Unpublished Work © 2012 Cristina Carlino 

TINY ACTION FOR BIG TRANSFORMATION

TO FLY HIGH – FIRST BE STILL

Greetings, Butterflies.  Thank you for joining me for this brand new week in our journey to gentle (but mighty) transformation.  “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, Climbing high into the sun.”  We may not be singing this with the same gusto as The old Air Force Song goes; rallying our fight as guardians of our nation’s freedom or even guardians of young children.  But still, we are each of us the guardians of our own spirit.  And we may have problems we are fighting with valiantly to resolve. We may be struggling to just find the solution.   What if our first solution is to stop looking for the solution?  And listen instead for stillness – for inner silence.

So my tiny action for big week is to practice being still. To not just do something – sit there!  And let the transformations begin.  Life is funny that way.   Even in the moments when it doesn’t feel “so funny.”

I  never  realized that to fly at all, l let alone to fly high,  would  require a total surrender to the fact that i have no control or power over my flight plan.   But then, came a day in August of 2009 when my life took a sharp turn and I was “called” to what was to  become not just a new life for me but a new way of being.  The first stop was stillness. I have written about what felt like my fall from grace in “Song of the Beautiful Beast, an interactive journal  available to you all on the ipad app and at the website www.beautifulbeast.com.  My life of perpetual motion came to a total stop.  Stillness was what was and what always does order, create and reorder life.   I was being transformed to my core.   Know it or not.   Like it or not.  And I didn’t so much at first.  There was nothing funny about it.  Now some stillness is a sacred practice and part of my days.  It brings peace.   It brings joy and laughter.  It is the fuel that lifts my spirit on radiant wings and puts my choices and decision on emotional terra firma.

I love these words of Eckhart Tolle, “When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.  When you lose touch with yourself, you lose touch with the world.”

So what are some ways to actually  stay in touch, connected as we practice stillness this week?  How do we “ get there”  without having to travel to a remote mountain top?

Here’s a few routes  I appreciate:

Sit still

Walk  in nature

Listen to the birds

Listen intently to another

Hold a child’s hand

Close your eyes

Close your computer (if only for a minute)

Say a simple prayer

Then sing another

Rinse, Wash, Repeat!

Some  deeply mystical forces are always at play in our lives when we slow down long enough to allow them to be heard.    Eventually, we may come to recognize that what the mystical is in fact the very real.

I’d love to hear your experiences.

With grace and gratitude,

Cristina