I wrote this when I’d just gotten back from the monthly Bellingham meet-up at Sitara’s house.

I tell you. The value of having a soul family to check in with once a month is incalculable.

To ride forward into whatever is coming next with one group whom you know to be dedicated lightworkers is great good fortune. I must have done something good in my past life.

So now I’m gassed up for another month.

Nonetheless I’ve been in confusion and dissonance all day, unrelated to the meet-up.

Do we agree that it’s thought that creates cognitive dissonance? We get ourselves into thought traps. We can also find our way out of them. Here’s what I was dealing with today. I had to really dig to get myself out of this one. But I succeeded in correcting confusion and dissonance. This was a first for me.

My dissonance arose because my life is so busy I require a higher degree of solitude than most others.  I also have a temperament that prefers solitude anyways.

But my future, as AAM frankly stated last reading, was going to get much busier. That means much more time given to social contact and less time to research and writing, to keeping up with the baseline of events, to spiritual exploration, etc. It means a different lifestyle.

I was afraid and worried about what the future would look like. I stood to be torn apart by two seemingly-competing agendas – let me call them “solitude” and “busyness.”

I didn’t know which of the two horses to ride or whether I could ride two horses.

But it’s my thought itself that was causing the dissonance. I got to see how I get myself into these thought traps.

Here’s the trap.

I have the thought that I must ride two horses. That’s an either/or way of seeing things that can produce dissonance.

I can just as easily create the thought of the two horses (solitude and busyness) having two riders and the three of us (me and my horse and the two riders) cooperating to produce some great end.

Sometimes we riders veer to the right (say, solitude) and sometimes to the left (busyness). But we do so in a coordinated manner with the overall direction being forward.

Forward to Ascension, forward to abundance, forward to Disclosure.

A friend would remind me that a bird has two wings – in this case, solitude and busyness. That’s another way of saying the same thing: Let go of either/or.

Both tendencies can prevail at different times. The flow between them needs to be effective, fair, and equal. And, whether we veer to the right or the left, we’re agreed that our overall direction is forward.

***

The first thing I need to remind myself of and never forget is that I have complete control over the way my day unfolds. I choose to give some control away for the success of the  enterprise and at the direction of Michael and the Mother.

But I can also take that control back. In the end, no one has control over my agreement or disagreement but me.

Dumbed down, hypnotised, entranced, entrained – yes, that mitigates responsibility in the eyes of the law and in the common heart. But at some point, if we’re going to make progress forward, we’re going to have to take personal responsibility for as much as we can.

By taking responsibility, we’re asserting our awareness, discernment, and courage. We’re demonstrating that we value integrity above mere show, mere appearance.

The more victimized we feel, the more – because of tension lowering awareness – we may forget to be responsible for our situation.

***

We’ve now removed the either/or and demonstrated that we value integrity by taking personal responsibility for as much of our situation as we felt we could.

Let’s now take the process a step further by coming up with a metaphor for resolving the seeming tug-of-war between the felt need for activity and the desire for solitude.

I’m going to recommend that we re-introduce the metaphor of the eternal dance of Shakti and Shiva. Shakti is energy; Shiva is awareness. Shakti is activity; Shiva is stillness. Shakti is sound; Shiva is silence.

In my own experience, love and bliss are very much Shakti but peace is very much Shiva.

Let Shakti stand in for activity and Shiva for solitude.

Above Shakti and Shiva is the One directing all.

Shakti and Shiva are locked in an eternal embrace, in an endless dance of loving creation, forever circling around each other.  They do not stray.

In Hindu statues, Shakti is depicted dancing on the recumbent form of Shiva. Shakti is active; Shiva is still.

Now let me apply this metaphor to my own situation. Sometimes I ask Shakti to lead and activity will be preferred. Sometimes I ask Shiva and stillness is preferred.  Above them, overseeing all is the one who’s always around, the witness of everything.

It’ll be a dance of ebb and flow, advance and withdraw, with the common agreement between the three of us being that the overall direction is forward.

The dilemma has dissolved. The two personalities, the two interests, the two voices in the head – one for solitude and one for activity – will cooperate with each other from now on and ebb and flow together.

At no time will the witness, the third partner in the dance, surrender personal responsibility, authority, or initiative, unless a conscious and common agreement on the matter has been reached.

***

We’ve illustrated that we can take a “thought trap” resulting in confusion and dissonance and reframe it, recontextualize it, recast it, to eliminate the difficulties.

We took back responsibility for our choices around time and our daily schedule.

And we created a new metaphor. We superimposed the dance of Shakti and Shiva, energy and awareness, on the issue of solitude and busyness. It allowed us to recast the relationship as a dance, a give-and-take of flowing grace, rather than a battle of will and wits.