Regardless of your age or station in life, there has never been another time like now.  Your search for meaning and to know your place in the world is occurring amidst the greatest cycle of changes you have ever witnessed. 

 

It is normal now, in this window of 2012 energy, to have a host of questions about what is really going on.  It is also typical to wonder how you can find your perfect niche and thrive.  You want to know how you fit in, and what you can do to adequately face the steady stream of challenges. 

 

How do you make sense out of all that is occurring?  How can you see yourself as you really exist in the big picture?  What can you do differently, right now, to find a deeper sense of peace?  How can you make friends with change, especially when the change involved is so significant and so incessant? 

 

The following is some background that will help you to better understand what is happening, and to know how you can move into more self-empowerment, beginning right now. 

 

 

Know that the dance of creation naturally involves change.  You are living and breathing that dance, even when you think that you are standing still or blocked. 

 

One of the differences now is that you are more awake. 

 

You have more conscious awareness than you did before, and as part of that, you sense things more as they happen.  This ability to sense what is occurring becomes more acute as you progress on your spiritual path. 

 

Increasingly, as you become more skilled with accessing your intuitive knowing, you also sense things that are in your probable future. 

 

Keep in mind when this happens that the future you perceive is only one of many options.  You are not seeing something that must happen in the exact way that you see it.  Do not allow yourself to go into fantasy or fear. 

 

Let go of expectations, too.  When you expect something, you limit yourself and what you could experience.  You set yourself up for disappointment and suffering. 

 

Oftentimes when you are out of balance or involved with self destructive behavior, you may sense a future with some potentially unpleasant consequences. 

 

As you are responding to this information, factor in the possibility that some or all of what you are sensing can be your fear talking.  It takes a developing skill to discern whether it is your intuition or your fear communicating. 

 

Fear can be tricky.  It has many disguises, as you will learn over time. 

 

If indeed it is really your intuition speaking, there will be no scare tactics or warnings.  You will simply be shown some ways you can change course.  You will be guided to different choices.  

 

When you act on those choices, you set in motion a different and more positive future.  Then you are in the driver's seat of change.

 

 

Another thing that occurs as you become more awake is that your sensitivity heightens.  In increments, as you progress, you become aware of more and more. 

 

This awareness is sometimes a knowing, other times more like a feeling, and sometimes both. 

 

What does this mean?  In general, you become more sensitive to energy,, including that which is within you and outside of you.  That means you can more easily get in touch with your own joy as well as your own sadness.  It means you are more able to sense when others around you are under stress, feeling angry, or trying to manipulate you.     

 

Being more awake comes with the responsibility of being willing to face what you see.  Some of it will be pretty.  Some of it will be ugly.  What you encounter will stir a plethora of feelings, ranging from delight and joy to fear and repulsion. 

 

A vital part of your awakening journey is becoming conscious of your feelings.  In order to progress, you will need to learn how to intelligently work with the emotions that are a natural part of being human.  Masking your feelings through unnatural means will only impede your spiritual growth. 

 

You cannot be numb to yourself and your life experience and become enlightened. 

 

You must be willing to know what you feel, transform negative feelings, and avoid acting them out in the world.  When you act on your hate or other negative emotions, you harm both yourself and others.  This harm is a real energy that you send out into your experience, and like a boomerang, it will come back to you at some future time. 

 

 

Another difference now is the acceleration of energies that is a part of this great shift cycle.  The quickened pace of changes, and of evolution itself, can be mind boggling.  There simply is no modern day reference point for this magnitude of shifting. 

 

Even your wisdom keepers are evolving, and as they do, they can offer updated insights that can help you to take the next leap in consciousness. 

 

While much is shifting, and your great-grandparents likely would recognize little of your modern lifestyle, many things are the same.  For example, it has long been human nature to resist change. 

This fight with change remains a key stumbling block for humanity today. 

 

Humans like to believe that they are superior to all other life forms.  This mindset does not take into account just how adaptable some other species are. 

 

For example, ants have been able to adapt to a number of planetary change cycles, including those involving warming temperatures.  Some large mammals altered their diets to survive over a million years ago when glaciers withdrew from North America.

 

 

Consider, for a moment, a time in your past when you broke a leg or lost a job.  How easy was it for you to come to terms with the change in your routine?  What did you do to adapt?  How did you find your center while you were healing or finding other work? 

