"There is no greater prosperity than being who we are."

"Prosperity is a feeling of being richly in the flow of life, able to participate as fully as we choose in every moment. It is about feeling joyful, loving, grateful,happy, appreciative, at peace, contented, healthy, wealthy, radiant and excited about who we are, what we have in our lives, and what we are creating. When we feel prosperous, everything flows: money, love, success, opportunity, health, support, work, fun, good relationships. When we feel prosperous, we feel capable of tackling what is in front of us. We take prosperous actions. We feel connected to other people. We engage with life, we think well of ourselves and others, we jump into things with gusto. Prosperity is about feeling connected to our true purpose and to an abundant, benevolent universe. When we set intentions to fully utilize our gifts and talents in service to the world, the universe brings us extraordinary opportunities to shine. There is no greater prosperity than being who we are." Christiane Schull



@copyright, 2006 Christiane Schull, excerpt from 'What You Speak Is Seeking You' (available at select bookstores - please visit www.christianeschull.com).

As You Go To The Next Level of Success....

As each of us goes to the next level of our success in the world, we are invited to activate even greater gratitude, love, appreciation, fearlessness, and actions that demonstrate our abundance. Almost always, the next level demands the clearing out of the old--old patterns, old relationships, old outmoded habits, old ways of being and often an experience of living in the void between creations. The old is barely gone and the new has yet to completely show up. We are living a little betwixt and between forced to cultivate deeper reserves of trust and faith and put our gratitude for the abundance we currently have into action. It helps to steep ourselves in the works of leading prosperity writers and teachers . One of my favorites is Catherine Ponder, former Unity minister and author of The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, among many, many other books.

In the following prayer, Ponder writes about 'God' or 'Lord'- and as I see it, and often share with people in The Prosperity Circle, 'Lord' or 'God', for me, is a Creative Force of Intelligence, Energy, Infinite Light and Love, animating all things, animating us, the Substance of things seen and unseen, the Power inside of all Creation. 'God' - that Creative Force of Infinite Love and Light - is in us and at our disposal. We are a Creative Force of Infinite Light and Love - when we remember and act upon the highest within us. Many people - because of their experience with organized religion and because of the great persecution they have experienced or witnessed at the hands of organized religion, have a pejorative relationship to the concept of God. In that case, I would suggest you replace the word 'Lord' or 'God' with the name of any deity you choose. Call it 'higher power', 'Source','Divine', 'higher self'....anything that allows you to access a power larger than yourself.

In Catherine Ponder's words:

"WHEN I FIND MYSELF IN A FINANCIAL WILDERNESS, IT IS BECAUSE I AM PREPARING FOR A GREATER ABUNDANCE THAN I HAVE EVER KNOWN BEFORE.

MY WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE IS MY DIVINE INITIATION INTO THE HIGHER LEVELS OF SUPPLY.

I AM BEING FREED FROM ALL FEAR OF LACK. AS I LOOK TO GOD FOR GUIDANCE AND SUPPLY, I AM BECOMING FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT ON A DAILY BASIS.

"I CAN BEGIN TO GATHER MY MANNA BY DOING SOMETHING FEARLESS. THE ACT OF BLESSING WHAT IS ON HAND INCREASES IT MIGHTILY. SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS HAPPENS WHEN I BLESS THE SUBSTANCE AT HAND. INSTEAD OF ENVYING ANOTHER'S PROSPERITY, I OPEN THE WAY FOR INCREASED SUPPLY TO COME TO ME.

