Stand still

Dear Angelic Blog Buddies;

I can remember when I was a little girl and I wanted to go outside and play in new fallen snow, my mother would have to repeatedly remark to me to stand still while she was attempting to get a snowsuit on me or some sort of protective clothing.

Over the years, I have come to realize that standing still is something that my brain has a hard time computing. I do not do standing still well. Additionally, I have come to recognize that standing still is a very powerful form of healing.

In the Bible in Psalm 46:10, we read the words, "Be still and know that I am God".

The first spiritual divination tool I was introduced to by the angels was the Runes. I was inspired by the angels to create my own set of Runes made from broken pieces of sand dollars that I had collected at the beach. To this day it is my own personal belief that the Runes are one of the most intimate and personal of all divination tools.

There is a Rune that is called Isa. Of the 25 Runes it is No. 23. The Rune Isa looks like a lower case letter l. It is a single straight vertical line. It is a messenger of standing still; being patient. I always look at this Rune as the icicle Rune. It is filled with the power of the element of water. It has all the energy of a rainfall, waterfalls, an ocean; yet it is in a frozen or standing still state.

Sometimes in the past, when I had a question and wanted to know what I was to do, I would use the Runes and Isa sometimes appeared. I remember thinking, "Oh great, I am to do nothing." I really didn't like drawing that rune. The are many times I want to be flowing like a river and the Divine sends me a message that I need to stand still with the energy. Spirit tells me to chill out like an icicle.

Since the beginning of the year I have received inspirations from the angels as to the importance of rest in my life. There's so much change going on that it is overwhelming at times and it can be exhausting. In order to be nurturing to ourselves, we need to give ourselves permission to rest, pause, take naps, relax, chill out.

A good friend of mine gifted me a book by Macrina Wiederkehr: Seven Sacred Pauses - Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day. "Wiederhekr helps readers ...devote themselves to pausing - whether once a day or more frequently - the wisdom of living in the here and now and moving more harmoniously with the rhythm of day and night." The book is "an invitation to pause, pray, and live in tune with the spirit of each hour." I am certain that my angel team whispered to my girlfriend, "Give Jayne this book on sacred pauses; she needs the healing of the pause in her life."

I love anything that is connected with spiritual devotions aligned to the hours of the day. I recently attended a symposium at the Walters Art Gallery that was a gathering of brilliant researchers on the Book of Hours. However, I came to realize that I was reading and researching about the calling to pause; I just wasn't living it. I laughed at myself when I again looked at the title of the book: Seven Sacred Pauses. I wasn't allowing myself one pause let alone seven.

In contemplating how to help heal myself through pausing, resting, standing still I came to recognize how serious an imbalance this is in my life. Even though the sun sets at the end of each day, I wasn't. I'm the energizer bunny that keeps on going.I want to be constantly beating on that drum.

The angels were encouraging me to balance my life by taking a sabbatical or going on a retreat. For my solar return chart my Sun is in the 12th house. The 12th house is the house of giving oneself the gift of being invisible at times. The word sabbatical means to give rest at regular intervals.

I came to recognize I didn't understand what the Sabbath was all about either and how it was a gift of healing from God. The word Sabbath in Hebrew means the seventh. It was a consciousness that whatever was "the seventh" conveyed an energy of a time designated for repose and rest and rejuvenation. Every seventh year, fields were not to be tilled. They were given a year of rest. In Jewish law, the seventh day of the week was a day no one was allowed to do any work.

The Sabbath is a day of the week in certain religious practices, i.e. Saturday is recognized as a Sabbath day, and Sunday is also recognized as a Sabbath day. That is an abundant spiritual practice; however, for me I came to recognize that the Sabbath is the conscious choice of giving up constantly being in a doing/getting something done consciousness and entering into a stillness of being with God. It is a time to place ourselves in the lap of the divine and rest.

I remember in my childhood of growing up on a farm, my Mom and Dad both honored Sunday as the Sabbath. It was a day of going to church, coming home and sharing a special meal (there were certain foods that were for Sunday dinners only). Sunday was a day of resting. Life was lived at a slower pace on Sundays. I grew up when the Blue Laws were enforced. There was absolutely no shopping on Sundays. I remember many conversations in my home that the world was going to you know where because of having stores open on Sunday.

In a way my folks were right, we are experiencing Sabbath Deficiency Syndrome. We are lacking the goodness and healing we receive from stopping all the constant action and take regular intervals of rest. The Sabbath is about letting go and let ourselves fall into the arms of the divine. I think this is why I love Psalm 91 so much. It is a message that says if we place ourselves under God's wing, God will take care of everything. Words of Psalm 91 convey the message: God is my refuge; in God I trust. However, when I keep on doing everything from sunup to sundown, I am not embodying my belief in those words.

I do recognize that times change; however, I have been thinking to myself recently what a terrific idea God had in creating day and night and having the sun as the light during the day to support activities and having darkness at night in order to support rest and going to sleep so our bodies can rejuvenate. I am giving myslf the gift of going to bed earlier.

And an equally abundant idea is this idea of the Sabbath; a consciousness where we stop the doinginess and be with God. I have taken my appointment calendar this year and given myself Sabbath days;days of rest and rejuventation. I have to be truthful, some months I have really accomplished this and feel so happy about the healing in my life and some months I have resorted to old habits of being the bunny with the drum and I keep on drumming.

I also asked myself how I could give my physical body a rest, and I am doing days of fasting so my body isn't constantly having to be doing the bodily functions of digesting and eliminating. Some of you may know I was a pretty sick puppy the month of June from an on-going bout of bronchitis. Bronchitis affects the air passages of the lungs. I truly believe my body was telling me that I was sending air out through my service and healing activities, but I wasn't stopping and being still and letting air back in which would be a healing to me.

I have also given my mental and emotional bodies a Sabbath healing,too, by unplugging from newspapers and the television and computer news. I found that mentally and emotionally I was responding to all of the news and my body was constantly "doing responses" to where was Michael Jackson's body, who would be Michael Jackson's children's guardian, and how could Tony the football star dump Jessica the singer star via email the day before her birthday.

I am striving to find a balance of living in this world and still staying conscious I am not of this world. My world or reality is one of striving to achieve the balance of going out in the world and doing work and service for God and being a blessing, and then keep my own life in healthy balance by having an equal amount of time to rest and rejuvenate myself and be blessed by being still.

Love in Abundance, Jayne