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copyright © 1999, by Karyn Greenstreet. All rights reserved.
KG: Let’s start at the very beginning. Do you
mind talking about the book and what lead you to writing it? SW: I was in a Mastermind group in Northern California.
I had an earlier book published called “Cultural Diversity in the
Workplace”. As we do in Mastermind groups, I was holding that book and
announcing that my success for that week was my book finally got published.
Someone said, “Who is the publisher?” I said that it was Business One
Irwin. Suddenly I said, “I almost slept through my dream come
true”. It had been my dream to be published by Business One Irwin. An
editor came to me from one of their sub presses and I didn’t, until I was
standing up there announcing it, even connect that my dream had come true.
I suddenly thought that a lot of us do that. We work
and work and work and then we accomplish something and we are so busy,
especially in this society to do more and have more and be more, that we miss
celebrating what we have already accomplished. That is really what the
book is about. KG: Isn’t that amazing? It is so funny because I
read that story in your book. I stopped. I said, “Okay, let me
think about this. Am I in the middle of my dream come true? Oh, I am!”
The book was so appropriate for me, personally. I thought that sometimes I
wonder whether people are at that level of awareness. My first question to you then, based on that principle is
how do people know? What techniques can they use? What can they do
to be awake to this? SW: I think in most goal setting or dream making workshops
or seminars there is always the principle of writing something down. By
writing something down, it becomes more concrete and it is telegraphed to our
subconscious. We are serious about this. This is the material form
of my handwriting on a piece of paper. I actually prefer it on a piece of
paper than on a computer. You can sort of finger it. The thing is
that returning to those pieces of paper is very important. That is how you
realize, “Oh, I have accomplished this. I have created this part of my
dream.” There is also the story in the book about when I was still
living in Washington, D.C., I was sitting at my desk and I was saying, “This
is so noisy. Here is this fax machine clattering away transmitting and
this printer whirling and printing out on either side of me. It is so
noisy. Then I pulled open the top drawer of my desk and there on top were
my goals for the year. Right there in my own words I had wanted a fully
equipped office with a clattering transmitting fax machine and a whirling
printing laser printer. I had even written down the sounds. I had
almost missed celebrating it because I was, like we all do, so busy creating the
next thing and working away and doing more. I didn’t stop and say,
“Hey look! Hey, this is the occasion for celebration.” I think
if we start looking forward to celebrating our own successes that it helps keep
us awake. We review what we aimed for and then we say, “No, let’s stop
and celebrate.” You can celebrate alone by going to a special place, or
with others by having a party or going out to dinner. Whatever your style
is to celebrate. It is really important that we do that on a regular
basis. KG: I agree completely. I was just thinking how
wonderful it would be if we just threw parties for ourselves. SW: So often our inner critic is saying, “Oh, you don’t
do enough. You are this, you are that, you are too much of this and not
enough of that.” If the subconscious starts getting rewarded saying,
“Oh, you are really terrific, let’s have a party to celebrate!” It
sends a very different message to our own self-identity. KG: Exactly. The interesting thing is that this is
just not true only of business successes or career successes, but I can remember
about six months after I met the man that I would eventually marry, pulling out
a list, exactly the same thing that happened to you, and it was stuck in a
drawer underneath all sorts of things, I said, “Oh, what’s this?” I read it and it was a list of what I was looking for in a
mate. It wasn’t physical; I didn’t really care about that. I was
looking for personality traits and spiritual traits. It matched him so
exactly. I had forgotten that I had written it down and I had forgotten to
look at it to even know that I was in the middle of it. It is amazing that
if we just stop for a minute to do that. SW: Your story is really important because you wrote down
specifically what you wanted and what was important to you. It is amazing
how often we get that. I am fan of Lilly Tomlin and all of her characters.
She has this one line where she says, “I always wanted to be somebody. I
wish I had been more specific!” We often have this general wish. “I want to be
wealthy. I want to get married.” Just different things and then we
get it. We say, “Oh dear. I wish I had been more specific.”
It’s important to be specific and at the same time to be open to whatever the
divine purpose has for us so that we are not so specific that we in fact limit
the greater good that we might have. KG: Exactly. Sometimes we can’t know. I know
a lot of people who say, “Well, I want to do this one specific thing.”
When really, as an example, they want to teach. If they had said, “I
want to teach. Let the universe make whatever available to me.”
They would have discovered that they might have been teaching in a way that they
hadn’t dreamed possible. Instead they say, “I want to be teaching in a University,
in a classroom, with a full professorship.” They go so specific that
they Universe didn’t have any choices. I was reading through the book and one of the things that
you seem to use a lot is dreaming and intuition. Can you talk a little bit
more about that? SW: So often in our busy lives- and I am as guilty as
anyone,- we are in traffic jams and we are zooming around, we fly on planes, we
go to board meetings, or we lead groups, or whatever we are doing in our lives.
