Anne's Note reminds us that Urgency Isn’t Emergency. The main article, Wake Up, referencing Anthony De Mello's book, Awakening, talks about the awakening process many are experiencing today. Healthy Living shows how we can Stay Cool and Reduce Our Carbon Footprint by cooking outside. The Anne Talk is an interview of Anne about The Golden Rules of Conscious Relationships. The Featured Product this month is EZosophy: The Art and Wisdom of Easy or At Least Easier Living.

The EZ Mantra: "Everything can be EZ or at least EZier." – Anne Sermons Gillis

  A Note From Anne

Dear ,

We finally had our first home showing. “This is Showing Central and we would like to show your house in 30 minutes.” Of course the house was in disarray. We had gotten slouchy because, after knocking ourselves out and not having any showings, we had backed down from our daily cleaning ritual. You could feel the flurrying as we scampered into action and, sure enough, 30 minutes later, the house looked pretty good.

I had to remind myself, as I dashed around the house, that urgency isn’t emergency. I could clean the house, stay centered, and actually enjoy tidying up. When we are faced with doing a task when time is running out, we tend to have a hard attack, get somber, and feel fear or irritation. It is amazing how easy it is to throw away our peace and how we can justify our behavior, giving ourselves a free pass to get upset when we think circumstances warrant it. I was in the middle of such a free pass when I realized that I could still be an EZosophist while under pressure. It worked. My house cleaning became anticipation for the first showing rather than living under the influence of drama.

Have a great week, don’t have a hard attack, and remember to make life EZier and EZier.

Anne

  Wake Up

The self-improvement gospel decrees that “attitude is everything.” Patti LaBelle has a new attitude while the world contorts itself to convert old thinking into optimism.

A good and bad attitude are choices that affect our outlook, but attitude is at the surface of an endless source. Attitude is like snow. To think that snow is the whole earth is naïve. When the earth is snow covered, everything looks white, but a little digging reveals layer upon layer of complex diversity.  Attitude is a small part of a vast intelligence that moves within. Our attitude is a part of trains of thought and old familiar recipes that keep us constrained, seemingly safe, and clinging to the familiar. Our attitudes have limited liberation potential.

There is a new conversation emerging in the current spiritual narrative about that which is bigger than attitude or the mind we know. While attitude drives our minds, something much more powerful lies below the mind. That which is ever-present is subtle and it rests in stillness. Masses of people are awakening to this stillness. We are in the middle of a spiritual renaissance that started in the eighteen hundreds. The momentum continues to grow as the hidden knowledge of adepts and mystics comes into the hands of lawyers, students, housewives, and itinerant workers. Waking up is no longer reserved for the spiritually elite.

Anthony De Mello tells the following story in his book, Awareness The Perils and Opportunities of Reality:

Last year on Spanish television I heard a story about this gentleman who knocks on his son’s door. “Jaime,” he says, “wake up!” Jaime answers, “I don’t want to get up, Papa.” The father shouts, “Get up. You have to go to school.” Jaime says, “I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not?” asks the father. “Three reasons,” says Jaime. “First, because it’s so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school.” And the father says, “Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the headmaster.” Wake up, wake up! You’ve grown up. You’re too big to be asleep. Wake up! Stop playing with your toys.

Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced.

I love De Mello’s book. It is the book I wish I could write. It invites us to wake up and, in some cases, he knocks down our life sustaining illusions. As De Mello so aptly reminds us: most people are asleep. De Mello humorously switches on the light of recognition in his readers. The book not only captured my heart, I taught a class using it as the main text for two years. One can listen to him on YouTube deliver the workshop from which the book was created. That link is only the first in a series of short videos from the workshop.You can also find the book in PDF form here.

Many people use attitude to swing into action so as to rid themselves from negative feelings. But when our actions are sourced from the need to avoid, we end up in a place more hopeless than the one we tried to side step.

When we are awake, all is well, even when we are in the midst of a dilemma. When we are asleep, everything, even good news, harbors the possibility of drama and life draining misery.

When we are asleep, there are two things we can do to help us wake up:

• We can learn stillness practices and implement them into our lives. That article provides some excellent examples of how we can easily inject some stillness moments into our busy lives.
• We can borrow insights from others who are awake. We can read, listen to tapes, and attend lectures or seminars. Being around those who are wake, or even those who are stirring from somnambulance, is helpful. Even though there are many spiritual teachers who are less than honorable, there are a host of gurus and teachers who are not only awake, they have to ability to wake up the seeker. Seek those people out and go to them. You will be attracted to the ones who are right for you. Don’t just watch “Scandal” and “Wheel of Fortune” and expect your misery to end. Find a group who is waking up and attend.

