KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

October 21 through October 27, 2024

Monday’s Gemini Moon will put us in the mood to socialize or do research, as it raises the bar on intellectual pursuits. The highlight of the week is the Sun’s entry into Scorpio, where it will spend the next four weeks turning our thoughts to the mystical and mysterious. Scorpio is also a sign where our intense sides can come out, bringing more flair and drama to our movements as well as communications. Spiritual and metaphysical practices are encouraged as well, as this is one of two times of the year that the veil between our world and the spirit world is the thinnest. Our intuition and emotional well-being will be highlighted on Tuesday and Wednesday under the Cancer Moon, as we indulge ourselves in fantasy, daydreaming, or simply become couch potatoes for a few days. We can expect our most productive days of the week to be Thursday and Friday as the Moon pulses through Leo, energizing and directing us. The weekend unfolds under a Virgo Moon, allowing us to catch up on chores, clear our heads, and reconnect with the people who bring joy to our lives.

Living Love Daily, by Jennie Lee

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

By what measure do you love? If you are like most people, you probably keep some score of reciprocity, monitoring whether or not others are giving as much as you are in your relationships. Granted, no one likes to feel that a friendship or partnership is one-sided, but this typically self-referential approach to love does not really serve our highest good, and keeping score never feels good.

It is true that the feeling of love we have will fluctuate based on how balanced the giving and receiving is between us and others. But if we instead approach love as an action rather than a feeling, then we can be grateful, either for what we may be receiving, or if we are not, then for the opportunity to practice stepping deeper into love. If we take the perspective that loving is a spiritual practice, it changes the measure by which we love.

The Energy of Love
The key to making this shift is recognizing that there is only one energy of love. It is not mine, or yours, or hers. Divine love is radiating to us and through us in a million different disguises, through every human expression of loving that we share with partners, relatives, friends, and even strangers.

Love is the universally harmonizing energy that draws all things together. It is the uniting principle of the cosmos. When we see it as such, rather than a limited personal commodity that we may or may not be getting from another person, then we can start to create divinely loving relationships.

We can see one another as love channels and appreciate every moment as an opportunity to dive deeper into loving action, offering kindness and compassion to each person we encounter, rather than selfishly looking for what they can bring to us. If we are not watching to see what someone is giving back, then we are free to expand our capacity to love.

This is certainly not the world standard for loving, is it? And if someone is unkind, or even hurtful to us, how can we be loving then? This is when our practice is most essential! Rather than react in a similar way, we need to pause and breathe. We can bear witness to the purity of the person's soul behind his disagreeable exterior and choose to drop into the energy of love that lives in our own hearts.

Although it is not easy to keep our heart open in this way, it is possible if we allow conflict to be the catalyst for our spiritual evolution. Our challenge is to return again and again to the essence of love itself, not as an intellectual exercise but as an embodied meditation on our shared oneness, twenty-four hours a day, every day.

Of course, we will feel challenged by the painful limitations of our ego at times, but if we attempt to spiritualize every moment of our lives by living the principle of love, we create a purposeful connection to all beings and to the Source of love itself. Any small gesture of love moves us in a positive direction and eventually we experience a newfound freedom in all of our relationships. This practice also keeps us from drowning in the worldly fear and outrage that threaten daily to rob us of our inner peace.

Love Is Always the Answer
By making our engagement with conscious loving, rather than the scale of reciprocity, our measuring stick of success, then whether the world responds or turns away we are able to carry on with passion and purpose. Love becomes our guiding philosophy, sustaining us during times of sorrow and discouragement, and giving us meaning and joy. There is no more powerful or constructive force for positive change.

Every moment becomes different when we approach life through divine love. We see more possibility, more compassion, and more potential. We feel more expansiveness in every moment as we grow beyond our old personal limitations until the whole world becomes our beloved. By consciously loving, we remember the truth of our being; that we are love and that love is the answer to everything.

Meditation Opens the Door to Divine Love
The best way to develop a strong connection to this energy of love is through mediation. Daily stillness illumines the ways in which we may be blocking Divine love in our hearts or minds through habitual reactive responses, or the tendency to fight or flee if our ego feels threatened. It calms the body and the mind and creates the foundation for a deeply peaceful life and more harmonious human relationships. It also connects us with our innermost soul, which is love, and this makes us feel joyful and eager to extend that universal love to all those around us.

Daily Practice
Beginning meditation is not difficult and requires no special techniques. The first step is simply commit to some time to be still. Begin with just five minutes each day. Turn off cell phones and other distractions and sit down somewhere quiet. Feel your breath moving in your belly and chest. Notice any thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations, but do not engage with the story. Instead, direct your mind to something that inspires the feeling of love for you. For some this might be a religious teacher or symbol. For the non-religious, it could be your spouse or beloved pet. However you initially connect to love is fine.

Train your attention completely on the energy of love and breathe into it with your whole being. Eventually, with deeper and deeper concentration on love, you will feel a merging into the energy of love itself so that you perceive no separation from it.

If you are in intimate relationship and would like to experience a connection together in Divine love, try an open eye meditation with your partner. Again, be sure to eliminate distractions and commit to a period of quiet time together. Sit in close proximity to one another and hold eye contact without talking. Take slow, mindful breaths for at least two minutes. See the essence of love within the eyes of your partner. This will create a profound feeling of togetherness and deeper intimacy.

