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Thursday, July 16, 2015

Be Determined to be Limited in Your Affinities By Katherine Carroll, Associate Editor, Health Freedom News


www.adytumsanctuary.com in Mossyrock, WA on the road to Mt. Rainier


Adytum Sanctuary (.com) is where I live and work. Having several other jobs as clinic administrator at our two optometry practices and working at the National Health Federation plus having familial obligations (okay…pleasures) means that time is really something to be managed carefully.

My first guest, five years ago this August 2015, said something during his stay that has stuck with me to this day. Phillip Folsom, owner of Fulcrum Adventures, told me, “Katherine, be determined to be limited in your affinities.” He was an ex-Marine running team-building high rope courses and stayed at Adytum Sanctuary as he taught skills to our local high school in 2010. He taught me a skill that serves me still.

So many things interest us. So many things tug at our time, energy, and passions. As I tugged at buttercups today, the spreading “weed” with adorable yellow flowers, I realized something. The buttercups, which sprout up everywhere in my Pacific Northwest garden like dandelions (we use no chemicals, herbicides, or pesticides here on this sacred land) were competing in this draught season for water with productive blueberries and must go. Sacrifices must be made during good times and bad if we are to find the fruit which we are clearly here to bear, being compared in Holy Scripture to a grapevine. Any of you who has a vine or a whole vineyard knows that branches bearing nothing are cut away to nurture those who actually bear. And bear they do. I have no idea what we will do with all these grapes coming this year….

But when there are limited resources to be spread around over several focal concerns our lives, we must be more careful than ever to be “limited in our affinities.” Phillip also gave me the wise observance, “Katherine, you tend to dilute your focus.”  How’s that for a first guest? He saw right through the “Gemini” in me. Yet he spoke the pure truth to me on all counts and I loved him for it; few would dare. And it’s stayed with me all these years.

So how to define our focus? For these buttercups invading the productive, life-giving, health-enhancing blueberry bushes I planted as a memorial to my sister Jacqueline Leeba’s death August 8th of 2014, they competed. They threatened to choke out the life I was wishing to nurture to recall our happy times picking blueberries together when my kids were small, Sarah Brightman’s Phantom of the Opera playing in the car on the drive home while we ate all we picked. The buttercups speak now that anything that competes with our focus must go, or be shelved until the proper time.
To every thing there is a purpose and a time for everything under heaven.- King Solomon

Had Jackie known she was to die in her 60th year after enduring five hellish years of traditional cancer treatment making doctors and drug companies rich and she more diminished in every way, would she really have hunkered down and kept her nose in her books to attain her doctorate in Depth Psychology? Only she can answer that question. But my personal benchmark is this: our lives are not our own. We are here to serve others. We are here also to make our God happy and fulfilled in our very being, living in close union and intimacy with Him as a lover, a best friend, a husband of the heart, and our Maker.

I recently saw a sign in the Home Gift Section of Nordstrom’s. “If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. The World needs more of that.” In my life, it’s not just people but animals and the Planet…and God whom become the focus of my “happiness spreading and service mission.”

It is important, at some point in your life, to ask what your destiny calling is. I asked in my 20s and a long “wilderness” period ensued while my gifts were being honed and even built upon like stepping stones. Don’t think that during this time, I felt unheard. In fact, during this time in my 40s I felt “put out to pasture” when all of what I had to give and bring to the World seemed absolutely invisible. But I put the question out there, “God, reveal to me my destiny and my purpose on this Earth.” It is always devastating to witness the lives of others who carry on with no knowledge of the need to ask this crucial, defining query. It will make or break time here. Make it meaningful and satisfying on a soul level or make it just a trivial pursuit of achieving, acquiring, and maintaining.

One vacation in Zihuatenajo, Mexico years ago in a lazy fishing village with nothing to do but read, swim, rest, think, and then write about it all yielded up a goldmine in a rather “channeled” article called The Matrix. You can find it here: http://katsmeditations.blogspot.com/search?q=matrix

This “Matrix” – it became the benchmark, the gold-standard by which the activities of my life would be measured. We need something, even if it changes as we change and grow or accomplish things in life, to guide our path so that if age 60- or God forbid before- deals us a death card, we can leave knowing we accomplished what we came to do.

