Cruising at Spring Break
I have just left Port Canaveral on Mariner of the Seas — along with 3000 of my closest friends — for my first ocean cruise. It's a week looping around Cuba, with stops in Haiti, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel, and this is a reunion for the seven of us in my immediate family. So far, the winds on deck are 45 mph which means you can almost lean into the gale and it will hold you up. My earrings nearly blew out of my ears, and in a Marilyn Monroe moment (thank God I was the only one on the bow at the time) my sun-dress upended vertically over my head, and I could not see, let alone get it to stay down! With 14 decks, a rock-climbing wall, ice-skating rink, 1500-seat theatre, pools, hot tubs, and every kind of restaurant, I am in a state of overwhelm.

My intuition is in retreat mode, in terms of tuning in to people; I have become aware of just how much space I need to maintain balance and sanity — and it's a fair amount! I seem to have an interesting radar, though, about intersecting with members of my family serendipitously as I wander the corridors and decks. I am amazed at the number of people who aren't the least affected by the crowds, and in fact, are energized by the teeming masses. I may not be very evolved, I think — I love people in small doses. One at a time it's easy to see the soul and understand any kind of behavior. But in hoards, I must say, it's challenging! How does God do it?! Perhaps the closest I'm getting is to merge with the currents running through the flow of people. Outside my balcony, the cobalt — yes, cobalt! — sea reminds me of the wave action common to us all.

10 Ways to Be More Intuitive and Feel More Spirit in Your Life
1. Look for the light inside people and objects, and even in the air and in places. Imagine that you can see beyond the outer form of things into the blueprint of light beneath.

2. Make a personal commitment to stop judging others and yourself. Let people be who they are. Let yourself be who you are.

3. Identify the 'shoulds' that dictate your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. List the areas where you get emotional about right and wrong and where you feel unwilling about something. Then look at each item and imagine with all your senses what you and your life experience would be like if you tried on the other possible ways to be and act.

4. Be open-minded. When you have a problem to solve, think of at least 3 perfectly viable ways to do it. How might a 5-year-old solve the problem? Or an enlightened master teacher?

5. Make a personal commitment to tell the truth. Don't hide from yourself or others. Say what you mean. Ask for what you need, when you need it. Just as it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown, it greases the wheels of life when you don't tell lies — or even half-truths.

6. Have passion for your work. If you can't change the form of your work right now, change your attitude about it. Find ways to make whatever you do more interesting to yourself. Pay attention to details. Pretend you are someone else doing your job. Imagine teaching your job to someone else so they'd become really good at it.

7. Make a personal commitment to be entertained by life. Encourage yourself to say words with ah's and oh's in them: AHA! Ha-Ha-Ha! Oh, Wow! Open. Aum. OK. Ahh-So! You can be positively involved with your life experience, no matter how traumatic things seem — if only you want to. It depends what you decide to get value from. Why limit the scope of possibly valuable experiences?

8. In your imagination, send a stream of clear, pale blue light from your heart, way up into the sky, and let it rain down in a loving spray around each person you love.

9. Truly notice what other people are saying to you. Listen to every word. They are the messengers that God, Spirit, and your own Soul are sending to you because you aren't listening to the still small voice in your own center.

10. Practice noticing similarities. How is one thing like something else? This increases your intuition and understanding.

The Secret: A Cautionary Tale
A friend just read The Secret, the latest blockbuster New Agey book making the rounds on Oprah and Ellen. Just after that, he came upon an opportunity to buy a cottage in his favorite vacation place, where he had nostalgic memories of good times spent with family. There were a few glitches, though: it was not built to code, had to be bought for cash, and was in a somewhat dangerous location. He took it as a sign that the law of attraction was working in his life and got very excited. Yet, he didn't have enough money to buy it outright, his consulting work had fallen off, and the place was halfway around the world. We talked and I pointed out that there were inherent drawbacks, possibly for good reasons — perhaps to slow him down. The synchronicity might not have been to encourage him to buy this particular place, but to rethink his whole life structure right now, to see where he wanted to live, what he wanted to do for work, how conscious he wanted to be about his finances, and how he wanted to be involved with his family and friends.

This has happened to me before, often with what I took to be prophetic dreams telling me of a new person coming into my life. In the end, the dreams turned out to be warnings, not gleeful announcements, but my mind colored the information with my own inclinations at the time. A string of synchronicities I thought were pointing out a path of action turned out to be alerting me to a situation that was going to trigger my deepest subconscious blocks, and eventually free me from those fears, but all was not what it seemed!

It seems we are all hungry for the magic solutions to our stuck places. The Secret tells us: Ask, Believe, Receive. But, Wow! There's so much more to it. Not everything comes to us in physical form, not all godsends are materialistic. Anyway, my friend may indeed continue on his path to purchasing his little cottage, but at least now he's looking at a bigger, more complex picture in which to fit it.

Incorrect Use of "Counter-Intuitive": Arrrgh!!
I turn my attention to a pet peeve today, one I wrote about last year. Once again, this time in the advice section of the March issue of Oprah's O Magazine, Martha Beck's 5 pieces of advice are hyped as: "Are they counterintuitive?" This seems to be a stylish new hip term these days — one that many media people throw around without really understanding what it means. They are using it to mean "illogical," describing something that doesn't make sense or goes against what we usually think to be true.

In its truest sense, counter-intuitive means to override your intuition. One's intuition may certainly be illogical at times, but it is mainly a sense of direct knowing, of trusting one's body and soul, without mental proof. Something that goes against intuition is a basic reversion to belief, logic, and proof. It would be counter-intuitive to NOT call your mother when you've been thinking about her all day. It would be counter-intuitive if you chose to mouth the party line instead of speaking your own truth. It would be counter-intuitive to not follow a hunch, or dismiss a strange, new creative idea, or gloss over a dream that warned you to be careful of what you eat this week. But it is not counter-intuitive when an idea doesn't fit the constraints of cultural norms. Sheesh!!!