I have a Mascot that captured ME when I was in Africa.  A Baboon that rides shotgun when I am on the road.  And  my little Crossover Nissan is called a Rogue and, staying with the Africa theme, a Rogue elephant is separate from the herd and that is how I feel since leaving Tulsa one month ago.  But in reality, that was really my point for this next year:  Steering my life solo, apart from all the contexts and containers I usually find myself in and opening up to the unexpected.

When we stop aligning with the things that are outside ourselves (job identities, relationships, obligations, even living in certain countries) we are left with the raw material of who we innately are to work with.  No distractions contributing to how all of us forget our own center, our own alignment with the source of who we are.  I am interested and compelled by this intentional stripping away of the distractions.

Once life is pared down to the common  and simple denominators of the sun rising and setting, all the distractions that compose our usual day drop away and what is left is …. space.  And what I am finding is when I make space in my life it is never empty space.  Some law of nature always fills it in with something.  The trick is to ALLOW the space to fill in and not do the habit of filling it in because you should.  This allowing is what I am learning.

But, there is an ingredient in allowing life to unfold that is essential.  How you allow!  How you FEEL when you allow.  If you create a stance of allowing the amazing and vast universe around you to inform those spaces it does so by bringing into the space energy that matches the energy in you.  So, If I am afraid and fearful of my next steps, then the space will fill up with something that I might be afraid of.  If I am full of the joyous self I am, full of expectation and awe of the world around me, then without missing a step, the space fills with more joy and more awe.  It never fails. This is the Law of Attraction.

And I had a wonderful example of that this week.  It went something like this:

I was driving listening to an Abraham Hicks CD for the first time in my life.  I laughed and cried and was delighted.

Then the next day my friend called and said “come to San Diego to Louise Hay’s birthday and meet all the authors you love.  Esther Hicks will be there…you know the wonderful woman who has channeled Abraham for the past 25 years.”

Then I thought, ” Oh I should go to a workshop Esther gives, I wonder if she will be in any city in the future that I might be going through?”, so I looked online and found that three days later she was in Asheville at the Biltmore Estates where my daughter works…hmmmmmmm”.

I signed up and three days later was at the only two day workshop Esther gives. There were 3 spots left.

I went.  My DNA was nothing less that re-programmed.  I met two people who will certainly be long term friends.  And I met a person who is a Kindred Spirit, which is a rare gift. I have not stopped smiling.

All because I made a little room to ALLOW for my life to unfold and shower me with unexpected joy.  What a relief from the doer in me always striving to do the right thing, or juggle way too much and feel obligated before simply asking myself  “does this make me happy?  Well if not, then why am I doing it?”

So, I am off on a new adventure to Boston and then across the continent to San Diego to meet authors that will give me the next piece of my  journey toward fulfilling my dreams as a writer.  What will happen?  I have no idea.  That is the pure fun of The Gypsy Life.  The not knowing and allowing becomes a powerful force for navigating my life toward who I have been all along.

This says it all!

As I begin to understand what it truly means by living in the “Flow“, a word the new age has thrown around for sometime, and a concept that challenges most of our lives, I am finding the journey to be inspiring, and liberating.  But, most of all challenging.

I have a hefty Doing Consciousness,  so the idea of “Allowing” means that I need to re-weave my thinking and the way I live my life.

When I wake in the morning and ask the day “what do you want of me today” or ask my highest self, “what would bring me joy today?”, I am excited to hear the answer, yet challenged to not first orient to the always undone “To Do List”.  It is all too familiar to convince myself that I have to first earn the right to a joyful day by slogging through that unsavory list ….First.

So, The Gypsy Life has at its center, my practicing “allowing”, not doing.  And the minute I understood this in a deeper way I received the following message in my inbox this morning.  And now I simply feel gratitude for this amazing journey.

“Most rarely align with their true power, because it seems illogical to them that there is power in relaxation, in letting go, or in love or joy or bliss. Most people do not understand that their true power lies in releasing resistance—which is the only obstacle to their true power.

Most people do not expect their path to great abundance to be one of ease and of joy. They have been taught that struggle and hardship and sacrifice are requirements that must be met before the reward of great abundance can be realized. Most do not understand that the very struggle they deliberately involve themselves in, in their quest for success and advantage, actually works against them.

There are so many things that you have been taught to believe that are counter to the powerful Laws of the Universe that it is difficult for you to think your way out. And that is the reason that we present this path of much less resistance.

We want you to breathe rather than try, to relax rather than offer effort, to smile rather than struggle, to be rather than do. For your true power is experienced only from inside the Vortex.”

— Abraham

Excerpted from the Getting into the Vortex Guided Meditation 

Our Love,
Jerry and Esther

The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy.
Rabindranath Tagore

I have been listening to a woman by the name of Esther Hicks who has been channeling since the 1970’s.  She channels a group of spiritual entities that call themselves Abraham.  The Abraham teaching is recognized world-wide.  I have been channeling since the 90’s and appreciate the elegance and the wisdom I hear when listening to Abraham. Pure and simple lessons that all have to do with living a life of love.

A central aspect to the Abraham teachings is the concept of recognizing whether our life, like a boat, is pointed upstream, constantly pushing against the current of perceived obstacles in a river that naturally flows down stream to the source or whether we have our boat pointed downstream and allowing for the stream that exists with out without our boat, to carry us naturally to our source. The source of all happiness and fulfillment.   An ancient concept that has deep spiritual and personal relevance which I appreciate, as I have pointed my boat onto open water.

