Uncategorized | Bonnie Barnard - Part 9

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2013 is a Good Year for Learning and Deepening

This new year promises to be a Go(o)d one because I choose it to be. I am old enough, imbued with enough wisdom, to realize my circumstances don’t dictate my sense of well-being, and I can influence many of my circumstances through thought and all of them through Love. So, I choose to enter into and live 2013 with the magical, miracle of simply being alive in this multi-dimensional universe. Aaaah… Join me in a powerful year. Two of my friends asked me on separate occasions to teach them how to pray as I do. The prayer technology I use is entitled Affirmative Prayer. This technology is several hundred years old and empowering. It acknowledges the mystical reality of the Kingdom of God as an inner reality and creates prayer with this in mind. I’ll be offering a three session class on this in January. I have been asked by a colleague to offer a class on embodiment and health. The focus of this series is learning to energetically...

A Community Prayer for World Peace

Inspiration: I have a vision. It is one which has tickled my insides for a while now, and I couldn’t quite articulate it until this TED Talk was sent to me, by my friend Rhonda. The TED talk is about fourteen minutes in length and well worth watching. Eric Whitacer, composer, facilitates a global choir singing some of his compositions. Inspiring, powerful, and filled with stories of the human spirit and the gift of music; to me it is a manifestation of the Oneness which we are. This is where my idea comes in. And, you don’t need to watch the video to play in this idea. The Idea: Here is the idea…individuals from around the world (that’s you) create a video of fifteen seconds or less with their one word or sentence of prayer for world peace. That’s it. Grab your cell phone and video yourself or a group of you, and speak your Peace. Some suggestions? State what it feels like to be at peace within yourself. Or,...

Something Fishy Is Going On

Taking my seat in a large auditorium church, it is day two of a much anticipated conference. After a few minutes of sitting I notice something smells fishy. I raise my hands to my face. No, it’s not my skin. My skin smells like the just applied “Falling in Love” lotion I lathered on after my shower. I pull softly on my blue and white guaze top and smell the corner of it while looking around the room as though I always do this and it smells freshly laundered. Nothing. Then I look to the right. There is a woman with short brown Liza Minelli cut hair, a ruddy face and overexuberant disposition. I lean into her to hug her and eeeek, it is her. She stinks. She smells of, not old seafood from a diner platter the night before, but from “I took raw salmon skin and rubbed it on my body this morning as my new lotion.” I couldn’t believe it. My gag reflexes set in and...

The Big Wait

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” Ralph Waldo Emerson There was a time not that long ago that I valued travel and adventure over all else. Put me in a car with a tank full of gas and a GPS and I was a happy woman. After three years of intentional home building, there is nothing more that I yearn for than home. I have gone from two extremes; the wanderer to the homebody. The truth is, I am home whenever my heart is open. As I hang out in a state of impatience, my heart is closed and I go into an inward battle between what is and what I want. This battle is a guaranteed “lose” every time, yet I still engage in it. So, how do I practice patience in a state of impatience? I don’t know. Yet, I’ve practiced loving I didn’t feel it and I’ve practiced generosity when I’ve felt impoverished, so this challenge ought to be worth my...

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...

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...