I can hear his voice in my ear saying”you don’t want to give your Power to worry, doubt and fear…Oh No, you don’t want to engage in circumstantial living.” I must have heard the phrase “circumstantial living” over one hundred times before I realized what it meant realizing simultaneously that was exactly what I was doing. When I was happy, life was GOOD. When I was having a bad day, life sucked and something was wrong with me, God, or someone/something else.

In every spiritual center I’ve led, I’ve brought the practice of Day of the Dead to the community building altars to the deceased and remembering the eternal nature of Love. This year I brought myself to Mazatlan to participate in the ritual first hand.

We were given one exercise in the Death and Dying class that I was unable to do. We were to take the names of the three people we were closest to, write them down, then turn them into the teacher. He would pronounce them dead. My parents had just divorced, and like all major emotional tsunamis I was left to figure it out and process myself. Adding death, even imagined, to the puzzle was too much for me and yet Life’s timing isn’t mine to control. Studying death head-on opened my curiosity aperture wider.

The advisors and I wanted to bring a spiritual practice to the Center that would be practiced daily so by the end of the year individuals can look at their lives and see how they have changed and grown.

I have never become complacent with the idea that everything is alive and moving and that everything begins with an idea. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is said that God spoke things into being coming from thought. You and I do the same thing.