The Violet Flame

“The use of the violet consuming flame is more valuable to you and to all mankind than all the wealth, all the gold and all the jewels of this planet. ” – Saint Germain

I first came across a book on use of the Violet Flame in a chain bookstore while my husband at the time and I were there. He was lego interested and I was not particularly, so I found myself wandering over to the new age spirituality section which I hadn’t spent time in since my late teenage years. Somehow I was interested to peek there with no current reading agenda that required a purchase but because I had recently been given a gift card to the store, there I was.

I stumbled across a very small book tucked in to the shelf called, “The Violet Flame”. Having an incredible fondness for the word violet, I had to peek. I’ll explain myself a bit more: My great aunt was named Violet and she made herself available to care for me as a premature infant, living with my family for a time period until I had grown to the point that my parents felt comfortable with other arrangements. She and I developed a sweet bond that continued on until she passed away when I was twelve. Besides this, the previous husband with me at the store had partially grown up on Violet Court and was living there when I met him, and one of my favorite group song projects from my freshmen year of school was Das Veilchen by Mozart which you may guess means “The Violet”. It’s a funny little song about a violet who wishes more than anything to be plucked and held by a maiden he admires. Instead of his wish, she tramples him and still he is satisfied because it was her… So I was drawn to the word Violet and had to know about this flame. The book had bits in it that rubbed me the wrong way at the time because of religious intonations but the curiosity I felt was stronger than the uncomfortableness. I bought it along with some other treasures that day.

I began with the prayers in the book as meditations and chose to think of them like that so that I could move past my limitations and just see how those words may work in my life. The more I recited the words, which I did about three times a day, the lighter I felt. Forgiveness began to move through me in new ways and other books began to show up in my life that allowed me to work even more thoroughly with forgiveness and compassion for memories that replayed of childhood challenges and scenarios that cropped up as a newish parent myself. The words I found in this book allowed me to go back into memories and release what was difficult as well as to do that in the moment when I found myself feeling blaming energy. The words helped me again years down the road when I found myself living without a husband and doing my best to offer steady, balanced, and loving parenting to my children so they wouldn’t need to go into their memories as adults to forgive mistreatment. However, I’m not claiming to be a perfect parent here. I’m sure my children will have things they plan to do differently and if they can make improvements, I applaud them. I hope they will.

In hindsight, I know this little book was a gift to come across and in the case it helps you now, I’ll share one of the prayers I found to be especially supportive:

I AM Forgiveness acting here,
Casting out all doubt and fear,
Setting men forever free
With wings of cosmic Victory.

I AM calling in full power
For Forgiveness every hour;
To all life in every place
I flood forth forgiving Grace.

If you choose to work with this text, it’s also lovely to close your eyes and visualize a gently warming violet flame holding you as you recite. As you grow more comfortable, see the flame growing also. Let the flame grow to hold your home, your neighborhood, your community, and beyond until you have the entire planet wrapped in the violet flame with forgiving grace circling everyone and everything.

Forgiveness is important work and the more you can forgive, the better life will be. Hope you decide to try this out, dearest ones.

Empty Cup

“Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your life with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.” – Norman Vincent Peale

If you can invite the concept of self- emptying, creating a void space within you, and then making yourself into a cup ready to be filled, you may be delighted with what follows. As an empty vessel, allow yourself to be filled and to empty again and again. Let your thoughts and your feelings come and go so that you become a vessel for life to flow to, through, and from you in beautiful ways. The perception of emptiness as a problem is all in the eye of the beholder. What if the moments of emptiness are actually full of potential ready to take new form based on what you are prepared to hold?

In order to become empty, meditation is necessary. You must learn to still your mind even if only for small increments. The more “nothingness” you create within, the more presence and potentiality you invite. The thoughts will still come. The feelings will still come. It’s okay to hear them and feel them and then to notice if you can detach to let them fall away. The more this is practiced, the more the small self diminishes so that the wisdom of your soul can shine through. Let yourself be wonderfully surprised by “emptiness” perhaps better felt as “openness to receive” while also letting yourself take inspired action (such as giving to others, participating in creative projects, saying or doing the thing that you know needs your attention, showing up to places that call you, remembering to bring all of your awareness into the present moment, etc.) without concern for fullness coming into play. It will come and it will go.

Waking Up

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up” — Paul Valéry.