In a great book “The Art of Navigation” the author shares a thirty year journey of navigating his Life-boat through the power of intuition and not through mindful, strategic thinking.  Looking and listening for signs, for coincidence and following a “gut” sense of what feels right is a compass for living that most of us do not easily use.  Instead, we have a habit of believing the illusion that we are in Control of our lives, or that perfect planning and execution is the only way to achieve our goals in life.  The idea that if we desire and then feel the joy of that desire, feel the feelings that come when visualizing that desire as reality, is not an easy idea for most of us. We tend to focus on those perceptions that we attach to like not enough money, not enough time, not fit enough or free enough of deserving enough.

I committed to myself to practice living in The Flow this year in a deeper way than I have committed to in the past.  Part of that commitment means that I act on my intuition and my inspiration… immediately.   This blog, The Gypsy Life is the outgrowth of acting on my inspiration and following my intuition to publish something that felt very important to do even though Blogs are an act of faith really.  You don’t know if anyone will be interested, you don’t know who is out their reading your entries and you certainly do not know if it will catch on in time.  You simply faithfully write.

My blog has been up for a few days and I have had many responses, subscribers and I have felt compelled to write every day and have been surprised by what I have been writing much of the time. The flame of inspiration began burning bright.  The blog has generated interest and a lot of energy in only a few days.  Then the phone rang and an author friend of mine from Boston was calling to encourage me to rethink my blog.  She asked if I felt that the content was something I wanted to publish and her question validated a feeling and intuition that I had been having all day. Namely, that my blog was needing to be a book not simply a blog.  I sat with this idea for a while and feel that the blog inspired a larger writing project for me.

So I have acted on this instinct and removed a few of my pages that I will not include in the future.  I will continue to write on this personal nomadic year, include profiles of those I meet along the way that are embracing some of the same intentions and explore the realities of building a movable dwelling.  The blog will continue to be a place to discuss the Gypsy Life, but in a pared down form.

I have felt right and good about this decision.  Acted on it.  Felt peaceful and calm.  And then the phone rang again.  I was extended an invitation to come and meet with the authors of Hay House and celebrate the birthday of Louise Hay in San Diego. This offer is an example of what happens when we align with the flow of our own intuition and inspiration and in that inner alignment we align with the source of all manifestation.  All of a sudden things start to happen to push your boat easily down the river you wanted to go down all along.  Universal validation some would say.

So as any of us lighten our lives, reduce our commitments of energy to belongings, to activities that are not heart-felt, and make room for our own creativity and imagination to inform our lives, the Universe, Spirit, the Source of all our happiness and fulfillment simply become the perfect wind in our sails and everything begins to create the dream we have in our hearts.

As I lingered with the invitation to go to San Diego to meet Louise Hay (founder of Hay House, the single largest publisher of self help books in the world) and have an opportunity to talk with icons in my life, like Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Suzie Orman and Carolyn Myss, I smiled with gratitude as my friend mentioned that Esther Hicks from the Abraham teachings would most likely be there too.  Then I simply laughed at how perfect it all felt.

That night I thought, “Go online and see where Esther Hicks is speaking over the next months”.  I had wanted to go to a one day workshop of hers that she had in every major city in the US.  I thought maybe in my travels she just might be coming to a city I might by “chance” be in.  By chance I said.  So, I saw that she was doing a one day workshop in NYC, LA, Dallas and then Asheville NC.  All her workshops were a day long.  The one in Asheville is two days, at the Biltmore Estates in the building my daughter works in and is….next week.  Just days before I am to go to San Diego.

All of this story is leading to one conclusion that I wanted to share with you on this nomadic journey of mine.  Namely, if I follow the flow of my own spirit, the inclinations and intuitions and gut sense of what is right for me as an individual, then life if not only so much simpler, so much more stress free, but life is amazing.  I just have to get out of the way and say yes. Then watch what happens and paddle.

We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone … and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

– Sandra Day O’Connor

The outpouring of support and excitement about this tiny blog is wondrous.  So many people have sent it onto friends, family and clients, mailing lists and posted on their websites and in their newsletters.  This is what community is.  The whole working for each individual and the support of that which affects the whole.  Thank you for everyone’s support and loving emails.

This moment of launching a blog into cyberspace is the first step of truly experiencing one of the core values of the Gypsy: Community, family, honor, connection.  We have lost so much of the essential nature of being human the minute someone or some group decided that a core value of being an American was to create the Nuclear Family, put up fences between groups, between houses and unshared pools, and backyard BBQ’s.  Now we drive down any suburban street at 2 am and see individual blue light coming from every house. A lonely sight.

We as humans are Pack Animals.  Designed to live and thrive in connection to one another. Most of the world still lives and values living in Community. Extended families all over the world live together under on roof, hut, RV, urban community or Sampan.  Our big homes take so much time and effort to pay for, to fill up and to live in that we often don’t even know the people that live next door.

So, as I explore the Gypsy life, at the center of my interest is in re-discovering the way in which living in community can be on or off the road.  RV parks are community and some live there year round.  Hell’s Angels are a kind of community that stick together like glue, some churches are community, Circus People,  Elder Hostel people who meet come together and fashion long enduring friendships and travel together.

There are a hundred transmutations of living in the pack. The glue is common desire, common goal, common belief.  In the animal world in most cases you cut one member out of the pack, the hive, the flock, the pod and they usually die early and are a target for predators.  We need each other much more than we realize. Our physical health depends on the interaction between ourselves and others.  The smiles and hugs and kisses we share abundantly change our vibrational frequency, strengthen the heart and keep us inspired.

I will be exploring these themes as I travel.  Finding out how community broke down in the first place, how others are reestablishing those commitments to communal living, to mobile living and especially those who have adopted even more of The Gypsy Life.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. 
William James