There is always that little voice that is talking to us. People get it in
different ways. We have lots of terms for it – like gut feeling or I
just had this sensation that I should do this or that. We usually ignore
it. We do so at our own peril. I can’t tell you how many times
that I have had this feeling that I shouldn’t do this or I shouldn’t do that
and I ignored it because the plan was otherwise whatever the situation was.
I had a couple of very dramatic things happen on a personal
level where I knew and I didn’t follow it. Other people have written
about this and talked about it. It relates to the importance of
celebration in the sense that our own subconscious is constantly getting
messages from us that yes, this is the good thing to do or why bother. If
it (higher power or inner voice, whatever terminology you prefer.) works hard in
creating our dreams and then we are just looking at the next thing, it is sort
of discouraging. So celebrate and encourage your subconscious to continue
doing a good job. There are many levels of our consciousness. There are so many levels of awareness. In our daily lives we are tapped into such a narrow spectrum and such a narrow bandwidth of awareness and consciousness. Within our daily lives, we can start to become more aware even in things that seem mundane. I am now using traffic as spiritual practice. I live in Northern California. There is a lot of traffic. I often have to go between Silicon Valley and North of San Francisco. Heavy traffic, bridges, tolls; traffic jams, or even in town with red lights when I really needed that green light. I have begun to use very aggressive drivers that cut me off with about three inches to spare; instead of getting it angry and letting that person not only endanger my life, but have my body deal with anger the rest of the day, I am using it, not always successfully, but more and more, as a trigger to say, “Hey, this is just a shift of perception here. I can go to another plane, I am still driving and I am still getting to where I am going.” It is like a trigger of realigning. With some people, I might suggest that you do a mantra.
That would be the moment. Sitting at red lights that seem to go on forever
and you wish you had run the yellow light because there is traffic coming from
eight lanes and it seems like 15 minutes until your green light comes around
again. Those are moments to really realign, to listen, to center, to go
into your heart, whatever the practice is that seems most close to what you are
comfortable with. We have those moments every day. KG: A lot of that is just learning to focus a little bit on
the opportunities that you are given for being conscious of what is going on.
Anything can be that. It can be your baby crying, it can be having a task
list of 20 things that you want to get done and say, “Okay, I will just do one
thing at a time. I will be with that one thing and then I will be done.”
Learning that skill is sometimes hard. I think we forget from time to
time. I was noticing in your book that you talk about a fire walk
and how you had not expected to ever be doing this. It wasn’t something
you had sought out. Why was that event so important to you? SW: There is this wonderful woman who lives in the
Washington, D.C. area and now owns a home in the Shenandoah area. She has
led fire walks for many years. Her name is Phoebe Reeve. Unlike many
people who have used fire walks as something to conquer nature, to overcome, to
beat your chest and say, “Yes, I can do this!” Phoebe Reeve has a
totally different approach. She comes from it as a oneness with the fire. She
studies cultures where people even roll in the fire and become one with the
fire. She approaches it from a very different way. The preparation
before the fire walk is to feel the oneness with that energy. Walking on
fire with her is a very different experience. Instead of conquering, it is
another way of relating to the elements. Like swimming in a lake brings
you closer to water or seeing dolphins or being with trees makes you aware of
the intelligence in other forms. Being with the fire in that way is a very
different experience of this often frightening and beautiful power that usually
we don’t think about touching and being with. KG: When you were invited to that, did you think of it that
way? SW: Oh, no! Phoebe first invited me to be her guest
at the fire walk as a birthday gift to me. My story for her was that my
car was in the garage and I had no car for that weekend. She said, “Oh,
don’t worry. I will have somebody pick you up.” I had never sought out
fire walks. It wasn’t something I particularly ever thought I would ever
do or want to do. She had someone pick me up and we went off to the fire. There was chanting, preparation, aligning one’s spirit
with the spirit of the fire. There was this huge bon fire. It had
burned down over the evening through the preparation. It was just so hot
that we could barely sit around it. Phoebe began raking the coals. I
had no experience in fire walks at all. I thought she was raking them to
cool it all off a little bit. I thought we would walk on the ashes when
things cooled down. Then, with this radiant heat that we could barely
stand around, she laid down the rake and walked across. I said, “OHHHHHH!”
Seeing her walk with those sparks flying up around her feet, I will never forget
that impression of that person walking. It has been quite a few years ago.
We did walk. I did have a few slight little blisters on my feet. There was
still fear in me. There was still a mixture of things. There was a
lot of support from the group. Everybody walked. Some people walked
several times. I went home and I thought, “Well, that was that experience.” Months later, she moved to a new home and was having a fire walk and again, she invited me to be her guest. I don’t know if I even tried to think of any excuse at that time. I just went. Phoebe and her assistant had been doing some drumming.
The thing that was so wonderful about that walk was that they had asked me to do
the drumming. I think her assistant was going to walk across the fire.
I sat there with a huge drum. I couldn’t even put my legs around it.
