Jan. 03, 10--I am posting the first new essay of the year on Fishpond Thoughts. Welcome back to my faithful readers and welcome to all of you new ones. Fishpond seems to be the favorite page, so why not feature more essays there? Indeed. I am going to be working on putting my essays into a book. As many of you know, this has been an ongoing task for me. I appreciate your taking the time to visit and enjoy my writing, which is always from the heart. You will find no intellectual analysis here, for that time has past. It is high time we simply are....and that is grace.

Love, Vicki
If you have the time to guide your friends to the site, please do. There is a lot of competition for spiritual sites and I can assure you that this one is worth a visit :). Thank you for your time, input and occasional donations.

You are bigger than the world...

You are bigger than the world...yes, you. We all have a sense of this when we come into the planet for our sojourn as such and such a personality. By the time we are in our teens, we have somehow come up with a pretty permanent character to play. And yet, for all the protection it seems to offer, we are constantly in conflict with ourselves.

The spiritual path opens up before us when we come to understand that this conflict can never be resolved by thinking about it. On the contrary, the more we think, the more we sink down into the morass of our egos.

When I began studying with Vernon Howard, he was living in Boulder City, Nevada. He chose it, I think, because it was isolated and in the desert. You really had to make an effort to arrive in his presence. I went for the first time, guided by a dream. I had been listening to one of his audio tapes and knew I needed to see him in person.

He was, in a word, formidable. He allowed no room for anyone to argue with him intellectually. His job was to back our personas into a corner and he did an excellent job. By the same token, his job was also to confirm what our intuition was saying about him. With me, this happened in dreams, in things that students would say to me, and by synchronicity.

He never lied. And it is worth all the effort a student makes to be in the presence of someone without guile. Someone who knows the ego is rotten to the core and bent on keeping its so-called owner in hell.

I am a lifelong student of truth and luckily for me, I always carry that with me, regardless of any ego shenanigans I might be up to. My husband was a student of truth as well. As some of you know, I have written many essays about our experiences as he bravely faced his death from multiple myeloma. Recently he came to me in a dream. It was wonderful and sad at the same time. That is how the path goes. It’s not about roses, roses, but about roses and thorns. Our egos are thorns that we must reckon with. Our true nature shines on.

Vicki Woodyard
http://www.bobwoodyard.com