Gardens of Abundance

There is a Frangipani Tree. Outside my window. I saw it today, flowering away. I have never noticed it before. A favourite tree, and flowering, wanting for noticing, by me. And so lovely is she.

How stunning to see.

It made me ponder how sometimes it is hard to see what is actually, already, within our vicinity.

The beauty surrounding, so confounding, waiting, for noticing.

I have always wanted a Frandipani Tree in my own garden. Yet, this one, planted firmly in another, across the street, is ideal for me. It gives a better view from my wide open window than one from which my own garden would be.

My eyes now focussed on this one delight giving Frangipani Tree. Gorgeously Blooming. Whenever I need to see. That what I love and need is already here.

And that someone else's Garden of Abundance is also available to me. Being shared in the caring from across the street. Beautifying our collective surroundings. Marvellously and generously.

A reminder to appreciate the beauty surrounding. Opening, to see. What may have been missing. May already be here. In ourselves, in our friendships, and our neighbourly relationships. Being thankful for it. And building on it. Creating the Gardens of Abundance we need.

Much Love

SaraSwati Shakti

Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.
www.lovingpsyche.com

Photo: Gardens of Abundance, Heart Art mandala couplings, by SaraSwati Shakti © 2015. Heart Art is a therapeutic service trademark of SaraSwati Shakti.

True Love's Kiss

Pure love is like a beautiful flower with an irresistible fragrance ~ Amma (Mata Amitanandamayi)

A quote, a mandala drawing, and a movie I watched this week, converged to create a brief log this week. The movie was Maleficent with Angelina Jolie. A delightful, visually arresting piece, on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale myth. And the reminder of True Love's Kiss. What that is. Purifying what is most important in the whole scheme of things. The fragrance to life that that, with it, so potently brings.  

A pure and open, fragrant heart, given and received. Waking up.

Consider it for yourself as inner contemplation this week.

Much love

SaraSwati Shakti

Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.

www.lovingpsyche.com

Heart Art mandala drawing Fragrant Heart by SaraSwati Shakti © 2015. Heart Art is a registered therapeutic service trademark of SaraSwati Shakti.

Woman

It was with sadness that I completed a nine month program with Andrew Harvey last week, diving into the cauldron of Christian mysticism on a Christ Path intensive. It was riveting, both in Andrew's delivery, and the content compiled for the weekly sessions. I loved it. It moved in me and through me. I will miss it. Though I know it will have an impact for years to come.

This week the discussion included the statement that Christ consciousness is now being birthed most vigorously by woman. And I see it evidenced in communities everywhere. Big and small. Woman taking an active place in spiritual healing, awakening, and development. Because Spirit comes through the feminine, in both men and women as Christ consciousness. The heart, balanced with the masculine mind, both hemispheres connected. Grounded in the body. With purity and surety of loving intent. Heart and mind prepared to act, create and relate in a way that overcomes discontent. It is so gratifying to see it being embodied, increasingly individually, and in community building, toward wholesome being.

And with the Dalai Lama also stating that the world will be saved by western woman, the spiritual leadership by women is becoming acknowledged as more and more relevant and prevalent. Equalising and leading, with men, in places and on stages in communities locally, and worldwide. The power of the feminine heart to change, create, and transform in daily life, and on the world stage, at centre, is compelling.

International Women's Day corroborates in events leading up to and on this weekend. This year, on March 8, the theme is Make It Happen. Indeed the Christ Path, of Action. An opportunity to take further steps forward in heartfelt ways. Lovingly restoring and creating new political, social, and familial pathways. To keep contributing healthfully and restoratively in larger focussed doses, choosingly. In areas that transform lives with beauty, joy and passion, to raise vibration. And in areas that alarm, and break the heart, so as to repair despair and disharmony that no longer serves the planet. A range of ways to create balance, in a new age.

Men and Women joining in actions around the Globe in understanding. Of the importance of the health and welfare of woman in creating a better society. From creating art instalments in Sydney in corporate arenas, to wearing skirts in Turkey in protest against violence, exhibitions, conferences, workshops, and legislative considerations, are having a spiritual impact on psyches collectively. The breadth, depth and diversity is brilliant, and reflective of the enormous gifts they contribute.

