Unfathomable Mystery

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg."

--Eckhart Tolle

What a delight to read these words by Eckhart Tolle this morning when I opened one of his books. I relate totally to what he has said here because it speaks to my experience of living life on a clairvoyant path.

The key to understanding the passage above is realizing how deeply entrenched we are in relating to our world with our "minds". This mind is only one aspect of our true selves, our energetic, spiritual self. We are in a human phase of evolution during which we are beginning to realize that there are other ways of perceiving the world and that there is so much going on beneath the surface appearance of things. We have trusted rationalism and intellectual inquiry and science to give us all our answers as to the nature of LIFE and organized religion to create our rules for living, when neither one can give us the "whole picture". We are beginning to discover that in fact we have the ability within each of us, to look deeper and to see further and discover our own truths. And therefore the ability to recognize for ourselves what is authentic for us, what holds meaning and value, what we feel connected to, and have faith in.

When you have the courage to look beyond the word of a thing, the name and facade of a person, there is an incredible amount of information and life force to explore and get to know. There is the unique story of every human and how it connects to every other story out there. There is the incredible life force of every object and how no object or thing is stagnant but like us, changing every second on a biological and energetic level. Yes, we are all an "unfathomable" and "unknowable mystery" but it is possible to peek below the surface of the words and symbols and be startled by the beauty of it all.

--Francine Marie-Sheppard
www.soulpsychic.com
hello@francinemarie.com

Miracles & The Big Bang

"The big bang is so preposterous," says renowned astronomer Allan
Sandage, co-discoverer of the quasar, "and the chain of events it set off
so unlikely, that it makes most sense when thought of as a 'miracle.'"

"For the sake of argument, let's assume Sandage is right. If the very
beginning of the universe itself was a miracle, then everything in it is
impregnated with the possibility of smaller but equally marvelous miracles."
--Rob Brezsny


Just for today, try to look around, observe your life and everything in it, and notice the
outrageous amount of small miracles.
As I wrote that, the sun suddenly came streaming through my window. Of course, that was just a coincidence, but I certainly welcome the warmth on this brisk fall morning.

Francine Marie-Sheppard
www.francinemarie.com
hello@francinemarie.com

Poem by Ghalib

Let the ascetics sing of the garden of Paradise-
We who dwell in the true ecstasy can forget their vase-tamed
bouquet.

In our hall of mirrors, the map of the one Face appears
As the sun's splendor would spangle a world made of dew.

Hidden in this image is also its end,
As peasants' lives harbor revolt and unthreshed corn sparks
with fire.

Hidden in my silence are a thousand abandoned longings:
My words the darkened oil lamp on a stranger's unspeaking
grave.

Ghalib, the road of change is before you always:
The only line stitching this world's scattered parts.

By Ghalib

Inspirational Quotes for Change

Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid.
-Dorothea Brande, Writer

If you play it safe in life, you've decided that you don't want to grow any more.
-Shirley Hufstedler, Lawyer

That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along.
-Lisa Alther, Novelist

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
-Bernadette Devlin, Writer

Goals are dreams with deadlines.
-Diana Scharf Hunt, Writer

Your goal should be out of reach but not out of sight.
-Anita DeFrantz, Olympic Rowing Medalist

We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
-Maya Angelou,Poet and Writer

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.
-Julia Cameron, Writer

Be yourself. The world worships the original.
-Jean Cocteau, Writer

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
-Erica Jong, Writer

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
-Hellen Keller, Activist

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-Anais Nin, Writer

The full life is filled with vulnerability, not defense....You face whatever feeling there is.
-Virginia Satir, Family Therapist

When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.