Waking up is not serious business, but it is business, and it is our business. Our job in this life is to wake up. We have to get up in the morning and show up to work. We have to earn money to support ourselves, but that is not the real work. The real work is waking up. When we find ourselves steeped in misery and desperation, it means we have stopped showing up to work. The message is clear: Get up, show up, and wake up, and when you do, you will find that life is EZier and EZier.

Anne

  Quotes

"We love to play with our thoughts, but our minds are so unstable, that most of our thoughts trip us up. It’s called a mind trip."
— Anne Sermons Gillis

"Time, for spiritually advanced people, simply disappears; it does not show up like a psychological burden."
— Anne Sermons Gillis

"The mystical moment is beyond time."
— Anne Sermons Gillis

Affirmation: “I appreciate the knowledge and wisdom available to me and through me this moment. All moments are miracle-filled."
— Anne Sermons Gillis

  Featured Product This Month

  What is EZosophy?

Click the graphic above to learn more.

NOTE: If you are viewing this on a cell phone, be sure to scroll to the right to see the other column.

  Healthy Living

Stay Cool and Reduce Our Carbon Footprint

The sun sucks the water out of each plant, tree, and shrub. In southern Texas it’s been day after day of 100 degree weather with no rain in more than a month. Animals, insects, repitles, and birds hunt for water. Our air conditioning is set at 78 degrees, but the motor rarely turns off. It just buzzes and purrs in hopes of giving us a cooler day.

These are not the days to cook inside, so last night at 9 PM, the sweet potatoes entered a 350 degree oven. They stayed for 30 minutes, then I turned off the oven, and they remained there untouched until morning. The orange tuberous roots were perfect and ready for tonight’s dinner.

Not cooking during the hottest part of the day helped reduce the inside heat, yet I wondered: were there other ways to reduce the heat?  My solution: I soaked dried Navy beans overnight and put them in the crock pot this morning. I added water, pink sea salt, avocado oil, chopped onion, carrots, and bay leaf, and escorted the assembly outside for cooking. I plugged the pot in near the back door and soon the backyard smelled like a cozy, aroma-filled kitchen. Hours later, the beans were cooked to perfection. The house stayed a little cooler and I saved some energy.

Click the image to see a larger view.

The times call us to be gentle on Mother Earth. Fires burn in the northwest, millions of northwest salmon die daily, cooked alive in hot waters, asthma rates increase, and while we may not be able to invent a technology that can cool the earth’s atmosphere, we can be creative and think of ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Even if it’s just to shut our doors faster as to not let the heat or cool in, there’s something we can do daily to lighten the burden of industrialization and modern life.

There’s an old chant that reminds us of the responsibility we have toward our earth:

The earth is our mother.
We must take care of her.
The earth is our mother.
We must take care of her.
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.
Her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take.

Just as we need to take care of our clothing, home, and financial obligations, we need to take care of the earth. We don’t really own her, but we use her resources as if she had an endless supply of everything, and that’s not the case. Each of us has access to creative solutions and ideas. It’s time to pull them out and apply them to our relationship with our planet.

This is just a reminder. I know each of you do many things to conserve our resources. So just for today, maybe you could up your game a little and use your creative genius-ness to give our mom a little help. Many people grill outside, but I’m raising the bar and suggesting we can cook other things outside too. Toast? Items in our small portable ovens? Who knows what we can think of to cook outside? Let me know hear about your ideas, and thank you in advance for your help.

Anne

  Anne Talks

This talk, The Golden Rules of Conscious Relationships, is an interview of Anne by Keith Anthony Blanchard, host of The Searcher's Road Map Show on Blog Talk Radio.

The interview starts about 6:51 minutes into the show. If you want to go directly there, you can click in the scrub bar area (where the minutes show), right below the center of the microphone.

  Anne Art

Flowers
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Smile
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  Anne's Schedule

All times here are Central Time.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015
7 PM, "EZosophy"
Creative Life Spiritual Center
5326 Spring Stuebner Rd. Ste. 200
Spring, Texas 77389
Phone: 281-350-5157

You may reach Anne by phone at 281-419-1775 or click the button below to contact Anne by email. Anne is also available to officiate at weddings and funerals.