2014 Your Opportunity to Create Anything

Kalina Ivanov and Muriel Stockdale creating
Kalina Ivanov and Muriel Stockdale creating
Happy New Year to the year of the heart, the year of creation, the year of getting into basics like what makes you tick, what connects you and what sustains you. Times have been interesting and I think will continue to prove to be even more interesting. Think of where we have come from in our lifetimes. So many new things, when I was a baby we got color TV, today’s new babies will see reconstructed body parts, wearable tech and god knows what else. But what is the point of all the magical toys if our inner state cannot match them with a higher state of consciousness. It’s not worth it to create more and more stuff to destroy each other, that is just not satisfying, is it?

So where are the new things that help us lift our consciousness? I’m not suggesting that you go to Colorado today and buy some pot but instead look for tangible tools to free the mind and heart so that 2014 can be that year of freedom, creativity, satisfaction, accomplishment and absolute connection to the ones you love. Here’s how I manage to stay in the light.

First, I continue to practice my Mastering Alchemy lessons. In a lifetime of spiritual yearning, wandering, experimentation and practice I have finally found a path with astonishing tools of enlightenment that steadily drive me toward the success creating my own life that I have always craved. The path starts off by helping with understanding the boundaries between me and the world out there. Next it progresses to discovering the interference of other voices in my head like as Jim Self, the master alchemist, says, “Teacher, Parent, Minister”. Once discovered those voices, that try so hard to drive our lives, are politely invited to depart. From there the course of study begins to include the voices of master principles inviting us to align with our own power. For example Jim Self repeats often “be happy”. He invites us time and again to be confident, capable and kind to ourselves and I finally get it. The course continues to be exciting, inviting, interesting and joyfully challenging. The key here is attitude and crafting the right attitude and sticking with it is the stuff of mastery. I invite you to check out the site www.masteringalchemy.com and see if you find it useful to you too.

Next I continue to watch the world and seek out those bright light ideas that inspire, uplift and ignite respect and love for each other. I try to post them here but it’s been a busy year and I know I’ve missed  a lot of good moments that should be shared. Two things that are really critical right now and that speak to the new trend that we will swing together toward are these and they relate to money. I know that the economic downturn was terrifying for so many. That downturn was predicted for ages before it happened and the circumstances that caused it are not mitigated so the chances are we could be back there again any day. But you know me, my goal is to focus on what’s positive. So don’t worry let’s make another crash into a great opportunity. Already behind the scenes there are many people creating radical ways to construct the new economy. Right now I am reading a great book, “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein which invites us to consider trade and commerce in a far more enlightened way than we do today. For those who were shocked by the fact that so many lost their homes in the bad mortgage fallout how about those crazy Occupy Wall Street folks who are buying up bad debt and then just forgiving it so that people can move on? We are not out of the woods and we need the radical free-thinking ideas of new minds to solve the tremendous problems we’ve created for ourselves. They are out there working on it creating micro finance, new forms of exchange, better worldwide connectivity and safer forms of interaction. The big trees are dead and about to fall but on the forest floor when the light of the sun hits them so many creative shoots will sprout that we will be amazed we had not known that all that preparation was going on.

On a more personal note I want to encourage everyone to create, do what you love, write, draw, sew, sing because that is the new economy. Many of you know that I was an unhappy costume designer for many years, that I then quit my career to make my way into a new career creating uplifting entertainment. That career has been a winding path, with a group formed to support people who want to create spiritual entertainment, a short film that never became the feature I hoped for – yet. There were also a few scripts including a musical that wasn’t produced and TV pitches that almost made it as well as a couple of books still in progress and, of course, the diverse US flags that have had an awesome journey throughout New York and New England and have now settled for a while at least at Charlotte’s Place downtown here in NYC. My husband has been asking me continuously, “What are you doing? You’re all over the place, why can’t you focus?” and because I don’t know what to say, I have to follow my heart so I say, “I not making an appetizer, I’m creating a feast”.

So I’m so thrilled to report that it looks like exciting things are coming to life in 2014. One is a TV show developed by me and my dear friend, Kalina Ivanov, for cable TV in the style of, “The Borgias”. Our show entitled, “The Accidental Empress” is about the remarkable ascension of a Creole girl, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery to Empress of the Ottoman Empire in 1817. What makes this story more interesting is that it’s true and she’s the cousin of Josephine Bonaparte. So watch out for the show, it is currently being shopped around and our fingers are crossed. The second project is now an opera entitled, “Sitayana”. It is the story of Rama’s wife who was rescued by her prince after being kidnapped by the demon king, Ravana. For years this project languished after my dear friend, Philip Baloun, who hired me to write the book for the musical, died. This summer when I did costumes for “Ulysses” i proposed my script to my fabulous director, Crystal Manich and she likes it and graduated it from book to libretto. So we are developing the project. Keep your ears open for news of Sitayana too.