About Exoricism

The root to the word healing is in the word whole, and to heal is to engage yourself in becoming whole, becoming yourself. When you heal, at least energetically speaking, you are releasing what is not you and making space for you or your energy. With your energy you and your body are more capable of healing physically and energetically. It is easier to enter into a state of wellness with your own healing energy flowing through your aura, not somebody elses. I like to say wellness is that state when body, mind (awareness) and spirit are in harmony and in communication.
When an entity comes into your space through your body, there is less space for you to be there. Sometimes when you become that other energy we call that being possessed. Some other entity other than the one that came with this body (you) is in possession of that body or in control of it. There are many many reasons why this can happen and sometimes it is because an agreement was made, a spiritual contract, for that exchange to happen or "possession" to take place.
Exorcism is a form of healing where on some level that spiritual agreement is "renegotiated" and ended or in other words the "possession" is ended. When a person has lost their seniority completely to the foreign spirit and becomes the victim, sometimes they need help and turn to a healer who is capable of having seniority over the entity or spirit.

I do recommend that people seek help and that they take their healing seriously enough to want to find their freedom. They should keep looking until they find someone who can help them. Unfortunately in this day and age energy healing is still looked down on in many places and people with problems are invalidated and punished. If people were validated for their psychic abilities and intuition long before a problem develops, then we wouldn't call them crazy or losers for having a problem they are unable to to solve. They would have the certainty to be able to find a solution because they would know their problem is real. They could trust their perception and perhaps avoid falling victim to a creation that they are no longer in agreement with.

It is the absence of validation of spirit that causes so many problems--particularly the inability to have seniority over troublesome spirits. If we cannot validate that we are spirit, how can we solve a problem that we do not believe really exists? If a sensitive person is considered crazy how can that person function when he is no longer sure of what he is experiencing due to a lifetime of invalidation for seeing things that are not there. We cannot expect a person to have seniority over a spirit when we tell that person, in essence, that they do not exist. Because when you believe that spirit does not exist then you are also saying to a "sensitive"that they do not exist, because a "sensitive" knows themselves as spirit, and the world as energy first, and matter second.
The next thing you know, you've got a schizophrenic on your hands, lost between their experience/perceptions and everyones elses definition of the world.
And if that person loses seniority to another spirit, now they have an entity telling them they are crazy too so the entity can keep them away from a healer and channel through the body as much as they want.

What a world we live in. Maybe one day there will be exorcism specials for $19.99 at the spa and it won't be such a scary thing. After all, most programming for fear is just a lie that found it's way into your space for one reason only: to control your behaviour. If we really validated spirit and the ability of all persons to achieve spiritual healing, versus trying to control who is healed and who has the knowledge or the"Truth", well, a lot of not so nice entities would have a lot less playground space in the world.

That's all I have to say about exorcism today.
Francine Marie-Sheppard
www.francinemarie.com
hello@francinemarie.com

About the Mandalas

I started painting these watercolor mandalas when I when to a very special conference in October of 2004. It was a gathering of tribal elders, healers and grandmothers to create a Council of Indigenous Grandmothers comprised of wise women from around the globe. I attended the pre-conference where the women were getting together and then the conference where these Elders were meeting with western women leaders like Gloria Steinem for discussion and healing. It was a remarkable week where we were treated to prayer rituals from many cultures at sunrise and sunset and the wise and healing words of many people. The was dance and celebrations too. Anyway, sometimes in the late evenings or early mornings I would pick up my paintbrush and start painting a mandala. These were not the type of painting I was used to doing, but I finally understood their power in creating a meditative and calm focused vibration. Each of the mandalas I painted that week represented to me, one of the grandmothers. Every one in while I find myself wanting to paint another one. It's very relaxing and as I said, meditative. I definitely recommend it. They don't have to be perfectly round or symetrical either to have power. Funnily enough, since I never got around to getting a compass drawing thingy, I just take various cups and saucers from my cupboard to pencil in some circles of varying sizes on my fresh page, and then just go from there with no particular design in mind. Sometimes I just think about the person the mandala is inspired by, sometimes I just follow my own tastes in colors and see what emerges. Some of my mandalas remind me of certain chakras.

Francine Marie