Practice | Bonnie Barnard - Part 14

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Celebrating Life as a Response to Death

Today am I keenly aware of death. Rev. Jackie Allen, my former practitioner teacher made her transition this week. Three years ago today, my father passed away. Last month I attended an out of state memorial service for my high school friend’s husband. Yesterday I dropped a sympathy card in the mail for a friend whose father passed. As a minister, I have conducted many memorial services and a few funerals. It is one of the reasons I became a minister. There are moments in our lives when people gather together out of love and cheer each other on. Births, birthdays, weddings, graduations, new homes, and deaths. Death is different than other celebrations as often grief companions us through the process. Our hearts are broken. We are at choice to allow our heart to break open, or to close it and try to protect ourselves from any future pain. The courageous route is to be broken open and to allow vulnerability to rise within us. The death of a...

Girl Scouts Take the Stand of Inclusion

While on my morning walk listening to Beth and Friends, KEZ 99.9 fm, on my iHeart Radio app, disc jockey Beth played a portion of the YouTube video, below. It is a talk given by a 14 year old Girl Scout advocating a boycott of Girl Scout Cookies because they allow transgendered individuals in the troops. Beth’s response was something along the lines of “I will buy MORE cookies this year because I want to support a compassionate organization.” I agree with her. It would great for hate toward others unlike us to end in our generation. Listening with an open heart to the full YouTube video I remember how sheltered and naive I was at her age. And, I applaud this young woman for having her voice heard and making an argument utilizing the written tenants of the Scouts. Bravo. However, the lack of understanding and compassion spoke louder than her argument. The bigger question, I believe, is not how do we extricate individuals who are different than...

Your Invitation to Creating a Year That Matters

Happy 2012!! Join me for taking Rhonda Britten’s Create a Year That Matters. Each one of us creates a life that matters by creating moments, days, years, and decades which have meaning to us. Chunking down our dreams, goals, and aspirations into sizes we can implement, then acting upon those chunks, allow us to create a life of our choice. I take Rhonda’s tele-class every year. I look forward to it. This past week I began asking myself questions about who I want to become, what I want to do, and the experience I want to know in order to prepare for this class. Rising to the top of my desire list is completing my book and increasing my spiritual coaching practice this year. These intentions I bring with me into the class. With the coaching support of Rhonda, and the assignments she parses out, I am certain to manifest these intentions. She is giving a deal to my blog readers. Four weeks of vision, clarity, and releasing disappointments...

A New Year, A New Theme

What is your theme for 2012? Every year I choose a theme for the new year. Why? It becomes my year’s anchor and guide. Instead of waddling through a year, I have purpose. At the completion of the next year, God-willing, I can look back through a lens and see my life with a given perspective. My themes usually are about calling forth an inner quality of being. In 2009, my theme was Self Care. 2010 I was “birthing my Soul.” 2011 was different as my focus was on a skill or profession. I was cultivating The Writer. To do this, I became a member, then secretary, of the Phoenix Writer’s Club. I could be found in writer’s workshops, such as Stella Pope Duarte’s workshop Drawing Down the Muse. Or at Paradise Valley Community College taking a creative writing or magazine article writing class. As a guest writer for a local blog, I wrote weekly about the Soul for liwi.com. I started my own blog soulfulresources.com which then turned...

A Year in (Visual) Review

Beginnings, middles and ends tend to be important to me. If my year has been more bad than good, I am grateful it is over. “Phew, thank God, I can start again.” If more joy than pain, I celebrate this. “Yippee, winner.” (is that word Trademarked now?) Always a triumph in the flipping of the calendar from one year to the next. For closure, I create a comprehensive list of anything remaining to forgive or leave behind, then I do it. Followed by a list of gratitudes, which I hang out in a bit. Then, the intention or theme I’ve set for the year, I imagine in my journal. This year, while contemplating my closure within my blog, I decided upon a “year in pictures” selecting photos which in some way open my heart a bit. Here goes … 2011 begins. Happy New Year is the picture I have on my Face Book profile for the month of January. Daughter wins Bingo … raise your...

Recognizing the Field of Plenty

In church one Sunday, sitting on a pew in the corner cubby, I meditated. I don’t recall much of anything said or music sung, I recall instead an inner question which bubbled up from inside me about half way through the service. The inquiry said “have you felt into the field of plenitude?” The answer was “no.” The question has followed me since. I have avoided states of being or fields of collective energy out of fear. Trusting has been difficult for me. Trusting is difficult for any child with a history of abuse. Letting go into Life feels like certain death. Yet, when the question of plenty arose, I knew its significance, and I was a willing student. My entire life I have been surrounded by plenty, however, I haven’t trusted myself to yield into it and know its address. To hold an address, is the key to returning to a place, whether inner or outer. The how is imbedded within the inner state of location. Location, location,...