Saturday, January 29, 2011

Penney's 2011 Letter Is Available


Last year I began to write a letter about what I sense happening under the surface for the year ahead, and I've just finished the 2011 Letter. It is available as a pdf at my website:

If you'd like to read the 2010 Letter, which is still quite pertinent, it's available at:

And finally, if you'd like to read the Summer Solstic message I sent last June, it's available at:

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Latest Issue of Intuitive Way eNews is Out!


You can read my latest editorial about "Screen Addiction" in the January 17 issue of my newsletter, at www.penneypeirce.com/newsletterarchives.htm

Each newsletter contains an editorial about what's happening just below the surface of our awareness. You can sign up at www.penneypeirce.com/newsletter.htm

Your Psychic Potential: A Guide to Psychic Development by Dr. Richard Ireland


This newly released book comes to us courtesy of my friend Mark Ireland, son of Dr. Richard Ireland, one of this country's most well-known, and accurate, psychics. This is a compilation of Dr. Ireland's journal writings, never seen before. Dr. Ireland was the teacher of two of my favorite friends and colleagues, trance mediums Kevin Ryerson and Lin David Martin. Mark Ireland has published his own inspiring book, called Soul Shift, which is recommended for anyone wondering about life after death.

Written by preeminent twentieth-century psychic Richard Ireland in 1973, Your Psychic Potential didn’t reach the author’s son, Mark Ireland, until August 2004, twelve years after his father’s passing. Since then, two psychic-mediums with no knowledge of the manuscript have delivered messages to Mark suggesting that his father had deliberately delayed the book’s discovery and was now nudging along its twenty-first century release.

Your Psychic Potential strives to increase readers’ awareness of the subtle spiritual and psychical forces that form a part of the invisible world and yet are constantly weaving themselves in and out of our everyday lives. Anyone interested in discovering their extrasensory talents and achieving some conscious control over them will find this an indispensible guide. The book provides simple methods to aid psychic development, including meditative exercises that promote the natural unfolding of abilities and tools to cope with any fears that may arise along the way; a discussion of the four spheres/levels of psychic activity; an exploration of the relationship between artistic talents and the psychic; tests and experiments that help discover your psychic potential; and a psychic’s diet that supports the freer flow of abilities. Both charming and informative, Your Psychic Potential will appeal to the psychic-curious and to novice and advanced psychic practitioners alike.

Born into rural, depression-era Ohio, Richard Ireland developed his psychic skills at an early age and later became a full-time minister as well as a counselor to such celebrities as Mae West, Amanda Blake, and Glenn Ford. Ireland founded his own interdenominational University of Life church in Phoenix, Arizona, appeared on radio and TV shows, and gave demonstrations everywhere from Las Vegas nightclubs to large venues in Los Angeles, New York, and London. He died in 1992.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

One Voice in Many: Part 5


I've been posting bits of an old manuscript I wrote in 1980 or so. . .and it's interesting to see that in my attempts then to merge into the collective consciousness and speak from that unified voice, so much of what was said is so simple and true today. The "We" voice could as easily be a divine voice inside anyone and everyone.

What is unconditional love? It's not just acceptance and tolerance, especially when things are comfortable. Spiritual love, Being for Being, is always unconditional. We are created of the same stuff and how can a Being not love itself? Only when we think we're separate is there lack of love and conditional giving and receiving. Do I consider myself a trustworthy person? Yes. Do I trust others unconditionally? Not always. . . If I don't trust another I must believe they can do something to hurt me, I have stopped relating on the Being level. I doubt.

In my imagination, I step forward to commit myself in service before the enlightened beings. "Will you accept me?" I say. "Will you accept us?" they echo back. I see it is the same, we are the same. "They" will never tell me something I am not already telling myself. I give my whole self, all my talents, even my burdens. They drop the burdens—those bundles I have been so hesitant to part with. They simply don't exist in their light and higher frequency, for they are lies and cannot exist at all. I am truth. We are truth. There is no difference in I and WE, MY and OUR. It is not MY higher self, but OUR higher self; we exist as aspects and unity at once.

I can be a source of love and reassurance to others that they too are sources of love. I am as healthy as I am loving. I am as inspirational as I am loving. I am as inspired as I am loving. We DO receive as we give. Teach and be taught, love and be loved, inspire and be inspired, hoard and have nothing, steal and lose what you have, fear and stand still.


Flower photo by Susie Surtees Creative, Australia

Friday, January 14, 2011

Work with Your Imagination


Here's part of an article from Martha Beck, from the December O Magazine:

Step One: Pick a goal, any goal.

Think of a typical noun-verb goal, something for which you frequently hanker. Be honest rather than politically correct. Some people may have deep desires to establish world peace, stop global warming, and end poverty, but maybe you actually think more about, I dunno, reaching your target weight. And that's okay. This is not a beauty pageant (those contestants can afford to wish for world peace; they've all reached their target weight). What I want you to do is fess up to your real desires. Now pick the biggest, most ambitious one.

Step Two: Gaze into the future.