It was just a huge, huge drum. I was drumming; boom, boom, boom, and that
drumming did something to me. It was as if that energy came in to my belly
and went through my body and with the drumming, boom, boom, boom, I became one
with the whole experience. I became one with the drum, the rhythm, and the
fire. When I again began to walk across the fire, it was a totally
different experience. I was on a different level of consciousness. I
walked several times through the fire. I danced through the fire. I
actually twirled and whirled and skipped and played with the fire. It was
a very, very different feeling and a feeling of actually being one with nature.
There wasn’t fear or the feeling of trying to conquer fear and not trying to
do any sort of talking to myself, “I can do this. I can do this.” If it is something you want to do or if it is something
playful, then you don’t have to try and get together all this big amount of
courage. You just do it. KG: That is really amazing. What kind of things can
people do in their life to remind them about these things? For you, the
experience of being with the fire, maybe not the first time, but the second
time, and the drumming certainly brought you to a certain place. You
don’t get to do fire walks every day. How can people, in their everyday
life, get to that place? SW: The strongest suggestion that I can make is to get out
in nature. We have so eliminated nature from our lives. We bring in
sometimes very beautiful plants into our houses, our offices, or our atriums and
we try to bring nature in. There is nothing like walking among trees
beyond the city, if possible where you don’t even hear the cars. It doesn’t
have to be strenuous. You don’t have to pack up and go camping for the
weekend. The ability to get to a lake, to a river, to trees, to the ocean,
to a mountain, whatever it is, there is something about being out in nature.
This is as old as humanity itself. If you look at any culture, there are
people who have gone out to the desert, out to the mountains or taken their boat
on the ocean. Whatever it is – you can be doing some specific activity
or you can just be connecting with nature. The things that we need more in
our lives are connecting with nature and silence. You asked earlier about how do we feel our own intuition.
I talked about traffic as a spiritual practice. What that really is about
is taking that moment for the inner silence. It is not often ideal
conditions. Obviously, rush hour traffic with everyone zooming around and
anything can happen is not an ideal condition. Take that silence another
step. You don’t have to go away from civilization or go away from our
responsibilities as citizens and family people and business people. Simply
taking a couple of hours every week or twice a week, if possible and just being
silent in nature is one of the biggest things you can do. Any kind of
nature. That is what the fire walk was about. It wasn’t about
overcoming it. It was being one with nature. When I just spend all my time with computers or in
conference rooms or in traffic or on a plane, I begin to lose contact with that
inner silence, as well as the outer silence. KG: I know that feeling exactly. The other thing that
I noticed that you mentioned, which I think is excellent, is listening to music,
listening to motivational tapes, and having a daily practice of remembering, of
connecting or of just putting that thing in your life. Just like when some
people say that if they don’t start their day off with a jog that they can’t
survive. For some people it is, if I don’t start my day off with
listening to something inspirational to remind me to stay awake, I can’t
survive. There are so many different things that people can do, which is
great, regardless of what is going on in your life. SW: I think that one of the things that I want to stress is
that all of this can be effortless. There is so much in our society that
is all about striving and doing. By listening to music or being in nature,
we don’t have to do anything. We do have to make the effort to either
put on the music or set it up or get out to a place, which is more of a natural
surrounding. After that, we don’t have to do anything. We don’t
even have to sit and meditate. We don’t have to focus. We don’t
have to do anything. Something happens on a physiological or even a
cellular level in certain types of music, in being in nature, in being in
natural elements that just happens. We do have to make the effort to allow
the space for that in our lives. We don’t have to think that it is our
total responsibility to make something happen. KG: I understand that completely. We are almost out
of time. I wanted to ask you if there is anything that we hadn’t covered
that you would like to make comments on? Any final thoughts that you might
have that you would like to leave with this? SW: There is so much! I think that, probably if I
have a few sentences, it is really to be kind to yourself and to appreciate
yourself. Also, appreciate other people. The quality of appreciation
and if I have to leave with one thought, it is to experience on a daily basis in
your life, the power of gratitude. Gratitude is one of the most powerful
elements that we can have. I always suggest when I give seminars that
people have a time of focusing on gratitude every night before they sleep.
Perhaps review five things. Three of which happened that day. They
are not just general wonderful things like “I am grateful I am in good health.
I am grateful I have a wonderful family.” That certainly can be part of
it. This day, this very day, what of many miracles did I feel gratitude
for? As you make that a practice in your daily life, then you can feel it
throughout the day. “This is a mini miracle! I am so grateful!”
You feel that flow in your life that makes life really a joy instead of in
constant struggle. KG: Are you still living your dream come true? SW: My dream is constantly unfolding. Believe me, I
have to always be reminding myself of all this as well. Every now and
then, I have to say, because I get overwhelmed with to-do lists and so on, “I
have done this part. Now this happened. Now there is still more to
do that is happening.” To give appreciation and patience to ourselves,
as well as giving patience and appreciation to those around us, really will make
a difference in my life, in your life, and all of our lives. KG: That is wonderful. Thank you so much for
participating.
You can read more about Sally
Walton's work by visiting her web site: http://www.globalperspective.com/ |
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