"SINCE WORDS ARE CREATIVE, I CAN GATHER MY MANNA THROUGH SPEAKING FORTH DEFINITE, RICH WORDS OF SUPPLY..... MY MANNA IS ALWAYS SOMETHING CLOSE AT HAND, AND I ALWAYS HAVE IN MY IMMEDIATE MIDST WHATEVER IS NEEDED TO BEGIN GATHERING MY MANNA. AS I BLESS THE MANNA CLOSE AT HAND AND FEARLESSLY USE IT, IT MULTIPLIES. LORD, I DO GIVE THANKS FOR THE ABUNDANCE THAT IS MINE NOW!" Catherine Ponder

Gratitude: The Highest Expression of Truth

Gratitude is the highest expression of truth--the truth that we have all we seek, that everything in our lives is in Divine order. It is not easy to see sometimes. We have plans and expectations and desires and when life defies us, when things do not go our way, it is easy to descend into complaint and criticism and judgment. It is so easy to curse the darkness, to feel that life has forsaken us, that God, the universe has abandoned us, that nothing is working. When the truth is, everything is working according to a plan that is larger than our small pictures of who we are and how our life should be. When we choose gratitude, we get to really see and experience what we have. It is as if the clouds part in the sky and the sun comes and we see the beauty of what we have, where we are, and why things are the way things are. Gratitude also lifts us into a different frequency and draws to us the most beautiful people, events and experiences, and brings us to ourselves and our own lives in a new way. New perspectives pop up on the screen of our awareness because of our willingness to have gratitude. Gratitude transforms the impossible, the frustrating, and the tragic into the beautiful, the bountiful and the benevolent. Gratitude is the greatest creative use of our Divine creative energy. It is what brings peace and abundance again and again.

One of my greatest teachers in gratitude was a young man I met when I was writing an ad campaign years ago for The United Way. He had volunteered to be interviewed by me and as I crossed the floor of the big gymnasium to his wheelchair, I was struck by his warm smile and the dazzling Light in his eyes. I was nervous about interviewing him. He had a disease that contorted his face and limbs and I wasn't sure what to say or what to ask him. I felt my own fears and limitations rising in me.

As I sat down in front of him, he completely disarmed me with his joy. He seemed to sense my fear and he put me completely at ease by asking me how I was and if my day was going well. I was instantly enchanted by him. I fumbled a little with my questions and then just blurted out: What do you wish for? A girlfriend, he said. A girlfriend? Is that all? It was such an ordinary desire that it took me by surprise. You want a girlfriend?

Yeah, he said, I want a girlfriend. I have everything else.

I stared at him uncomprehendingly. How could he say he had everything else. He was so obviously challenged in my eyes by a terrible disease. But that was my perceptual challenge, my disability!

He told me he was lucky to have his condition because it forced him to appreciate the little things - like being able to flutter his eyelashes and open his eyes and see the beautiful world. He told me lots of people have everything but they didn't know it. He had everything and he knew it.

I sat there silently, almost crying. I didn't have a thimble-full of his trust or faith or gratitude or delight. His gratitude was so breathtakingly profound, so humbling that it made him absolutely irresistible. I could have spent the entire day just being in his presence, in his sweet powerful presence.

That's the truth about gratitude - it makes us absolutely irresistible - because it is a healing force of such magnitude. It heals the lie that we are lacking anything. It shifts our sight, elevates how we feel, opens our eyes to the abundance we have. It shows us how we have been blind to our own abundance and to all the opportunities to create anew.

Your Name is a Temple

At 4 am this morning, I woke to the sound of a name, a name being sounded through me, the name of a man I know, the name of a man who has been suffering and who I have been praying for. His name rang in me, the deep burnished sound reverberating as if in the ancient cathedral of my soul. I found myself speaking his name - singing his name three times. Then I saw a scene as crisp as morning -- sunshine, mountains, a sacred place in a foreign land. I swear I could almost smell the sweet morning air.

Then these words poured out from me:

"Your Name is a Bell that Rings through all Time the Essence of You. Let the Sound of Your Name Heal You. Your Name is a Temple. It Houses the Truth of You. Light, Eternal. Love, Eternal. Infinite Beauty. Infinite Strength.

You Have Forgotten.

Your Name is a Bell that Rings through all Time the Essence of You. The essence of Eternal Light.

