Welcome to the August issue of my Blog...
www.TheUrbanShaman.blogspot.com

The theme for this month is:
Celestial Events... Heavens Light Show Non-Attachment

I hope you are enjoying these blogs... It is my pleasure to share this information to you all. This month we get to witness some heavenly sights... It's warm outside so pull up a chair, some tea or a glass of wine and enjoy the show... I have also included subject of Non Attachment for your reflection.

Please pass this information to your friends and family... Pass the Love around! Also, if you have any suggestions for future blogs... Use the “comments” button on the bottom of this months blog... or email me at: TheUrbanShaman@aol.com Life is not just a journey... make it an adventure!

ENJOY the rest of your summer!!!!...
Peace N' Blessings,
Gail Oliver

Celestial Events to Behold

Eclipse season kicks off in just a couple days.
August 28, 2007....

It is the time of the Pisces Full Moon, so the pressure for change and completion of old undermining patterns is already building. This brings to a head the need for healthy improvements in your life that you began to target last Fall.

All of North America will witness some portion of the eclipse, but western observers are favored. The early penumbral or umbral phases will be in progress at moonset for observers in Maritime Canada. From the eastern USA, the Great Lakes region and Ontario, the Moon sets in total eclipse. Only observers to the west of the Rockies (including Alaska) will be treated to the entire event.

The Aurigid Meteors

The Perseid meteor shower has come and gone, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any more good meteor displays to look forward to. In fact, another potentially good shower is just around the corner, scheduled to reach its peak during the early hours of Saturday, September 1st: the Aurigid meteors.

Aurigid outbursts are very infrequent, having been definitively seen on only three occasions: in 1935, 1986 and 1994. That moment (4:37 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time) favors the far-western parts of the United States, where the constellation Auriga will be about two-thirds up in the northeast sky around the time morning twilight begins. If you live in Portland, San Francisco or Los Angeles, you'll be in perfect position to view the meteors.

The Aurigids get their name from the constellation of Auriga, the Charioteer. The meteors appear to emanate from a spot in the sky near the bright yellowish star Capella in Auriga. The Aurigids, however, are rarely mentioned in most astronomy guidebooks because they are hardly worth mentioning in any given year. Then why bother about a shower that almost nobody has heard of and that's due this year just days after a bright full moon? Because in 2007, these unheralded Aurigids are this summer's wild card. Unlike the steady and reliable Perseids, little or no activity is usually seen from the Aurigids. Yet, every once in a great while a short-lived outburst of bright meteors has been reported from the Aurigid shower. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center has recently shown that these rare outbursts of Aurigid activity were caused by a comet which ejected a trail of dust that very occasionally wanders into the Earth's path.

Non-Attachment
Gail Oliver © 2005

Non-attachment is a tricky subject to say the least, and to understand it is a challenge. In my reading, I was always intrigued by the concept of Non-Attachment. It seemed an impossible theory to understand, let alone practice. The definition of Non-Attachment is not in any dictionary because the word does not really exist in English. Nirvana, a Sanskrit word, and one I’m sure you have at least heard has many spiritual definitions. The definition closest to non-attachment is: one free from suffering, death, rebirth and all worldly bonds.

The closest word in the dictionary is: “Detachment”
1. the action or process of detaching :
2. separation
3. indifference to worldly concerns : Aloofness b : freedom from bias or prejudice.

Based on this definition… I never thought this was something I would want to do. Why would I want to be aloof, or separate myself from people (I am an only child anyway). So what is non-attachment? Non-attachment is not grasping. Not clinging. Not Possessing.

Let me break it down...

By nature and by programming, we are taught at an early age to put importance on the things and people in our lives. A saying comes to mind; the one with the most toys wins. It is then no small wonder that by the time we reach adulthood, most of us define ourselves by the things we have and the people we associate with. When something threatens to take these people and things from us, we do anything in our power to hold on. These things take on a life of their own… ours. We are so desperate to hold on to what we perceive defines us as a person, we lose sight of who we really are. This is a reason for us to take a deep look at ourselves, and, how we relate to these things and people that surround us.

As we look at the people in our lives, our friends, our lovers, our children, we tend to keep these folks close. We are attached to them. We don’t want to lose them. We fear losing them as a miser fears losing his money. Because of this fear, our vision is clouded and, the sad thing is we never learn how to just “have” these people and things in our lives. We should enjoy their presence in our lives in the moment. We instead try to possess and control the people in our lives which never works in the long run. Remember this one? If a Butterfly lands in your hands, let it go…If it returns, it was meant to be. If it doesn’t, it was never yours. If you grab it, you kill it. There are some people that get so attached to the people in their lives they become deranged and desperate when they leave, unfortunately we see the reactions to this loss on the news form time to time. They remind me of the of the alternative ending of the above quote… If the Butterfly does not return, track it down and kill it.

It is when we put so much in and on our associations with people that we lose them and become lost ourselves.

“It’s not who you know, it’s what you know”. Over the years this saying has been reversed to say, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. In reality, it shouldn’t matter at all who, you know… if you know who “YOU” are. It is in this knowing of your power in believing in your true self that the principle of non-attachment is based. At the point in your life, when you acknowledge that you yourself are complete, and let go, that’s when anyone and anything will come into your life you desire. This is non-attachment.

On the flip side, our attachment and the need for things and people in our lives permanently, is a reflection of fear. We attach ourselves to many things every moment of our lives. We attach ourselves to our house, our car, our clothes, our jewelry, our jobs. All things we feel define us. We attach ourselves to people; our family, our lover, our friends and our children. Not realizing they are a gift to us, not a possession. We attach ourselves to routines, TV shows, places and feelings. We attach ourselves to everything we experience.

