Practice | Bonnie Barnard - Part 10

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The Eternal, The Changing, and Being Content

I moved to Los Angeles this past week. After twenty years of visits and numerous friendships in this big city, I packed up my belongings for storage, rented out my home in Phoenix, and headed south to Los Angeles. Getting up this morning, like every morning, I begin my spiritual practice with sacred reading. Today I read Emerson’s essay on The Oversoul. The following jumps off the page and enters into my contemplation: We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And from his essay Compensation he says: I contrast this to a grouping of articles written in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair reviewing the culture of the past hundred years by decade. In essence, each contributing writer mentioned the good and the bad of the ten year span. Bill Maher said of the 2000’s “We gained Facebook. Like....

The Energy of Obligation

Step into of your most recent memory of doing something out of obligation. What did it feel like? This summer I traveled up to Washington State, from Arizona, and along the way I stopped at spiritual centers to speak, teach, and sign books. I have two new books released in the past several months, one in May and one in June. I stopped at one church which invited me to speak as a favor to one of my colleagues. Favors can be dangerous, at minimum energetically unclean, as implied within them is the energy of owing and obligation. Let’s call this church, The Church of We Are Having You as a Favor (CWHYF). As a spiritual detective, I allow myself to explore various energies as a bonus to the work I do of bringing forth Divine Love, my real job. Exploring obligation, then, was definitely on the menu at CWHYF. Why waste this grand opportunity? I stepped smack into the middle of obligation and immediately my body...

Exploring the Spiritual Practice of Willingness

Upon returning home to Phoenix from a seven week journey around the Pacific Northwest, I watched multiple episodes of Iyanla Fix my Life on OWN network. In this television series, Iyanla Vanzant works with families using truth telling and other spiritual practices for exposing patterns and healing lives. The first episode focused on the grammy singer Syleena Johnson and her relationship with her mother. My attention was drawn to and continued to ruminate upon the father, Syl Johnson. Although in the episode but for a few moments, it was clear that his old school training and perception of how a man ought to be, was a roadblock to change. I witnessed his state as stuck and unable to change as who he knew himself to be was so deeply entrenched he didn’t have the capacity or the internal space to know or do different. This is where the spiritual practice of being willing comes in. Willingness opens stuck places allowing one to see and know oneself from...

Until It’s Done: Celebrating a Big Completion

I pinch myself giggling. Close to twenty years of holding an idea and deepening into it, and two years of dedicated writing and rewriting, my book A Year of Go(o)d: Daily Lessons for the Mystic in Training is written, re-written, edited, re-written, published, and now available for sale. Pinch, pinch, pinch, pinch. Giggle, giggle, giggle. I stop, take a big deep breath, send an email to each of my friends, and celebrate this moment. It’s a big deal and I acknowledge it to myself. Until it’s done, was my mantra with this book. First came the idea. I was in a class studying the roots of the New Thought philosophy in the mid-1990s. I read Self Reliance by Emerson and felt like I was known. I read Judge Thomas Troward’s Edinburgh Lectures and had dreams of energy spirals, experiencing expansion and illumination. Then, I got to Emma Curtis Hopkins work and my body tingled, trembled, and experienced a cellular shift which I couldn’t ignore. Many in my class dismissed...

My Favorite Scene in the Movie Lincoln

In Spielberg’s new movie; Lincoln in standing in a communication center consisting of two desks and small brass contraptions which transport Morse Code. There are two men, one at each desk, and it is a heightened moment within the Civil War. Lincoln is waiting for an update to be transmitted and is partially talking his thought process aloud while engaging with the communicators. Lincoln asks if either young man studied engineering. One responds, “yes.” Lincoln then asks him what he thinks about one of Euclid’s Axioms. The young man says he doesn’t remember his book studies as he basically forgot his book learning once he left school. Lincoln shares that he, himself, didn’t have much formal education, but he allowed his studies to inform and change him. Since he read Euclid’s axiom “Things that are equal to one another are equal to each other” he contemplated this idea in the context of race. Like equalling like, Euclid said, is self-evident. This insight, provides clarity regarding an action Lincoln was to...

How Does Peace Feel?

How does Peace feel in your body? What is the sensation of Peace? How do you know when it is present? You may be able to say, duh, it is this …. and go into description, or it may cause some thoughtful contemplation. And, it is worth doing. To know the vibration of a concept, to intimately know an internal quality allows us to call it forward at any given moment because, in essence, we know where it is located and how to access it, and we can trust its presence as us. Several weeks ago I had this crazy idea of compiling a global Peace prayer through video clips posted onto YouTube. The intention is three fold: 1. to invoke Peace and creativity with those making the submissions, and 2. to magnify the field of Peace through this project so that it is easier for others in the world to access, 3. to directly impact individuals through the message. You are encouraged to play. You can sing...