Do not forget."

Each of us has a name that houses our truth, the truth of our Light and our Love, the truth of our beauty and our strength, the truth of who we really are.

Sound your name three times. Let your name be your prayer. Let it ring through all time the essence of you.

Drop Your Pictures: It is your pictures that are causing you pain.

'Drop your pictures. It's your pictures that are causing you pain.' I heard that many years ago from a friend. It was simple unadorned wisdom. She didn't indulge my story or my pain any longer than she had to. In one instant she silenced me. What I realize in looking back is that my friend had really good boundaries. She knew where she began and where she ended. She knew not to take on what was not hers. She knew that letting me go on and on wouldn't do her or me any good. And she knew it was a lie. The whole rant about my life would perpetuate a state that would not get me anywhere. She knew it - even if I didn't.

I had an opportunity to do the same thing for someone today. To stop the rant of fear and victimhood and I took it. I listened as long as I could to a friend's painful outpouring of sorrow and to what could of been and should of been. And then I said it: Drop your pictures. It's your pictures that are causing you pain.

Instead of the resistance I expected, he looked at me with something approaching relief. It had never occurred to him -- like it had never occurred to me all those years ago - that what was causing him pain was how he looked at things and the assumptions and judgments he made as a result. He was focused on all the things he wasn't rather than all the things he is - all the beautiful, capable, powerful, original, sensitive, gifted things he is. And where did that habit come from? From a father who could never appreciate him and always, he felt, cut him down. But now, at 45, he was having the opportunity to not do that any longer. He was seeing he could drop his father's pictures of him. To tell his father's pictures goodbye. The amazing thing was that when he did, he felt more love and forgiveness and tenderness towards his father than ever before. Dropping the pictures liberated the love.

I was making my bed this morning when an old picture drifted into view. It made me laugh that it was still kicking around in my consciousness looking for any opportunity to deliver its delicious judgment. When I was 12 or 13 and visiting my aunt, she came in to my room and saw me making the bed. She huffed with disdain and said that I would never get married because I did not know how to make a bed with perfect 'hospital corners' - sheets folded so precisely they looked like paper origami. I never forgot it. In fact, I would draw on that and many other pictures when assessing my life and deciding it didn't measure up. 'Well! ' I'd say, 'If you knew how to make hospital corners...then your life would be....'

My aunt was innocent and plagued by her own pictures of her own imperfections-- and my taking it on was innocent. But around the time my friend told me to drop my pictures - I began to sort and sort and throw away the pictures that no longer fit me, that no longer were me. They were somebody else's pictures. Or they were mine from a long time ago and they didn't resonate anymore - like from high school. Dropping the pictures liberated me to see myself, probably for the first time. I wasn't this mish-mash of somebody else's pictures. I was an original being - like we all are - answering the call of my own soul and carving a path that was uniquely my own. Did I know where it was leading? Would it have the common markers I was told to look for? Maybe not. But that was okay.

"You Are On The Right Path"

In my book, What You Speak Is Seeking You, a book on prosperity consciousness, I write about a woman I met who worked as a receptionist for a temp agency. It was on a day when I had felt incredibly down about finding work and I prayed and wrote in my journal that morning, 'God, please show me I am on the right path.' When I arrived at the temp agency, the receptionist acted like she knew me and put me in front of a manual typewriter without a ribbon in it. It struck me as very strange but the woman acted like it was completely normal so I said nothing. I put a piece of paper in the typewriter and started to type. The click-clack-clack of the keys sounded - like my life felt at that point - entirely futile. I was practically in tears when the woman returned and leaned her head inside the door. 'Stop typing. They' - and she gestured to the heavens - ' want me to tell you something." I looked at her in stunned disbelief.

"You are on the right path," she said, then walked back to the front desk.

I sat there for a moment speechless before leaping off my chair and asking her who 'they' was and why she had said that to me. She smiled knowingly and said "I just heard it."