Studies by Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education have shown that meditation increases positive emotions and decreases negative communications. As a result of seven weeks of loving kindness meditation, reports show participants felt heightened love, joy, contentment, gratitude, pride, hope, interest, amusement, and awe: all factors for relationship longevity. And it only stands to reason that people who are happier and experience positive emotions are more likely to form stronger, deeper bonds.

Devotion to Divine Love
To experience the full measure of Divine love, a total commitment to it is required. The same is true for meditation. Spiritual practices, both meditation and conscious loving, evolve with time and patience. Unfortunately, too many people throw in the towel because results are not always immediate. But this is just like the worldly, self-centered love that we stop offering because we are not getting it back in the way we wish.

The more we choose to focus on Divine love, the more profound our devotion becomes. And as we become saturated with loving devotion, both our meditations and our relationships deepen. Our consciousness blooms in empathy, compassion, understanding, and ever-deepening love and we no longer feel limited or motivated by personal agenda or feelings. Instead we feel the bliss of oneness and unconditional love.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018. All rights reserved.

I have been dreaming about a place that I have never been that feels so familiar. Often in these dreams I'm working on a farm, and sometimes I'm walking in town where I go to people's houses. I remember train tracks that lead to the barn and the stables. I know one of the horses that I ride. I take care of the animals. I have gone for walks in the woods and remember one time getting lost and wandering around a big lake for a long time. I'm usually wearing old-fashioned clothes, like long dresses and aprons. In waking life, I'm only 25 years old and have never worn such clothes. I've been dreaming about this place since I was a child, and I'm really confused. Sometimes I'm nervous in these dreams, and sometimes I feel completely at home and just go about my day. I'm wondering what this could mean. If these are dreams of a past life, why do I always hone in on this particular time and place as opposed to some other experience?

- Bridget

Dreamchaser:

You are definitely dreaming about a past life. You didn't mention whether these were day dreams, night dreams, or both, but it doesn't really matter, because the reason for them would be the same either way.

When you get stressed, you go to the place where your soul feels most comfortable, which happens to be in that life, where you are for the most part safe, alone and calm. You say you sometimes get nervous, but those nerves are emotions that you're bringing from this life into that one in order to try to deal with them.

When we sleep, our souls leave our bodies and go to where they most need to go to repair from today and prepare for tomorrow. When we have a childhood like the one you had this lifetime, our souls find various ways of coping.

One way you learned to cope was to mentally go to this past life when you were dreaming. This helps relieve your stress from this life, and gives you that feeling of contentment, familiarity, peace and security.

You actually do go to lots of other past lives in your mind and in your dreams - you just don't realize you're doing it. This past life we're talking about here just happens to be your favorite right now.

Though you may feel nervous or uneasy in some of these dreams, everything about that lifetime is familiar and comfortable. When you go to lives other than this one, you don't feel that same sense of familiarity, so you don't realize that they are actually past lives - you think they are random dreams or your imagination, or perhaps a memory of something you heard, read or saw at some point.

I think we all have a particular past life that we flash back to more than any other, and it is largely determined by what is going on this lifetime. I actually have two. In one I was a male Scottish or Irish war lord. I protected large areas of land, lived alone, and loved battle.

In the other, I was a Southern belle living during the time of the U.S. Civil War. I believe my experiences were pretty common for that time and place: The men went off to war, the slaves ran off, and the women were left alone to fend for themselves. Since we'd never had to do this before, it was pretty stressful!

Both lifetimes are so familiar to me that I can almost smell the smells and feel the materials of the objects in my dreams, whether they are day dreams or night dreams.

You need to realize that this sort of thing happens to EVERYONE. Sometimes you may even go through experiences that cause you to remember a whole bunch of past lives all at once. This is also totally normal.

I wish you peace with the past.

*****

Astrea:

There are two possible reasons you would be having recurring dreams about a place you've never been before. One is that you really HAVE been there in another life, and the other is that you are visiting a different dimension while you're asleep, and are actually living a separate life in that reality.

The past life dream explanation is the most probable. The reason you hone in on this particular place and time is because for the most part, you felt happy during that incarnation.

It's common for people to dream of the past life in which they were happiest. Since you can't return there during this incarnation, you revisit it when you're sleeping.

Dreams are powerful and can bring back many of the feelings we've had in past lives. The people I know who can focus in on the one incarnation when they were happiest tend to be pretty happy in this life too, for they remember what it was like to feel content. Also, if they were truly happy before, it means they've learned the life lessons required to be happy, so they don't have to do them over this time.

If you are experiencing a separate reality, it was most likely revealed to you at a time when you were most unhappy here. When we're troubled in this dimension, it's possible for us to visit a parallel life that we have a strong connection to while we're at complete rest.

I think the books by Carlos Castaneda might help you understand how you cross over to that other place while you're asleep. If this is what you're doing, these dreams seem so real and vivid because you really ARE there.

Psychotropic drugs are one of the quickest ways to explore separate realities, but I'm not recommending that path to you! Since you have such strong memories of these dreams, you wouldn't need drugs to get there anyway.

As unlikely as a separate reality may sound, I've known several people who have had loving families and very pleasant experiences in parallel lives. With time and patience, a person can even choose to transfer their consciousness from here to there.

This is really tricky, however, and is not something you should undertake on your own, for if problems arose, another person would be able to note your discomfort even if you were sleeping, and could draw you back from any danger.

Check around your area for a certified hypnotherapist who does past life regression. You want someone with the training and sensitivity to determine if you are visiting a separate reality or simply dreaming of a past life.

Either way, the knowledge you might gain from these experiences could be very valuable. I feel exploring this further could prove very meaningful to you.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.