I used to believe in black and white.

Right and wrong.

True and false.

Then I opened to my spirituality, and discovered metaphysics (the world beyond the physical.) And I realized appearances are deceiving. All that I thought was true and solid in my world suddenly wasn’t.

And the most frustrating of revelations – that the greatest truths are paradoxical. Two opposing principles are true at once! How disturbing is that to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get person?

Here are some things I am learning:

• You’re Never as Conscious as You Think You Are, and You’re Always More Conscious than You Realize – No matter how far I climb, there are always more levels of consciousness to experience. And at the same time, there is always more available to me within my own consciousness than I realize, such as information about prior lifetimes, realizations about beliefs, patterns, attitudes, and choices that I can discover and use to change my reality with – if I only access them.

• In Order to Get Something You Have to Let Go of Something – a difficult but real truth. We are conditioned to try to control what we cherish – to hold onto what we love at all costs. Yet to allow the magic in our lives, we need to be willing to let go of everything we currently have. We need to see our reality with fresh eyes unencumbered by the past and to let go of our fear, judgments, blame, and sometimes people and things, in order to draw to us what we desire.

• You Create Your Entire Reality and Everyone Else Creates Their Entire Reality – “How can this be so?” I wondered for a long time. Yet it is. What’s more, we have created a world where we allow others to impact us, and we have the power to impact others. Love matters.

• What You Fear the Most is the Key to Your Greatest Freedom – Years and years are spent in the average lifetime avoiding what is most feared. We erect elaborate interior barriers to control and protect us from what we dread. And yet, once we have the courage to stare our fears in the face, they give us the information we need to heal, to change, to grow, and to become free from the very fears that bound us. Freedom to finally create the lives we’ve longed for.

• There’s No Free Lunch but the Price Isn’t What I Thought it Was – I used to think you had to “pay your dues” and struggle a predetermined amount of time and then, if you were lucky, you got to have the life you wanted. Well, I was right about getting to have the life you want, but not so right about the dues. Actually the real price is more difficult to pay at times. What’s required is giving up self-pity, victimhood, martyrdom, blame, judgment, denial, and letting in how much we really are loved.

• You Need to Be Fully Present and Yet Ignore What “Is” to Attract What “Isn’t” – What a crazy rule, when you look at it objectively. How can you be fully aware while in a life where you have what you don’t want and still focus on what you do? It’s not easy, but it works.

• You Need to Take Full Responsibility for Creating Your Life While Staying Open to Miracles, Guidance and Assistance from Beyond – Once we really get this creating thing down, we realize we don’t have to do it alone. In fact, once we feel powerful enough that we can do it alone we realize we can’t. We need the love and grace and healing of a higher power to assist us at a certain level of growth. What’s more is, we want it. It’s even more fun, more incredible and more empowering than we could even imagine.

So, as long as we don’t expect black and white, and are comfortable in that gray place in-between (that is both black and white), we’ll be just fine.

In joyous creation,