We could look at this quote and marvel at the simplicity of first getting yourself out of bed everyday and consistently moving towards your dreams: one step at the time. To shift yourself from contemplation to actionable reality perhaps was what the French poet intend we derive. However, I can’t help but pull multiple meanings from this every time my eyes scan over the words. Perhaps we’ve been in one way of thinking too long and we must wake up to a pattern. Maybe it’s that we’ve been excusing behavior from others that limits us and we have to wake up to claiming our own right to space and expression. It’s even possible that we’ve settled into relationships that were comfortable for us at one point in time but as we all grow and change, we have to remember to wake up to the present and not the past versions because who we and they were five, ten, twenty years ago isn’t the same as today. Life may cause us to go through something that shifts us in a particular way to prepare us for a new way of being that we have to wake up to. From yet another perspective, perhaps the dominant energy in whatever life dynamics we find ourselves is providing the perfect illusions to keep us small and working in systems that deter our growth or keep us dependent on someone else’s dream or base desires. Within the same thinking, it could also be that our energy feeds the demands of another and we have so little left for our own wants and dreams that we begin to feel deflated. Perhaps we don’t even know what to dream anymore…

There are so many ways we may find ourselves waking up to reclaim and probably redefine our right to dream. Please don’t assume these dreams have to be big to be valuable. The smallest dreaming is quite powerful and affirming. You may find small dreams are the most rewarding all along your path. We certainly all deserve to live nourished and free in our hearts desires – surrounded by those who help us remember our sacred sovereignty.

Hug it In

What happens when you avoid or dismiss something or someone that makes you uncomfortable? Perhaps you bypass it or them because you think it’s not worth your while but yet when it rolls around into your awareness there’s a kind of stickiness there and maybe even a sting.

As we wind down 2025, year of the snake and shedding, what if you let whatever this could be in your life have a bit more airtime? What if you expand to meet it and even include it or them in your field with conscious awareness. Let avoidance be part of your shed, dear one. The sooner you meet whatever / whomever this is with your heart light, the sooner you embody peace and wellbeing with yourself across all aspects of your life.

This is not to say you should sit in difficult feelings for a long time but acknowledgment with the light of the heart helps to transmute these feelings into neutrality, and with more and more practice, you can even shift the feelings into loving acceptance and possibly joy.

May you expand in loving light. 💛🙏🏼✨

Frolicsome

I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

—

Starlings in Winter excerpt by Mary Oliver

Perhaps you’re not a starling gifted with wings, but you may have the capacity to find your way to light and frolicsome behavior before this week is out …and that may lead you to feel as if you do.

Good wishes to you ahead of the next full moon, also known as the pink moon or budding moon. May you step into your own expression of full light in whatever way that can best support you now.

Look Within

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more – more unseen forms become manifest to him.

— Rumi

Below you’ll find questions for self inquiry as we come away from a powerful solar eclipse. Paper and pen may be handy as people tend to find response in writing to be different than pure mental chatter. If you want to really stir things up, try writing with your non dominant hand. Give yourself space to answer from the heart as you consider the following:

How could you soften into your heart when you feel caught in the mind?

What does the heart allow you to see?

What could be seen differently if you release yourself from the storyline of your life as told to you by your mind?

What would you do next if you saw yourself as a character that could be or do or say anything to shift direction?

Almost Spring

Can you feel the daylight stretching to meet the darkness in equal length?

To honor the extending light, a poem from E.E. Cummings that demonstrates his unconventional phrasing and punctuation:

[in Just-]

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

________________________

I hope you’ll pause with this and consider how something different in the day could stretch your internal light. What nonsensical joy can lighten your load, even just for a moment? The rhyme and the reason need not hold hands in every moment! Be free for a bit.

With love —

Present Reflection

“The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.”
– Ernest Dimnet

With reflection, we have the opportunity to review our experiences for the sake of deeper connection with life, ourselves, and others. We may give ourselves a fresh take on positive traits or we may notice reason to grow. Keeping an eye towards spying something satisfying in your time of reflection is for sure a positive way to keep a past time practice useful to the present moment.

Wherever you are in your experience of present moment awareness, reflection can support the joy you experience in this moment.

Filled with Light

When I am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees, 
especially the willows and the honey locust, 
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, 
they give off such hints of gladness. 
I would almost say that they save me, and daily. 

I am so distant from the hope of myself, 
in which I have goodness, and discernment, 
and never hurry through the world 
but walk slowly, and bow often. 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves 
and call out, ”Stay awhile.” 
The light flows from their branches. 

And they call again, ”It's simple,” they say, 
”and you too have come 
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled 
with light, and to shine.”

Unexpressed

Today I heard someone say, “Unexpressed gratitude is interpreted as entitlement or even ingratitude.”

So I’m curious about this. The topic was to do with ongoing, close relationships where people sometimes get lazy in communicating what they appreciate about one another.

Does it apply in the broader scope of relating? Something to consider…

I’m taking this as a reminder to write out my thanks for the wonderful experiences (no matter how small) over the holiday season! 💛

Every genuine thank you lifts the spirt of another. It’s absolutely worth your time.