By Celia Coates
TIME MAGAZINE is right to be proud of a new initiative for their digital audience. In February they announced Motto – a site for “advice worth sharing.” TIME said it wants to provide, “…content on how to live a richer, smarter, more meaningful life – how to negotiate a raise, how to manage your in-box, how to actually unplug on vacation.”
I was disappointed. Here’s the same old unbalanced – although well-intentioned – guidance. That’s advice for part of what life is about. Yes, we do have to earn a living and even figure out how to relax, but there is so much more to creating a “richer, smarter and more meaningful” life.
Julie North is also involved in getting information to a generation that is trying to figure things out. She’s a medium and a medical intuitive born with the ability to see and communicate with the spirit world. (It’s an ability we all have, but as with musicians or athletes or businessmen, some people are better at it than others.) I heard her say that there is a generation of people generally between the ages of 17 and 25 who are starving for information. When I asked her what they are starving for she said this:
“They are looking for real ways to expand themselves and their lives. They are very well read, but they’ve grown up in a culture that raises people to be obedient, to do as they are told – go to school, get a degree, find a partner, work this job for 30 years. Those rules no longer fit. This is a group of people who don’t know enough about how to make their own choices and they are really searching.”
She went on to say, “My own passion is to bring clarity to people for their own empowerment. I don’t think of myself as a teacher – more a sharer. I don’t want to say, ‘Hey you need to learn this or you need to learn that.’ It’s more like, ‘Take this if it resonates with you and do something with it if you want.’
It’s all about free will choices. I often hear from people who wish they’d learned something when they were younger – about the energy body or the power of sound for healing or how to center themselves. There are also young people who are looking for opportunities and can’t find them – or can’t afford them.
Courses and workshops are often for the 40 and 50 year-olds who do have enough money. There are also some sources of information that are not empowering people. I read an article recently about the “new” energies that are coming into the Earth Plane that claimed only some people would be able to access these wonderful 5th level energies. This adds to fear and to very old misinformation about exclusive spiritual hierarchies. The universe, in my connection and communication, does not subscribe to fear or want us to have any sense of inadequacy.
Older people tend to look at Facebook, for example, as false but it gives this generation an environment of opportunity and community. It’s connective unlike most else in their lives.
I’m involved with Rootwire as one source for opportunities to learn. It’s a gathering designed for experiences of music, art, dance – and most of all, community. There are other places and events like this but usually what’s offered is “default world” – the old standard that doesn’t work.
I find that ROOTWIRE provides a great service – there we can encourage people to step in to places that are unfamiliar and might feel uncomfortable. But when we are interested in expanding beyond where we currently are, we have to step across that line of familiarity in order to expand.”
Julie North has brought us around again to Rilke and our need to step, with courage, into what is unfamiliar.