We met at a little diner for lunch a few weeks later. She told me she had had a heart attack a number of years before and had ended up at Cedar Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. She said she had 'died' and as the doctors and nurses were working on her to bring her back to life, her spirit rose up above her body, hovering and moving about the room. She says that as she 'came back' and was moved to intensive care, three angels appeared at the foot of her bed. The angels showered her with so much love. She was mesmerized by their Light and their Love. No love, she said, in the human world is like this love. All three angels had one large wing - not the two wings as is often depicted in illustrations, but one wing. One of the angels had a big book open in front of him. She says the angel read from the book and as he read, her entire life came to her in fast-moving moments, like little cinematic flashes, one after the other after the other. She said that the angel - not a he or a she but more androgynous - told her she had had a good life and that she had done well but that she had done something all humans do. She had worried too much. The angel with the book told her that it wasn't her time to go -- and that she would have to come back. She resisted this news she said. She told him she wanted to go - that she had never felt so loved or so ready to leave the planet. The angel with the book told her, 'You are going back and your job is to tell everyone you meet - Don't Worry. You must teach them this. It accomplishes nothing. It is man's greatest sin.

She paused and I waited. I was sure there was more. Books more. Was that all he told her, I asked. She smiled. Her smile conveyed volumes to me. She had asked them the same question. They had given her the same smile. And the smile delivered the same message: Trust.

I asked her how she had known to tell me 'You are on the right path'. She said that ever since her near-death experience she had become far more sensitive and psychic, more open to the other realms. She said, she heard a voice -- like a telepathic transmission - instruct her to speak those words in exactly that precise way.

Still, one thing about her meeting perplexed me. I didn't think to ask her at the time but I had wished I had. I didn't understand why the angels had called 'worry' man's greatest sin.

A few months ago, a new teacher of mine told me that the word 'sin' was an archery term for 'missing the mark'. Missing the mark was the definition of sin!! You mean that was all a 'sin' was -- just being off target! All those years of my Catholic upbringing and visions of a million lashes for sins real and imagined dissolved in a holy instant! I wanted to laugh! Whoo-hoo....I really could stop worrying!!

Worry did miss the mark -- always, 100% of the time! Worry was a distraction, a distraction of the ego -- an energetic force that kept you from hitting the target, that led you into procrastination, self-judgment and a wasting of your energy, your vital creative energy. Rather than focusing it in worthwhile and supportive ways, you drained it into inaction, fear, competition, separation, and distraction by worrying. Wow. Wow. Wow. So if worry was missing the mark, then having certainty, trust, peace, and joy, believing in a meaningful universe, in the support and oneness of all things, and in Divine timing was hitting the mark!

Just like receiving information from my teacher at a perfect time when I could hear it was a gift, meeting that woman on that day when I had prayed and prayed to be shown I was on the right path was a gift. It was a gift I have never forgotten - a gift that set me on a path of renewing my belief in the truth that we are guided and never alone, that everything has purpose, everything happens for a reason, everything is a sign, everything in the universe loves us, and is waiting to deliver us a message if only we would ask. As I have been told, you must ask - and sometimes with deep passionate welling up cries from the soul in your car driving down the road - for support from the heavens for angels to intervene. And even when things look bleak, hopeless - even when you are placed in front of a typewriter without a ribbon and told to 'type'and feel like a hopeless fool, there is a beautiful reason for it. Nothing is ever futile. Nothing. Not even worry. Because like the woman I met, sometimes worry is divine - inspiring the opening, the chance to exchange worry for trust in the most incredible of ways. And when you take that chance, you could say quite honestly, it is worry that got you to trust. Nothing futile, child, nothing futile ever.

After The Year of Radical Letting Go, Hurry Up and Be Yourself in 2008

In numerology, 2007 (2+7=9) was a '9' year - a year of completion and release and letting go of old patterns, self-concepts, belief systems, habits, relationships, or anything that was inauthentic , or kept us untrue to ourselves. 2008, by contrast, is a '1' year (2+8=10=1+0=1) and it signifies 'new beginnings and fresh starts'.