You might wonder how did this happen? I might have wondered too but now I know. For years I worked under the same conditions of under paid, over worked, under supported, not enough time, no respect and etc. I always felt like, “poor me” “why does this keep happening to me” until I had to admit if this dynamic keeps happening it has to be in my own world construction somehow. Two times in my life I saw with absolute clarity how I created situations. The first was at NYU with my thesis production. In my first year I saw the teachers absolutely rip a designer to shreds during her critique. It was not necessary and so cruel and much of what they cited was not her fault, I was shocked and that experience stuck with me. I was terrified it would happen to me too and wouldn’t you know two years later, it did. The other time I created with absolute clarity was when we broke the rudder on our first boat. It was in the shop all summer so we didn’t get the license for it. On the last day of summer they told us we could pick it up. I was fretting about getting a ticket for not having a tag and I went on and on about it. Guess what we got, lucky us.

With that kind of clarity in creating the invitation is there to figure it out. Many years later, a lifetime later, I am delighted to say that with the help of Mastering Alchemy I get it. I am not a master yet but I am so much better at the creative process than I was. This year I will be good enough so that you can watch the Empress on TV and come to Broadway to see Sita get rescued by her prince Ram. That’s my intention. I also intend great things for you too; may there be blessings, connecting with friends and family, satisfaction in accomplishment, recognition and opportunity for you all in 2014. 

Muriel

Multidimensionality

Heaven is a realm of uncountable possibility. It is where we know ourselves as the omniscient, omnipresent beings that we are. But this is a leap for our time and space bound minds that only a very few wise ones have taken over millenia. Today many more of us are poised to grasp the consciousness of multidimensional beingness and teaching comes toward us even from mainstream entertainment.

I have talked a little bit about the concepts of super heroes and super powers and the relevance of these to our true nature today I am inspired to examine the idea of multidimensionality. If we are omniscient and omnipresent we are not truly confined to the here and now that we are all so familiar with and comfortable with. This is the most mind bending of the concepts of ascension that our spiritual teachers present to us. It is impossible for the mind to grasp the idea of being in more than one place or time. Our linear construct is so rigid and confined and just what the mind can grasp. What does multidimensionality look like?

There are amazing ancient spiritual texts that tell stories of this like the Yoga Vasistha or the Ramayana, some Buddhist tales and many fairy tales. Sometimes moments in those stories strike our super consciousness into remembrance. A moment like that is when Hanuman, the monkey god from the Ramayana, goes to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve Rama’s lost ring and he finds 10,000 identical rings there indicating that this moment has been repeated for eternity. When I read that my mind stopped, it became stuck in an open space of wonder and awe that I cannot describe.

But forget about the old stories for now, what about the new stories? Several TV shows right now toy with this idea of multidimensionality – Ghost Whisperer and Medium concentrate on how ghosts; us in another state, interact with the living.  There is an overwhelming fascination with death in today’s entertainment. And last week we discover that Lost examines ideas of what can happen in the other dimensions after death exploring a tangled tale of woe, loss and loves in the Bardo state of between life and death. The Tibetan book of Living and Dying explains this Bardo state in great detail. Basically it is a state of consciousness where a human who has lost form gets stuck attached to the realm or idea of form and moves through seemingly uncontrolled adventures spurred by the fancies of the mind. The natural process after death is to move directly to the bright light of the divine, which is God or our own highest self but sometimes we are so attached to the idea of a life in form that we get stuck thinking we are still alive. Or we may know that we are dead but for some highly charged reason we are unwilling to move on. This is powerful esoteric understanding that we are becoming familiar with through the use of popular entertainment. This is a great blessing for this age.

To my surprise after suffering through the last season of Lost, I stopped watching after the first, I liked the ending. It is my dream to create uplifting entertainment and I am impressed that Lost’s last show pulled off a miraculous feat of mind-bending although a bit too sappy spirituality.  The implications of the end are beautiful. When we wonder what multidimensional beingness might look like this could be it – parallel lives, friends who become enemies and then become friends again, a constant raw respect for living and a throwing oneself deep into the game of living.

Hinduism refers to life as a lila – a dance. This maybe what it would look like. The multiple arms of Shiva, of all the gods; stabbing, saving, feeding, stealing, sharing and depriving and then embracing each other. The dance of life.

We are on an ascended path, these remarkably esoteric entertainments are a cohesive part of the shifting process. They show us what is possible without ramming it down our throat like a religion might. We can laugh because it’s all fun and entertainment then we can’t get the ideas out of our heads and then we realize we are living it.

Bravo to Lost; it was definitely worth it. I think I am going to plan a Lost marathon.