As I recently shared with an Adytum Sanctuary guest who had the traumatic and stressful experience of escaping Iran last year, this Matrix blog article gave a glimmer of hope to a highly successful athlete and businessman, only 45 years of age, who had a very unexpected stroke. Mark lost his wife, his home, his children, and his job because even though his body worked just fine, he was suddenly reduced by brain damage in his words, to kindergarten level in speech and writing and processing speed.

     That first connecting email he sent, three sentences, took hours to write. Mark clung to the words penned in Zihuatenajo, “If each of those things (identities) were stripped away, I could still create a life of deep value and meaning by appreciating God and living in ways that brought pleasure to Him and consequently increasing unity with Him by living in those ways that make Him happy.” Our great accomplishment was publishing a book review Mark did, reading a book on stroke and commenting from a personal perspective. Later Mark went on to buy a home again, to get a job, and to get his children back. The “Matrix” was the defining strength, the “strong tower” in which he decided life could be lived again.

When we strip away the excess and competing things, like buttercups, starving out resources of time, energy, and passion which are indeed limited resources, we find our Matrix and our true calling and destiny. We find that we really need to be determined to be limited in our affinities so that we can live an intense life well.  “It is always later than you think.” This found on a garden wall and wise words to those of us awake and aware and caring to craft our lives with precision.

        We will leave a legacy that way and not just a lot of scattered, unfocused or wasted activity. This is how I wish to live my life: investing in the happiness and evolution of others –family, friends, and guests alike (and my own “self”), protecting the Planet, our food supply, and being in intimacy with my Father, my God.

         In an old, influential book called Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd Douglas, he states that the more we give, the more we expand. Lloyd notes inside of this novel that it is best to give and invest secretly not sharing it about to pad our ego, then it will come back to us in ways that enlarge and expand our personality. We keep ascending the mountain to attain “our highest and best” purpose on this Earth. I have seen this to be true in my own life and also in the principle taught in another old book, read in my youth, called Try Giving Yourself Away.

This outward focus, the path of service, and the life of a servant, has created a 5-star retreat Inn serving over 2000 people from all over the World from virgin forest land. It has created a happy life for me, albeit an extremely busy one, far more so than I’d ever thought possible to actually lead. Perhaps that is another story for another time for there is some inherent magic in this lifestyle – some supernatural strength given to accomplish 3-4 times what many others are.

But for now, as I weed out the buttercups choking the potential of the productive blueberries, I will weed out negative, contentious people, activities, and thoughts which dilute my focus and my potential. My own motto has been, “If it doesn’t flow, it goes.” But Phillip Folsom, you spoke a good word to me in August of 2010 when you noted my tendency to dilute my focus and demanded, “Be determined to be limited in your affinities.” Concentrate and focus 100% on our loves, our passion, our gifts and talents, and 100% too on what we can change and 0% on what we cannot. Then our lives will be distilled, like a fine essential oil both sensual and healing, into an essence which of great value to ourselves, mankind, the Planet, and our Creator.

Monday, April 13, 2015

The Ugly Frugality of Time by Katherine A. Carroll, NTP, Associate Editor, Health Freedom News

Frugality. We view this as such a virtue. But frugality with minutes, with time given, is such an ugly frugality indeed; a wasteland, a desert, an empty well promising much and delivering little. Like all hoarding, it is not rewarded.

Only when we open our purse and let money flow does more come. Stagnation via hoarding stops the supply.

Only when we give of ourselves by giving the time of our very lives, the stuff our life is measured by, is more given in more meaningful ways. Measuring life in the miserly frugality of time is to be destitute in the rich quality of all that time holds. For time freely given holds a depth and a return reward attainable to those who understand this.


The impact on those on the other side of the “exchange” of this frugality? Marginalization… Patronizing…not listening to what is being said but thinking of what is next either mentally in response or in the agenda; already seeking to get this time over with to move into that time. In the day of the iPhone head-tilt, where time is diluted and distracted by so much informational competition we can’t possibly take it all in in the stream of fast-flowing info-bytes, shared time becomes a scarce commodity as it’s given over to virtual-World time. Eye contact is more precious than we imagined. Thoughtful listening before the answer is formed a prize to attain to. Instead, ready to launch like a rocket upon command at the first pause or usually, interrupting, these mark communications and create a loss in communion.