I can feel the newly birthed energies of 2008 swirling upward and outward in fresh new formations and a new perk of excitement in the air. Fresh and new are the themes for 2008. Hallelujah... not a moment too soon.

2007 tore through my life like a tornado and swept up to the surface and out the door anything that wasn't absolutely, positively in alignment with my path. There was a force at work that was on a mission for truth and it wasn't stopping until it had cleared the decks. Every old pattern that bore an 'expired' label was being rushed up and out. That included relationships.

Looking back, I can see that it was the year of the grand sweep -- grand preparation for the year to come. The grand sweep was difficult at times and painful but I have gratitude, gratitude, gratitude for it all. It was necessary. It was time. My soul was calling for it all, of that I am sure. The grand sweep brought me face to face with personal truths and dips into old wounds I thought were healed, sudden endings, defeats, detours, opportunities that were really 'emperors with no clothes', egoic blunders (yes, of course, it's ego blunders. But egoic sounds like I've been lanced by my own excess which is kind of how it feels), and repeated experiences designed to burn out of me old patterns of responding to life with disappointment and frustration. The relationships I thought would survive, left. The relationships I thought would leave, stayed. In the midst of all this radical letting go came the gift of liberated energy and liberated opportunities. Partnerships that left were replaced with new ones. Opportunities began to pop like popcorn, new possibilities were blooming all over the place. And what began to grow in me was more trust. Trust in God and the universe. Trust in myself. Trust in my own instincts and intuitions. Trust in the ability to listen to myself and glean my own answers.

I would also say it was the year of learning greater self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, patience, balance, and respect for grief and loss. In the midst of the emotional rota-rooter of 2007, came an awareness of my non super-woman status. It is not as if I did not know this but experiencing it so much in a moment to moment way all year put it front and center in my awareness. Change and loss has its own timetable of integration - even when it is a good thing. Even when it is bringing you more and more to honoring yourself. There comes the time of settling and sorting and adjustment, or re-directing one's ship, of licking wounds and feeling sorry for yourself then rallying anew happy to free of what is no longer right for you, of understanding what pieces of the puzzle get put back together, which ones no longer fit you and which ones can be dropped.

Sitting here with the experience of hindsight, I can say that the lessons have been fast, furious, deep and many: Breathe. Trust. Have gratitude. Cultivate a habit of saying 'Yes! Thank you!' to everything that happens, no matter what. It is the energy of 'all is well, all is in perfect Divine order' you want to encode in the cells of your being more and more. Flow in the direction the river is going, follow the energy where it leads you. Stop forcing a path where there is not meant to be one. You are meant to have ease. If something's not working, drop it like a hot potato. That may mean dropping the pattern of forcing forcing forcing it to happen happen happen your way. If you are being hurried along, allow the hurrying. There is magic in it since you are probably being hurried up to be yourself. There is no time to be wasted in the inauthentic, in what is not you, in what you don't want or choose anymore. Have what you love. Say Yes to who you are. Know that everything that happens to you, you have called for - for your healing and transformation. Be kinder to yourself in the midst of it all. Judge not, especially not yourself. Love yourself as you are, exactly, right now. Free yourself to do what your heart calls to you to do -- be who you are and have what you love.

2008 is a lush new magnificent landscape of infinite possibility. What will you create, creator? What new beginnings? What extraordinary unfoldings will you choose to call in? What miraculous manifestations? What you speak is seeking you! Choose to create --in thought, word, feeling and action -- with consciousness and delight. Invite the universe - as your friend - to partner with you for the highest good of all. Be flexible and open...and willing to believe that what the universe brings you will be even more miraculous and joyful than you can imagine! Yes! Yes! Yes! Love! Love! Love!


@copyright 2008 Christiane Schull. All rights reserved.