Archive for October, 2010

Emotional Spectrum V: The Whole Shebang

Seeds XII, 44

Seed: Emotional Spectrum V

There are lessons and emotions associated with each of the eight chakras. So many teachers talk about the chakras as though they are separate within the body. I don’t believe this is so. I believe that the most important thing about the chakra system is the spaces between them. Much like music, it is how the chakras, like notes, interact with one another, that creates our energetic experience.

From bottom to top, the eight chakras, colors, lessons and emotions are:

One                             Red                 Survival                      Despair

Two                            Orange           Passion                       Joy

Three                          Yellow                        Will                             Desire

Four                            Green             Love                            Personal Love

Five                             Blue                Creativity                   Expression

Six                               Indigo             Intuition                     Knowing

Seven                          Violet              Sacredness                 Bliss

Eight                           Pink                Service                        Compassion

The key to relating to the chakras is the visit their attendant emotions, and to realize that if you refuse to consider compassion, you are cutting yourself apart emotionally. If you refuse to let yourself desire, you are cutting yourself apart emotionally. No despair? No bliss. You need, we all need, all of these emotional states.

This week, when you have a few minutes to yourself, take the list above and check in with your chakra system. How is each one related to the other in you? Are there places that need some extra support? Wash them with their own color. Weak will? Throw some yellow at your third chakra.

I find the chakras fascinating, but only because they are one more way to approach these beings we know as humans, who are the most fascinating of all.

Be passion,

Susan Corso

Dr. Susan Corso

Seeds are remarkable gifts. Sown in consciousness, they bring you to the most important part of your being—your Divine Spark.

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Harvest Time

This is from Donna Henes’ The Queen’s Chronicles, a free e-newsletter that delights me every time it arrives in my inbox. To subscribe: click here and scroll down to the mailing list in the left column.

Throughout world mythology, the goddess of the good ground, the grain, the autumn harvest, has been appropriately portrayed as a knowledgeable mature woman of the world, mistress of all earthly domains. A matriarch. She is the Great Mother who sustains all her species. She was known as Astarte, Ishtar by the ancient Semites, Semele by Phrygians, Isis in Egypt, Demeter in Greece, and Ceres in Rome.

She is Tari Pennu to the Bengalis, Old Woman Who Never Dies to the Mandan and Mother Quescapenek to the Salish. To the Aztec, she is Chicomecoatl, to the Quechua Indians in Bolivia, she is Pacha Mama and the Huichol call her Our Mother Dove Girl, Mother of Maizea.

Oh Pachmama
Queen of the Universe
Mother to the Stars
You birthed time in Your great Womb

Oh Pachmama
Enlighten me with Your secrets
That I may know myself better
Guide me as I seek truths within and without

Oh Pachmama
Teach me to overcome my fears
Nurture my growth as I seek the unknown
Encourage me to face challenges

Oh Pachmama
I wish to share your knowledge
I am ready to learn without fear
Mother, Your daughter is here

-Incan Invocation

While the Earth, Herself, is seen as the fertile mother from whom all life has issued, Her aspect as the spirit of the grain is celebrated in many cultures as Mother Earth’s child. This young one represents next year’s crop curled like a fetus gestating within the seeds of this year’s harvest.

Typically, she is the daughter, the harvest maiden, the corn virgin, although in Aztec Mexico and Egypt, the grain spirit was Her son. Also Aztec was Xilonen, Goddess of New Corn. The Cherokees called her Green Corn Girl. To the Prussians, she was the Corn Baby, to the Malays, the Rice Baby. In parts of India, the harvest maiden is Guari and she is represented by both an unmarried girl and a bunch of balsam plants.

The archetypal grain mother/daughter pair is personified in Greek mythology as Demeter and Persephone, also known as Kore, the Virgin Goddess. They illustrate two aspects, the mother and the maiden, of the same divine fertile spirit. Demeter is this year’s ripe crop and Persephone, the seed-corn taken from the parent. Like the seed sown in autumn, she symbolically descends into the underworld, torn from the breast of her mourning mother. And, again like the seed, she reappears, reborn, in the spring.

The harvest is experienced at once as a festival of life and a drama of death. In the fall, we commemorate the seasonal demise of the light as well as the plants, which provide us sustenance. Even as we glory in the great yield, the reward of our diligence, we mourn the death of the deity residing in the grain, killed by the cutting of the crops. At harvest, we honor She who died so that we might continue to live.

Despite the clear and rational necessity, there is considerable and understandable reluctance to scythe the last sheath of grain. For here lives the Great Grain Mother and Her child – She who has always fed us, to whom we owe our existence. Can we slash Her body with a sickle? Can we allow Her to be tread upon and trampled on the threshing floor? Can we cook and eat Her seed and feed Her broken corpse to the animals?

Would that we still revered the gifts of life and living bestowed upon us by our mutual Mother Earth. Well, WE do, I know. So what will we each do to spread and share that reverence, so that it becomes the new (old) norm? It is up to us, you know.

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
- Rachel Carson

With blessings for a plentiful and fulfilling harvest,

Queen Mama Donna

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?

The Next Ten Minutes by Dr. Andrew Peterson

What are you doing in the next ten minutes? More, importantly, how are you going to do it? Will you be present or on automatic pilot?

Dr. Andrew Peterson’s The Next Ten Minutes: 51 Absurdly Simple Ways to Seize the Moment is all about presence—being here, now. In his years of experience as a therapist, he has discovered myriad techniques that will “drop you in” to what’s so right now.

“Big changes in our lives begin with small changes in our state of mind.”

We’ve all experienced this. One sentence blows open an argument between spouses. One reaction shifts the feeling of an entire team meeting. One little thing changes everything. It’s the nature of human change.

Dr. Peterson trafficks in human change. As a longtime therapist, he’s seen the gamut of human responses to simple and complex situations.

I thoroughly appreciated Dr. Peterson’s musical approach. As a jazz musician, he has to be able to hear and integrate contradiction, and his techniques do just that. By taking everyday activities and adding mindfulness to them, his patients wake up to what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and how to change it if they want to.

I particularly enjoyed #2: Relax Your Face. Most of us don’t know how we move our faces as we react through the day. To focus on what he calls, “the subterranean choreography of our musculature,” we can become highly aware of what we’re emanating.

Another one I liked was #19: Read the Instructions. Dr. Peterson takes the reader through specific instructions himself. This one is about relating to an appliance. (Anyone reading ever curse their computer? All answers will remain anonymous.)

My favorite is # 49: Accept Reality. He writes, “Because, really, what other choice is there?” Nuf said.

If you are a person who spends most of your time in the past or the future, The Next Ten Minutes is a guarantee to get you and your awareness in the here and now, and that’s where all the power is.

For spiritual nourishment, visit Dr. Susan Corso’s website and blog, Seeds for Sanctuary. Follow her on Twitter @PeaceCorso and Friend her on Facebook. And discover your own Inner Peace at, To Me Peace Is … What is Peace to You?