted to be doing with my life. From the clarity and expansiveness I’d attained by that point, I was able to see how small I was playing in my life. I saw it and accepted it without judging myself. And then I re-focused my trajectory to Play Big!

I named my dream of living in a tropical paradise, near the warm ocean waters, swimming with dolphins and whales as often as possible. Also, my dream of opening a mastery level Medicine Path Training Program.

By the completion of my time in Costa Rica, spending just 4 days with my mentors, I had a radically different life path before me. Before we flew home, I contacted my team and let them know things were changing. I then resigned from my position as Dean of Students at Energy Medicine University and I taught the most inspiring tele-class to my students I’d ever taught!

NOW
Fast forward to today, January 27, 2017. Duane and I just returned from Kona, Hawai’i where we spent 3 weeks networking, scouting and best of all, swimming with dolphins! Not only did we connect with brilliant lightworkers who are elders and spiritual teachers in the cetacean communication world, but we also had 3 absolutely life-changing experiences in the ocean with hundreds of Spinner Dolphins. By December, we hope to be packing up our home in Santa Rosa and moving to Captain Cook, on the Big Island of Hawai’i.

Along with that,
– My 3rd cohort graduated with raving reviews of the program and the current 4th cohort of students are traveling with me to Hawai’i where they will meet the dolphins first hand.
– My organization, Sacred Future, is expanding beyond US borders and I’m working with an amazing group of change-agents in Israel to provide ongoing Earth-based Ritual training, and I’ll soon be traveling to England to teach.
– I’m grounded in the power of the program I direct, having shifted the curriculum to my dream curriculum! Now I’m excited and my students are experiencing the most powerful and awake version of me, and getting instant results in their lives!
– I no longer lower the tuition for fear of the program not filling up. I know it will fill up with those who are ready to live their dreams.

It is true, we can only take our students as far as we’ve gone ourselves. As leaders, it is our responsibility to move towards our greatest dreams for our lives.

With a reflective lens on this transformation, I see that this major life transition, what I refer to as an initiation or rites of passage, was ripe for exactly this moment in time. I actually have the understanding and courage now to accept this shift and allow my higher guidance to carry me through it, whereas before I couldn’t choose it because I felt unworthy.

I was only focusing on all the reasons why it couldn’t happen. Why I couldn’t live the life of my dreams.

What I learned is: 
There’s a reason we dream what we dream. There’s a reason our biggest dreams give us so much pleasure to imagine! Because once we’re living them, we are finally aligned within our co-creator consciousness and our true spiritual work here finally begins. 

This current life transformation has opened me onto my path as a spiritual channel, time-traveler, and inter-dimensional activist for peace. My whole life has been training me for this moment! From my Marine Biology and Cetacean research in college, to my years of creative writing classes, to my MA in Counseling Psychology, to my Ancestral healing work, and of course, my embeddedness in native cultures around the world experiencing many forms of ceremony.

A Summary of the Wisdom:
We tend to steer our gaze toward what isn’t working, our flaws and failures, and how other people should change to make us more comfortable. Our noses are stuck in the tiny granules of sand that are the trivial details of our material and egoic existence. Like well trained, domesticated servants, we obey the man-made rules of the survival game, too enveloped in solving daily problems to look up at the stars.

Along our road, we will stumble and fall flat on our faces. During these traumatic times, we often feel like the biggest failures, but the opposite is true. These falls happen because there is no way to win at the game of survival. Everyone who struggles to be the best, to be perfect, to be successful and appear better than others, will fall eventually. When we fall, this is a time to give thanks. The fall shatters the illusion of perfection and the false belief that we are separate from the rest of life. These falls can humble us and invite us to look more honestly at our behaviors, choices and what really matters to us.

When we rise up from the ground, we are different, hopefully. If we give ourselves time to reflect and understand how this fall happened, without blaming others, but solely looking at our own choices, then we can integrate the trauma and move forward with wisdom.

During our journey, we will experience unexpected tragedies that blind-side us and leave us spinning. In such moments, we can lose all faith in our version of God or Good. We may also be catalyzed into a heightened understanding about life and death, and our own purpose of being alive. Losing someone suddenly can trigger the most heart wrenching abandonment. It can feel as if our hearts are being torn out of our chests. We may want to die, rather than feel the pain. We may reach for various forms of anesthesia to numb our hearts and quiet our incessant thinking.

These moments are doorways into the great unknown power living in our hearts, if allowed to be. Tragedy shatters us into pieces. What matters is how we put those pieces back together. We can hate the world and choose to remain shattered to prove something. Or we can reach out to collect the pieces of our heart, and one by one, hold them with the deepest compassion we can muster.

It is in these moments of pain that we have the opportunity to redirect our lives. They can show us how we are playing small and not going for our greatest dreams. How we let our true love walk away, how we minimize moving to a location we feel deep resonance with, how we keep dimishing our ability to bring  our creativity out into the world.

Fearing our own lives demands all our life force energy. Saying yes to our dreams gives us energy to move towards what is Soul Aligned. 

Another petal on the lotus flower of our lives unfolds. Each petal holds a beautiful truth about us. Each petal resonates at a certain quality of wisdom. Our lotus flower life is anchored by a tap root into the Earth. It grows up through the waters of our unconscious, and opens above the water in the lightness of air, responding to the sun’s warmth and heat with a graceful and willing blooming. The lotus flower that we are grows most strongly in community, combining our beauty with the beauty of others, to create an overwhelming presence of the divine on Earth.

WHAT DREAMS HAVE YOU BEEN MINIMIZING AS MERE FANTASIES?
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU TOOK THEM OUT OF HIDING AND BROUGHT THEM INTO THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY?
WHO WOULD YOU BECOME IF YOU TREATED YOUR DREAMS AS ALLIES CALLING YOU TO SELF-REALIZE?

With Aloha in My Heart and Inspired Vision Guiding Me,
Maria Christina Owl