I am spending time at an Open Day, at a Marist College on International Women's Day. Serving on an Italian Café. Marist, short form for Mary'ists, and Mother Mary as patron, is a school for boys my son attends. Behold Thy Mother, Jesus said, acknowledging the sacred feminine. The Marist motto, strong minds and gentle hearts, is a fitting validation of the Spiritual element of the masculine and feminine, connected.

And as a loving focus of my own for International Women's Day, a Make It Happen Prayer of Intent, for the Feminine, called Woman, for people everywhere.

Woman

May You Thrive
And Come Alive
To Your Precious HeartBodyMind
May You be Blessed
And Caressed
By a Graceful Tide
Of Beauty and Compassion
With Love by Your Side
To Birth and Co-Create
A Peaceful Loving Planet

Photo: Woman by SaraSwati Shakti © 2015. All rights reserved.

About the drawing: I drew it while on a trip for some recuperation and relaxation earlier in the year. I was facing the ocean, as she was emerging in the drawing. It dawned on me later that it has elements of the Empress, from the traditional tarot. My version of it. The quintessential matriarchal maternal figure is obvious in it. A primary symbol of fertility and the mother-goddess, and often depicted traditionally as the Christian Virgin Mary. How fitting.

Much Love

SaraSwati Shakti

Copyright ©2015. All rights reserved.
www.lovingpsyche.com

Heartworks

My favourite time of year, Autumn, is just around the bend, nearly here again, on the weekend.

My heart is filled with anticipation of heartworks of all nature and pleasure that is just about to burst in creative colours and movement in the next season.

May many Heartworks inspire this new turning, of yearning, for all that is burning, bringing great measure of treasure to awesome Autumn again.

Let the heart work it's magic
Let the loving begin
Let the joy fill the heavens
In flowing glowing streams
Let all that is wondrous, fill all your extremes
And bring you to brilliance
and glorious beams
May the sacred bless you
And passion possess you
Laughter lighten you
And adventure brighten you
May your life please you and funny bone tease you
May you be blessed with smiling gleams
May your eyes glisten
And ears listen with wild appreciation at nature's abandon
May you shine from head to toe
The colours that are your own
And bring all that is you
To a warm welcoming world


SaraSwati Shakti

Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.
www.lovingpsyche.com

Heartworks poem and mandala by SaraSwati Shakti © 2015

Travellers of Love

Yesterday I visited North Sydney. I was surprised by it's silence. Unlike the busyness of it's normal business mecca weekdays, it was possible to smell the sea air from the harbour as I walked along the streets there. To my destination. To Sunday slow, in a day out in a city environment.

And the occasion was a visit to Mary McKillop Place. So quiet, and beautiful to sit and contemplate, and listen. In the peacefulness and reverence where her body is now laid to rest.

Churches are lovely places for rest and contemplation. And in that contemplation I was reflecting on her words 'Crois aux paroles que Dieu murmure a ton coueur'. To 'Believe in the whisperings of God in your own heart', she said.

The listening to whisperings of inner wisdom, the Godliness, Source, Universe, Higher Power, Mother, whatever your flavour, undisturbed, inside the pureness of our own hearts, in us. Quietening for the answers as we keep considering our next steps. To help us with attention and reflection. Silencing out the distractions and focussing on the heart's power.

The last time I visited Mary McKillop Place was a few years ago when a friend asked me to accompany her there on her birthday. To spend time with the memory of her mother, who had not long passed away. It was a moving day. The image from the most beautiful stained glass window, of Jesus with his Sacred Heart above the altar, provided welcoming whisperings to my own heart's love path.

This visit was with my own mother, alive and well, to share a Sunday day out together. A peacefulness and playfulness that we both appreciated. A time of bonding and reflecting, separately on our own journeys, and the one we've had together. Reminiscing and spending time quietly on our travels, alone, and together.

And as we sat at the side of Mary McKillop's tomb I read on it the words 'Remember we are but travellers here'.

Indeed. Travelling the travels that matter to us. The decisions we make each day. The actions that our hearts relate to us, and that become the path for us, and those around us. Our travels of love. As travellers of love.

May you too be true to the quieter travels of love within you.


SaraSwati Shakti
Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.
www.lovingpsyche.com



Saint Mary McKillop was the foundress of the Order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, and their many works of compassion and action in the world.

Different Name. Same Soul.