You don't need a crystal ball to see what's up ahead; the three pounds of gray matter between your ears will do fine. Use your brainpower right now to imagine what your life would be like if you realized the goal you just identified. Create a detailed fantasy about it. Loiter there awhile, observing your dream-come-true with your mind's eyes, ears, nose, skin. Then, clear your mind and your throat: It's time for the magic words.

Step Three: Generate adjectives.

This is the heart of a really effective goal-spell. Begin listing adjectives that describe how you feel in your dream-come-true scenario. This is a simple task, but not an easy one. It requires that you translate holistic, right-brain sensations into specific, left-brain words. Author Craig Childs compares this to "trying to build the sky out of sticks." Spend enough time in your imagined situation to let your brain leaf through its vocabulary, scouting out accurate adjectives. In goal setting as in fairy tales, the minimum magic number is three. Don't stop until you have at least that many ways to describe those lovely feelings.

My clients frequently try to squirm out of the process by muttering, "It's hard to explain," or "Oh, I don't know," or "I can't describe it." Well, of course it's hard to explain; yes, you do know; and if you keep trying, you can too describe it. Your adjectives don't have to be eloquent; use simple words like energetic, focused, delighted, and fine. But you owe it to yourself to persevere until you've found some reasonably descriptive words. Three of 'em. Write them down and then share them below in the comments:

1.____________________

2.____________________

3.____________________

Step Four: Focus on anything that can be described with your adjectives.

Drop the fantasy situation you imagined in step two and concentrate on those adjectives. You might notice that these three words bring your stated goal into sharper focus. For instance, if your New Year's resolution is to lose ten pounds—a noun-verb goal—but your adjectives are strong, confident, and healthy, you might realize that your actual aim is to get fit. You would see that the strategy you came up with to diet (i.e., eating your weight in hydroponic cabbage) might leave you thinner but also recumbent on a couch without the energy to leave the house—which isn't what you really want. Thanks to adjectives, you can fine-tune your strategy: Swap a fad diet for a meeting with a nutritionist, and sign up for weight training classes at the gym.

Sometimes tweaking isn't enough. Your adjective goal might utterly contradict your stated goal. Time to rethink that original target. For example, if you think you want to win an Academy Award, you may imagine your Oscar acceptance speech, and feel "valued, satisfied, and unstoppable." If you think that only a night at the Kodak Theatre will lead to those feelings, you might spend years obsessively pursuing movie stardom, ignoring everyone and everything except your ambition. Odds are you still wouldn't win an Oscar, but you'd probably get a rapacious ego that could inhale all manner of rewards without even noticing them. On the other hand, if you immediately begin focusing on aspects of your present life that make you feel valued, satisfied, or unstoppable, you'll feel an instant lift. All sorts of things may happen. Sure, you might win an Oscar. But if you don't find yourself onstage, blurting out that the statue sure is heavy, you'll be left with...a pretty good life. You might even find that as you follow the things that make you feel appreciated, you've tripped into an entirely different career. So starting now, survey your life for anything (I mean anything) that can be described with any of those three words. Putting all your attention on those aspects of your life will make you happier right now and help you create future situations that fulfill your true desires.

Photo by Henri Cartier Bresson

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Friday, January 7, 2011

Imagination and Magical Creativity


Jill Badonsky of The Muse Is In, wrote in one of her newsletters, "I know that I'm a teacher because when I discover tools that work for me I have a run-into-the-house-and-do-it-right-now kind of compulsion to share it with others. It can be inconvenient when you're in the middle of holding a ladder for someone up a tree..."

I am the same way. I sit in meditation and when the quiet takes over, it's challenging to remain in the formless, as my particular kind of mind begins generating amazing teaching visions and insights, which I feel I must not lose, so I rush back to jot it all down on a notepad I keep by my chair. Many of these things have gone into my books and workshops. I know I'm an artist, similarly, because I feel the same urge to translate and shape visionary content into writing, and sometimes into graphics and other kinds of art, enjoying the surprise of how it comes through the filter of my own kind of awareness.

I am lately focusing on the importance of keeping imagination alive and active, of going into that workshop space of the imaginal realm to cocreate new realities with the magical force that lives there. For that reason, I was taken with parts of this article, which features bits from John Updike, published in The Authors Guild Bulletin, Winter 2009. Part of it is from an essay titled, Why Write, from Picked-Up Pieces (1975), and part is from an interview for The Paris Review, Winter 1968.

"Think of a pencil. What a quiet, nimble, slender and stubby wonder-worker he is! At his touch, worlds leap into being; a tiger with no danger, a steam-roller with no weight, a palace at no cost. All children are alive to the spell of pencils and crayons, of making something, as it were, from nothing; a few children never move out from under this spell, and try to become artists. . .

"In my adolescence I discovered one could write with a pencil as well as draw, without the annoying need to consult reality so frequently. Also, the cave beneath the written page holds many more kinds of space than the one beneath the drawing pad. . .

"Storytelling, for all its powers of depiction, shares with music the medium of time, and perhaps its genius, its most central transformation, has to do with time, with rhythm and echo and the sense of time not frozen as in a painting but channeled and harnessed as in a symphony. . .

"My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core joy."

photo by Henri Cartier Bresson

Wednesday, January 5, 2011