become conscious of how we direct the power of our spirit...

I'm very introspective these days. I've spent the week alone, reading spiritual texts, meditating, praying, writing, and doing yoga and belly dancing.
It's been nice to be alone a lot, and spend quiet days tending to my spirit.

I have also listened to the complete Sacred Contracts audio course by Caroline Myss.
Wow! I love her background as a Catholic, a nun, and a psychologist who studied archetypes and schizophrenia for her Masters.
Years ago I listened to her seminal work, Anatomy of the Spirit, while driving the back roads of western Marin County, while searching for a way out of my unhappiness.

I love her direct, no nonsense, somewhat smartass way of talking. She's cool. She's powerful. She's articulate, and she's paved the groundwork for very concise language about the human spirit.... Caroline Myss teaches us everything we didn't learn in Kindergarten through graduate school and didn't know to ask.

If the free people of the world, and by free I mean not in torture chambers and war zones and poverty and disease stricken gagged, bound, and raped masses in the third world... I mean the free bourgeois of the first world nations who sit in front of TV sets and computer monitors fretting over stock indexes and broken fingernails...
I mean us.
It's these free people who have the power to change the world for the better, for if they (we) could all understand that the source of our own pain and our own happiness is within ourselves and starts right in our own mind, our way of seeing and thinking and being, this world would transform, dramatically, for the better.

In this spirit, I'd like to share a bit from Caroline's latest newsletter here:
"Ideally, our task is to become conscious of how we direct the power of our spirit into acts of creation during the course of our life. More or less, that sums it up. An illuminated soul is one who is on to the game, who really understands what Buddha meant by seeing clearly through the world of physical illusion and not being controlled by that world. Jesus would say, 'Be in the world but not of the world.' Same truth, different words. What we are meant to become conscious of is how well we live in accordance to these high cosmic truths while in physical form....

This is what your inner work is all about: learning to discern what is truth from illusion – at all times, in all places.."