There's No Place Like Home
Oprah and I share something in common as we are both huge fans of the Wizard of Oz, and this year, 2009, happens to be the movies’ 70th anniversary. I remember as a child waiting in anticipation for the Wizard of Oz to be broadcast on TV in the Spring around my birthday. We didn’t have DVD players where you could watch it over and over. Hence, it was only to appear once a year, and it was just like the Christmas feeling with heightened excitement flowing through me. When Spring arrived, I was glued to the floor in front of the TV, and immersed myself in this imaginary world. I was captivated by the movie and didn’t realize the messages that were being broadcast to me at that time, and since then I return to those messages time and time again.
Follow the yellow brick road….
When I stay in my high vibrational alignment, I am on my yellow brick road. It lights the way for me and I KNOW it because I feel so great…those feelings of joy, happiness, fun and laughter dance with me. And I also know contrast. I KNOW when I’ve taken a detour through the poppy fields laced with poison and the dark, scary forests because I feel differently….those feelings of fear, worry, frustration and “I’ll bite you myself“ behavior.
Thus, I KNOW how to get myself back on the yellow brick road–the paved, sparkly road, where skipping and singing is the norm and I show off my bloomers (thongs in present day) under my blue dress, and it’s easy and fun. Easy and fun is my mantra and I will ask myself these two questions before undertaking something: 1) is it easy? 2) is it fun? When I’ve answered both these questions in the affirmative, the yellow brick road magically appears before me.
I’ll get you my pretty and your little dog too….
When the yellow brick road doesn’t appear, it’s because my fears have clouded my vision. My fears have and still can create all sorts of wicked witches, my conjured thought forms, and I can allow these demonstrations to push me off my yellow brick road as I buy into their “realness.” When I look at someone or something and become scared by the story I tell myself about it, I then enliven it with incredible power, and it becomes HUGE.
The image of wicked witches is complete with dark green faces, warts and pointy noses and power beyond belief. They fly on their broomsticks, and write “Surrender Tami” in the sky, and they even have their trusty flying monkeys at their side ready to wrap me up in their long tails and throw me around. Where’s a banana when you need one?
Run, Tami, run….
I run like hell away from them. Yet, when I run away, they seem to take on this bigger than life power and they always catch up to me. I KNOW that I’m creating the wicked witches and they’re not real. They are alive in my imagination because I have believed something other than who I KNOW I truly am, and when I switch my vibration and turn around, face them and stick out my tongue and laugh with a little spit thrown in (my version of water being thrown on them), then the wicked witches have a meltdown and reduce their size, and disappear altogether. Facing them, laughing and speaking my truth is the only way to make them disappear.
Richard Bach explains it nicely in the book, Illusions: “We are all fakes on this whole world, we’re all pretending to be something that we’re not. We are not bodies walking around, we are not atoms and molecules, we are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the Is, no matter how much we believe otherwise…”
I’ve always had what I was searching for….
Once upon a time, I became a searcher and explorer and looking for what I felt was missing, and now I KNOW differently. Everything I need is inside of me and as Dorothy so eloquently says in the movie, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it.”
This year, especially, I’ve stopped searching. I have everything I need, and it is within me to awaken with my imagination to play with, pretend and to have fun. I have used my imagination to conjure up wicked witches chasing after me, and now consciously use my imagination to create everything I want, not what I don‘t want. I express gratitude and appreciation for that which I KNOW I already have. When I enliven things I want with my imagination, then my physical world becomes a match to what I’m imagining and brings it into visibility. The physical world follows the imaginary world, it does not lead.
Think about it….
We are born with an active imagination and ability to play and pretend. It isn’t anything we have to go to school to learn. It is within us and always has been.
Somewhere along the way, we hid this innate ability from ourselves because it didn‘t seem appropriate in adulthood. We chose to believe something else. We adopted someone else’s persona, someone else’s standards, and this gift within of Infinite potential went untapped. We were adopted and didn’t even know it, and we wonder why this stirring within us longs to find out who we really are and why we’re here.
It’s still there just waiting to be remembered, waiting to be given the “go ahead” to create the world as you want it to be. Be as little children and evoke the power within, and watch your outer world reflect the imaginings of your inner world.
Children do not play to “get something,” they play because it feels good to play. Likewise, we are to be like children and get lost in the playing and lose all sense of time and create things because it feels good.
Remember when you played as a child…..
A few years ago, I was walking along the beaches in Oregon over a Thanksgiving holiday, and watching children at play. It was a beautiful, sunny day and many children were playing in the water creating motes with dragons and alike, and I wanted to join them. Now, according to my standards, the air temperature was about 50 degrees and the water temperature was about 45 degrees, and to me it was cold. Yet, these children didn’t set that same standard. Their imagination was so active, the concept of judging temperatures didn’t exist.
