Hearing God...hopefully!

Right now my husband and I are struggling.  He has been struggling with finding a job for two years now.  I began  the same struggle in November when I was laid off too.  At first I didn't worry because I thought I had a job, a job I really wanted.  Then it fell through and other jobs fell through.  My husband has had the worst challenge of his life it seems, and since it is his challenge I won't go into detail as that is for him to share if he chooses.  Needless to say, we are both in the same boat.  Time is running out.  We are out of savings, we are looking at having to move in with relatives and sell the horses.  I can hardly contemplate that!  For some people, horses are a luxury, an extra.  They love to see them in the yard.  To me, they are like my children.  I could let some of them go, but it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to let all of them go.  I don't think there would be a way, since Bella is getting old and has illnesses to deal with on top of it.  You can't sell a horse like that, you have to "place" them. 

So far our family has helped us immensely; financially emotionally and however else.  At least those who were willing and able.   We are getting down to the wire, however, and I feel desperate.  One night my husband said, "What are we doing wrong?  Why are we in this position?"  Yes, indeed, WHY?  I thought about this, and about karma and everything else.  I know that challenges are given to us to make us grow, etc, and I should be welcoming this but the fear takes over.  I needed to see a way out.  One day I was watching Oprah's 25th thing on her new network, a program about her life and how she got where she is today.  One thing about Oprah is that she is one person that I think is truly genuine and who she says she is.  So many others have disappointed, but she never does.  

So, on this program she talks about how things in her life flowed, how one thing led to another and another and here she is.  Then she said that the degree to which you are in flow is directly related to how far you are from your spiritual center.  If you are not flowing, then you are not spiritually centered.  I am paraphrasing from memory, so cut me some slack if it's not exactly what she said.  In any case, this really resonated with me.  My husband also watched it and agreed with me.  We felt that we weren't in tune with our spiritual selves.  I think that means different things to each of us (he and I), but we understood that we needed to reconnect with that somehow. 

So, what do you do to find your spiritual center?  As a Buddhist and generally a spiritual person, I tend to look at what's closest to me and what makes me feel connected to the "Universe", or whatever you would like to call it.  I think of it as "the thing larger than myself which is known as God, the Universe, Divinity, the Goddess, etc".  What it's called is immaterial.  What it does is not. 

First I pulled out my copy of Sonia Choquette's book Your Heart's Desire.  I have read this book many times and each time it is like a new experience depending on why I decide to read it.  Usually some crisis is looming but the book reads differently each time.  In any case, it is an instruction book for what is now known as "the Secret", or "The Law of Attraction".   If you have seen the movie, although it's very inspiring, it left a lot of things out.  I believe that fundamentally it is correct to some extent, but it also takes some work to turn your thoughts into things.  Your Heart's Desire, however, gives you the instructions and when things look bleak, just "thinking positively" isn't always helpful. 

Without going through the whole process, basically I got to a certain point in the book and realized that I needed to ask for help from the Divine Spirit.  And I needed to wait for an answer.  I needed to meditate and listen, listen for the inspiration and the guidance that would help us through this time.  I opened my email and had my weekly message from "Stumble Upon", a service that gives you the best websites by topic.  The spiritual one happened to be a site I knew well and had already been thinking of - "Spiritual Earth - Places of Peace and Power".  I clicked on it, and up came a map of the States with little red dots signifying spiritual places.  I hadn't visited the site in a long time.  I clicked on the magnifier to zoom in, and kept zooming in until only one red dot showed.  There were no divisions of states, so I had no idea what I was looking at.  To my surprise, the red dot was for Chaco Canyon, a place that I had been with my husband.  We had had a terrible time leaving there because the road was bad and it wrecked our trailer.  He was very upset about it.  I found this auspicious, but couldn't say what it means.

The more I searched the web and opened myself to spiritual advice from different places (I get daily "Wisdom Horse" messages, and "Napoleon Hill" inspirational advice daily) they all said the same thing: "it looks scary now, but you will come out of it. Be patient and be still.  Meditate and listen for divine inspiration and guidance."  This advice led me to want to go on a pilgrimage, and we did, but that is for another day.  I wanted to record this now, so that I can report what happens later.  The pilgrimage is interesting for its own sake, and the effects of that have yet to be discerned.  I think sometimes things happen very subtly, not in a huge flash of lightening.  A change came over us on our pilgrimage, a kind of strength to face our situation without fear so that we could talk about it and make decisions rationally.  It happened during a storm, by the way, and there was lightening in the background...

Links mentioned in this blog:

Wisdom Horse daily message - www.touchedbyahorse.com
Napoleon Hill daily message - http://www.naphill.org
Places of Peace and Power - http://sacredsites.com/
Free tarot readings, so far right on - http://free-tarot-reading.net/
Sonia Choquette's website - http://soniachoquette.com/
This is a shortcut from the Pioneer Woman's blog RSS feed about storms, which was one of the first things that inspired me.  Not sure if this link will work... If so, she is worth checking out for other reasons, but this one was special...http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thepioneerwoman/~3/XyVXz65SSwQ/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email