Attaching ourselves to a certain belief is dangerous too. I recently saw a movie that had a poignant example of attaching to a reaction of sudden loss. In the movie; a woman is suddenly abandoned by her husband. He seemingly just disappears off the face of the planet. But she, in her mind has it all figured out. He has run off with his secretary and left her to finish raising their four children… In her mind there could be no other explanation for his sudden disappearance She is ANGRY as hell to say the least. In her mind she feels betrayed and socially embarrassed, she spends months, years self-medicating her pain and nursing her new friend “anger”. She snaps at her children and is unsupportive to their dreams and berates their every idea. A man who is around trying to befriend her gets belittled at every turn. She becomes bitter and sarcastic, even going so far as to call the secretary in question and hangs up on her when she answers. Which is just one more validation for her anger. This goes on for the better part of the movie. Her children rebel and act out, as children often do. The man that has shown interest in her has had enough and walks away and refuses to acknowledge her calls and advances. She eventually calms down, mellows out and starts detaching from the anger she has fiercely attached herself to. She stops her self-destructive behavior. This process took 3 years for her to live out. As things calm back down, things return to a renewed semblance of normalcy. The truth is revealed. As it turns out, the decomposed body of a man is discovered in an old well shaft on the property where she and her children live. It is her husband. It turns out the reaction to her husband’s disappearance, was that of anger. She became hateful and closed, her life was fueled and consumed by the anger she attached her mind to believe for 3 years. She broke down realizing the time she wasted living in anger, alienating her family and friends, drinking and her self-destructive behavior, all behind what she thought she knew to be true. All this wasted life behind what turned out to be a tragic accident. Imagine, maybe this man was yelling for help for a few days, but because of the woman’s anger and drinking… no one heard his pleas for help. This movie is an excellent example of attachment and how it can ruin your life if you let it.

So how do we stop? It’s impossible to live a solitary life to stay safe from hurt or broken hearts. We all need to interact with others to have a healthy existence. Detaching from people is not the idea here. It’s by learning to love these people without clinging to them, without neediness, and without desperation. If we learn to cherish these people in our lives in the moment and not take their presence in our lives for granted, we can have them. If for some unforeseen reason, they go away or are taken away from us, we can look back fondly and be grateful for the time with them we were afforded. If we do not learn this, and people leave us for whatever reason, we can become distraught, and suffer great anxiety and pain.

When we put so much credence in people and things, we set ourselves up for pain, and our self-worth becomes contingent on symbols of “self”. This is dangerous because people and things (symbols) come and go in and out of our lives. When these symbols are lost to us we feel empty and react emotionally. We forget that we have ourselves. We a born alone… We die alone…And the rest of life’s precious gifts are in a constant state of movement. After all, I’ve never seen a U-Haul following a Hearst.

We tend to put too much energy and time into acquiring and maintaining these symbols. In Los Angeles, we are a car culture. Which has spawned a society of being judged by the kind of car people drive. I have a friend who was the epitome of this phenomenon. When I met him, he had a Range Rover. No property, no savings, but he looked good. His total worth was wrapped up in a thing. He had a second car, however not as cool, a fully restored 87 Jeep Cherokee Limited. One Friday, the Rover was not running and the parts were not available until Monday. I watched as this man became frustrated and became despondent. I innocently reminded him he had another car in the garage, I didn’t see any problem. He eventually calmed down and reconciled himself to use the “not-so-cool” car. I really was not getting this at all. As it turned out his whole identity and self worth was in this image of who he saw himself to be in “The Rover”. Fast-forward 6 years… The Rover blew up… Lost! During this time the man borrowed other people’s cars and rode the bus, no one really saw him socially until he emerged with his next identity, an $80,000 Porsche. I see him around town from time to time, but the funniest place I saw him was being parked at the laundry mat washing clothes. I guess owning a Maytag is not the same as driving a Porsche. I was tickled. By the way, the Jeep runs like a top, It just turned 198,000 miles and gets me wherever I need to be dependably, without all the fanfare and attention.

This is an example of how symbols are transitory in our lives and needing them to define who we are leaves us lost, fearful and empty when they are taken away. Because of this attachment to the thing, we have exchanged our self for and symbol of self. In the long run, chasing the symbols of self is like settling for a grape, when we could have the vineyard.

When we practice non-attachment, we have the power of wealth, happiness and the ability to create anything our hearts desire. That is because nothing and no one is responsible, or, is the reason for our joy, what we chose to create, or what we achieve. Non-attachment is trusting that your intentions and desires will be met without having attachment to any certain outcome. How free is that! When we detach from the outcome we in turn have the freedom to create whatever we want. Our problems are then solved in ways we can’t even imagine. When you focus on your intention and desire, then step back on let it go of (detach) your idea of a specific outcome, you will have an outcome that far exceeds your expectations.

Ultimately, this Universe can teach us that, through non-attachment, we cannot control anyone or anything other than ourselves. When we grasp at people they stay away. When we covet a thing, we are sure to lose it. People and things are on a transitory journey in and out of our lives at all times. The only constant is you. You are still you, with or without these things. They do not define who you are.

When you detach yourself from things and you are powerful and secure in your “self”, you can receive all the things you desire. They become icing on your already stand alone and perfectly baked cake. When you detach from people in you life for one reason or another, and are secure and powerful in your “self”, you will have them, or someone better in your life.
When we let it go… And let it be…
This is the only way we can truly have the very thing we desire.

Live the Let Go!!!