Despite many talking about living in the now, “there is only this moment,” this is the essence of not living in the now but thinking future always. The practice of mindfulness teaches us this. Watch your thoughts for just a few minutes and you will see; many people are not inhabiting the present moment because we are already planning where we are heading next. And those on the other side of the divide of frugal-time-begrudgingly-given are actually being victimized at a profoundly core level and are much aware of the destructiveness of these types of miserly interactions. Whether distraction or patronizing and fulfilling a “duty” prevail in these communications that lack communion, there is a stringy quality, very thin and threadbare, that leave these interactions which should hold richness, meaning, and deep connection bereft, heartless, void or at minimum, a thin veneer over what could have been, should have been….those damned unspoken heart-longings and expectations unmet.

    To stand across the great divide of wanting more time and the same being doled out with the frugality of a rice-gruel in war time is to be aware of the value of time given. It is to be cherished if and when we find the exchange with our God, ourselves, and others. Of all the focus of our life, time holds the most value by far and the energy we bring to this time allotted whether to our God, our selves, or to others is the most nurturing and soul-satisfying.


     For some, time is the medium that equates most with love and true compassion, concern, caring, and interest. For some it is gifts. Gary Chapman’s 1995 book, The Five Love Languages, reveals the basic languages of love- of feeling loved- and for each of us it may be different in how we wish to receive love-energy and how we must learn to give it in the right “language” so the other can “hear” and “feel” it. Touch, acts of service, words of affirmation, receiving gifts, time….maybe we even relate to several of these when we feel loved. For me, it is time and words. Love me in any other way and it is wonderful but not transformational, magical, and supremely satisfying as quality time- not duration- and word-gifts are to me.


       To interpret love as “time” and to face a frugality of this highest need, to endure the diminishment of it in one’s expectations and then in one’s actual experience and more so compounded as time passes, is to live inside of a cave when a mansion is nearby and vacant. Soon we learn that humans will let us down and the only way we can really experience true love is from our Father, our God who is never lacking in any of the ways of showing love. In the final analysis, we are all alone with our Creator so the sooner this deeply loving relationship is embarked upon and nurtured, the better. That way we are not looking outside of ourselves for the basic needs of being human, but within.

It is really about faith and trust. I can't tell you how many very ancient people are still saying, "I don't have time to...." and usually it hinges back on needing to do tasks. Tasks and errands and the endless to do list make for a sparse life.

        Industry, Ben Franklin-style (who was a mentor of mine in my 20s) and the American work ethic (well, what is left of it before we became a welfare nation/nanny state) must be balanced with investments in our God, in others, and in ourselves or what is life for but to work hard so another can reap the fruit of all our labor (whilst neglecting everyone, even ourselves...) when we die. These things all take time.

             Frugality of time leads to not carving out a place in others' hearts. We live on there, you know, in many hearts hopefully.  A false time-thrift, while we take care of endless business or waste time in senseless activities, leads to oblivion and not being remembered. But most of all frugality of time means that everyone was shortchanged in the present and into the future when they reflect back on us when we are gone (even while we are yet living in many cases).

            We must have faith and trust that when we feel overwhelmed and pressed and burdened with too much for any one human to possibly do (and I have three jobs, and little help, so I know what I speak of) that our schedule will flow with a supernatural ease and that as we give time to people and concerns and causes outside the narrow scope of our lives that more time will come rushing back to us, or the maximizing of such time, to fill the void we have created. Emptying...always emptying and pouring out so that we might have more. Recognizing we have failed and desiring to change is the first step. Leaving this new demand and burden when we feel overwhelmed already at the feet of the Master is the next step. Then be ready to participate in a new Grand Adventure, rich with moments and memories.

This mastery of time, of time management and time invested, may take a lifetime like any virtue worth acquiring. As Michelangelo patiently and wisely said, “I am still learning.”

(c) 2015 Katherine A. Carroll, All Rights Reserved