The last week has been spent changing my name. Progressively. On all of my public profiles. To SaraSwati Shakti, officially.

My friends and newer community colleagues are used to it. The transition that they have been witnessing of my emerging has been a normal aspect of the fabric of our lives evolving. It has been a graceful process with them in the intervening years between Marie Bonney and SaraSwati Shakti.

This marriage to my Spirit self publicly has created many new endeavours that have been fulfilling for me and those around me. I have started to receive increasing requests for articles, and public speaking around my book, my art, and the journey that led to this new name, this new beginning.

And it was time. To make a choice. To draw a clear line in the sand. To adopt one name. And to alleviate any confusion of the path my life was taking. A name accompanying the introduction of Loving Psyche, a suite of services of my trademarked business launched last year, with a renewed energy that it brings with it.

And while it initially challenged me about how I would bridge the distance between those who knew me with a different name, as I re-enter the marketplace among them, I have found that it has been easy.

I have been embraced wholeheartedly.

'Different Name. Same Soul' was a response I received recently.

Indeed. Different name. Same Soul.

I am still doing what I came here for. Making a positive difference in a changing world.

I look forward to doing that with you more.

Attached is my updated profile on my website http://www.lovingpsyche.com/About/index.html for those new among you.

And for those concerned about making a mistake, and how to get used to it, as I say hello again, I have retained Marie as my middle name.

And, it's Sara, for short.

So all is easy and right with the world.

Much Love

SaraSwati Shakti
www.lovingpsyche.com

Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.

True Self Knowledge

All true knowledge is self-knowledge.

How you act, react, feel and function.

How you think, decide, plan and relate.

Your wants, desires, disappointments, and automatic responses.

They each make up a kaliedescope of the who that is you.

And there is no other like you. You are the totality of an individual of remarkable existence and potential.

One of the things I like to do in my work is to help you to unearth what is the trueness of you. 

I have found that as soon as people begin to befriend themselves, it makes a difference, in their self-perception, and with those around them.

It has an enormous impact on them when they discover, and validate parts of themselves, that they have not yet consciously embraced. An identity that is enhanced, and advanced with self-knowledge.

I help you to come home to yourself.

A tool I sometimes use to help do this is the MBTI, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Used extensively for decades by qualified practitioners worldwide.

And while no tool is foolproof in identifying the complexities of you, it has helped me show people the beauty of some of their natural elements, and to normalise those as part of the way they operate.

MBTI focuses on personality, personal preferences innately, as a basis for self-acceptance and self-knowledge. The benefits from which people can operate more wholeheartedly with themselves and others. It's the soulful work of defining the personality in which your soul is operating.

As a qualified MBTI practitioner I  have used it privately in sessions when clients desire it, in workshops for building co-operative, fulfilling and more vibrant teams, as well as for the beginnings of understanding couple differences, and families.

This year I am offering workshops for groups and organisations interested in learning more about who they are, and who their colleagues are, as a way of better understanding themselves and those that work close by. Building awareness, co-operation and a greater appreciation of the nuances of everyone in the group creates an easier flow when people know you, and you know them, more innately and appreciatively.

And for change and improvement in group dynamics to take place in any organisation, it requires the inner power of self-knowledge, inspection and reflection to enhance co-operation and empathy with self and others. It refines the people aspects of the skills set of members of  a team or group.

My colleague Josephine Luna from Helping to Restore Balance and I are joining forces again this year to run MBTI sessions as part of the Loving Work series. Details of the sessions are in the flyer below.

If you are a leader who wishes to get the best from your team, I urge you to consider the benefits it offers as a wonderful opportunity to validate and enhance everyone's contribution to a group, and how the group can operate more brilliantly as a team.

Josephine and I love working together, and have done so on numerous projects over many years. We have had great fun, and success running workshops and helping organisations build more self-awareness and related benefits. We look forward to working with you in relationship too.

Please contact josephine@restorebalance.com.au for further details.

 

 

Loving Work is a registered therapeutic service trademark as part of the Loving Psyche suite of services. http://www.lovingpsyche.com/Services/Service-Offerings/loving-work.html

 

And may you always find a way home to your true self individually and collectively.

 

Much love

 

 

SaraSwati Shakti

 

Copyright © 2015. All rights reserved.

www.lovingpsyche.com