It was their parents who shocked them into a different way of thinking: “You must be cold, and you must be hungry!,” I heard the parents exclaim. As I watched very attentively, and because these children had no concept of what their mothers’ were stating, they all had the perplexed look on their faces as their belief didn’t reflect the same “fact.” Thus, their responses were unanimous, “We’re not cold, and we’re not hungry. We want to keep playing!”
This was a great reminder for me to fully appreciate the power of imagination, and what we can learn from children. When we imagine something, we are to have no concept of anything else that would say otherwise….no matter what someone else thinks. We are to enliven it, envision it, pretend it, play with it because it feels good! Remember, the “temperature” presented was only a thought in someone else’s mind, and doesn’t reflect it for anyone else. What a valuable lesson!
The munchkins….
You just can’t think of the munchkins without smiling. The lollipop kids are my favorite. Sing along with me, “We represent the lollipop kids, the lollipop kids, the lollipop kids, and in the name of the lollipop kids, we wish to welcome you to munchkin land.” Doesn’t that make you feel good? And, yes, they did inhale…the helium added another element of fun.
I love laughing, and I love being with people who make me laugh….who just want to BE silly and BE one with fun. These munchkins epitomize laughter and they created their entire world called munchkinland.
Stand up if you like practical jokes…..
One time when I was a corporate trainer for a financial institution, we had a culture, which included the FISH Philosophy, and one of the components of the FISH Philosophy was “play time.“ Can you imagine how great it was for me to be in this space of being a kid? I got to create play time for the employees and the members. I had to be “reeled” back in many times because in someone else’s mind, I carried things too far.
Bring on the practical jokes….
One time I decided to “pay back” Larry, a co-worker, for messing up my desk, and I really wanted to make it stick…or stink. In keeping with the FISH Philosophy theme, I had gotten a “real” fish head from the Pike’s Place Fish Market in Seattle and kept it in the refrigerator for just the right moment, and the right moment appeared.
When Larry left for a 3-day weekend, my training co-workers and I decided to sacrifice the fish head and some cans of tuna as well. We placed the fish head and opened cans of tuna in Larry’s office and left with that feeling of a job well done.
Something fishy’s going on here….
Unbeknownst to us, record temperatures were being forecast for the 3-day weekend. Thus, you can imagine the smell that was brewing in Larry’s office, but the smell didn’t actually stay in his office. The pungent smell decided to travel and permeate the entire teller area and lobby of the financial institution.
With this said, when I arrived at the financial institution on Tuesday following the 3-day weekend, I was met with fans ablaze to try to dissipate the odor, which was making the tellers sick. Many reported feeling very ill and, in turn, the odor hit the members who came to the teller windows as well. It took quite some time for the odor to disappear, and during that time, my boss called me into her office and told me that sense of play went too far. Would I do it again? I think you know the answer!
And history was made….
I recently saw one of the trainers who helped deliver that sense of play with me, and she said, “Remember, when we played that joke on Larry. That was so much fun!“ That joke is mentioned still to this day, and that was over six years ago. And I remembered how to play.
Embracing laughter and fun is exactly what we are to do. Remember, be like little children and play and laugh….uncontrollably.
LOLAMEP (laughing out loud and maybe even peeing)….thank you to my friend, Lindsee, who gave me this card which had this printed on the outside.
The ruby slippers….
“Dorothy, you better hold onto those slippers as they must be very powerful. Otherwise, she (The Wicked Witch of the West) wouldn’t want them so bad.“ These are the words expressed to Dorothy by Glinda, the Witch of the North, as we were led to believe that the ruby slippers had power and could be used as protection against the Wicked Witch of the West.
And we were led to believe that Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went to see the Wizard to get the things they felt were missing and would give them their power back. Did The Wizard really give them the heart, the brain, the courage?
The Wizard, who was an ordinary man, explains to the group that they already had what they had been searching for and only need things like medals and diplomas to confirm that someone else recognizes it.
We don’t take anything or anyone and enthrone it….
We’re great magicians hiding our power from ourselves, and thinking that someone else, something else has it. It is our consciousness that creates everything we experience and nothing outside of us has any power. It’s what we “think” about the thing or the person that gives it power.
And then the Scarecrow asks Glinda a powerful question, “How come you didn’t tell Dorothy?” referring to Dorothy being able to go home all along. And Glinda replies, “She always had the power to go home. I didn’t tell Dorothy at first because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to discover it for herself.”
It is through this self discovery that we awaken, it cannot be otherwise. Someone can tell us something, but we can’t be open to receive the message until we discover and remember it.
From the book, Illusions, “Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.” And I do love teaching that you already know these things, you have simply forgotten.
Somewhere over the rainbow…..
I love this song! Yet, I’ve stopped my search for any place, but here. There isn’t a place beyond the rainbow that will lead me to nirvana, and there isn‘t a person that will do this for me either. I create the vision of what lies beyond the rainbow from this place within my consciousness in each moment, and when I become a home body and imagine, play, pretend, have fun, then my dreams really do come true.
Ding, dong the witch is dead…..
I am home, and it feels great!