 

Adapting to changing external circumstances often means moving out of your comfort zone. 

You like what you are comfortable with, so you gravitate to people and situations you already know. 

 

You do this with feelings too.  The habitually angry person sets up a cycle of scenarios that fuel more anger.  The habitually depressed person looks at life through the lens of their sadness, so feels depressed a lot of the time. 

 

To be sure, if you knew that you were creating more angry energy by focusing on the source of your anger, you would be inspired to do things differently.  You would seek solutions that lead to peace and joy.  You would move out of your comfort zone long enough to find sanity and a better way to be. 

 

 

Change is movement in constant motion.  It can appear to be happening slowly or quickly.  It can seem like it is not happening at all, especially when you are not tuned into the subtle ways that energy moves. 

 

You may feel that you are not changing fast enough.  You may feel stuck in limbo.  You may be frustrated at your seeming lack of progress, noticing only what is wrong. 

 

To go forward more skillfully, you want to develop some new ways of looking at yourself and your world.

 

To begin with, know that you are experiencing the changes, and you are also creating them as you go.  Each time you experience something, you are an integral part of the creation. 

 

You are like an amateur chef without a recipe, throwing things into the pot.  Using your common sense and taste preferences, you do the best you can. 

 

Your habits play a role too, reflecting what types of food you typically like.  Your family's conditioning impacts you too.  You learned to like foods that you associate with comfort and love. 

 

As you are creating your meal, you can either do so consciously or unconsciously.  In each moment, your creating will take one of these forms.  You may be very aware of what you are choosing to put in the pot, selecting each ingredient with care and attention.  Sometimes you may have your focus on other things, retrieving the same ingredients you used yesterday and the day before.   

 

Either way, you will create something.  You may be quite pleased with the results. 

Sometimes, however, your creation may lack a key ingredient or have too much of one thing and not enough of another.  You may even decide to toss out what you made and start over.

 

Do you ever feel like this in life?  Do you wonder what key ingredient you are missing?  Do you question how you can be more ready for what is coming next?

 

 

The following is a checklist for creating from the driver's seat during these chaotic times.  Work with these ideas as often as you feel guided, inviting your higher wisdom to nudge you when you get off course.

 

1. Live life each day as fully as you can.  Be grateful that you have the opportunity-being on Earth during this window of time-to witness and experience some of creation's most auspicious moments.  Remember that you are an integral part of things.  You are not simply a witness.  Know that even your witnessing-the mere observing of the great shift unfolding-is part of the alchemy of these times.  Decide you will take an active and conscious role.

 

2. Monitor your thoughts.  Keep in mind how powerful your thoughts are in creating what happens next.  This is true regardless of whether you speak the thoughts out loud.  You are in a continual process of creating.  Decide that you will do this with love.  This means having compassion for yourself and others when the road gets rocky.  It means letting go of the need to be right, to criticize, and to judge.  No one is really perfect, yet there is a Divine perfection in all of creation. 

 

3. Remember that there really are no accidents.  Look for the higher purpose in things.  When you cannot perceive this directly, trust that things often are not as they appear.  Learn to look more deeply than you did yesterday, to question more from your heart, and to act more from a grounded sense of intuitive knowing.  Remind yourself that you and others are evolving, and in doing so, you can learn from everything around you.  Avoid the temptation, through your last breath, to become prideful and think you have all the answers.

 

4. Decide that you will see what is there.  This means noticing how you feel, what you are thinking, and how you are responding to the happenstance of your world.  When you notice you are feeling happy, allow yourself to acknowledge that joy and anchor the feeling in your heart.  Get in touch with what brings you true joy and find ways to add to your joy.  When you find that you are feeling angry, inquire within to discover the source of your anger, working intelligently with the feeling so that you do not allow it to poison the next thing you think, say or do. 

 

5. Place your focus on what really matters.  Stay on track with what matters throughout your day by learning to live as consciously as you can.  Develop discernment and self-trust in your inner wisdom that will show you, step by step, what to pay attention to and what to disregard.  Avoid obsessing on the minutia and pettiness that tend to dominate the ordinary human life.  Come back to your center often, allowing for refueling and reflection.  Allow the insights you receive from that place to guide your next steps.