My birthday balloon and I going for a walk.

When you're an adult, having a birthday can suck.

I have no problem with getting older. In fact, the older I get, the happier I am.

I don’t like them because I can’t honestly answer the question, “What do you want for your birthday?”

The socially appropriate answer for my age is some version of “I don’t need anything, but thank you for the sentiment!” Had you asked me that when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have hesitated to describe the top 3 things I wanted with enough detail to make you regret asking in the first place. So what changed?

Am I more mature? Yes.
Am I less frivolous? Sure.
Am I less deserving? No!

If we had the chance to design our life experience any way we wanted, we would probably all choose a life filled with as much happiness, peace, and bliss as possible.  We would all choose gummy bear lives.  How many of us would choose to include heartbreak, pain, darkness, stress, depression, and suffering?

It’s our natural instinct to avoid suffering.  In fact, it’s a biological mechanism that is meant to protect us.  But as much as we like to avoid pain and suffering in our lives, sometimes it is best to go through the suffering, instead of trying to go around it.   When we stop resisting suffering and take the time to digest it, it is literally the greatest catalyst for personal transformation.

Many of you have spiritual self protection practices. While we understand the reason you have adopted such habits, we would like to offer a tweak to that practice that will best honour who you really are.

When you focus on self protection, you are stating to the universe that there is something you need protection from. It is coming from a fear of being victimized, which is still playing in old energies. Spiritual self protection, in effect, separates, while you are trying to move into the energies of unconditional love and unity consciousness.

What you are really aiming for is energetic clarity. You are looking to shine your own wonderful energy, clearly, brightly, and unimpeded, as you claim your authentic power. It is standing in your spiritual sovereignty, owning your truth and your divinity, demonstrating that nothing can be stronger than you as a beloved piece of Source energy.

Do you see? The steps of self protection and energetic clarity may be exactly the same. It is the intention that makes all the difference in the world. ~Archangel Gabriel

Ben Decker, Guest
Waking Times

“Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.” -Marianne Williamson

Last year, on December 5th, a young man was shot and killed by a police officer at the Hollywood & Highland intersection, right around the corner from my Los Angeles apartment. This happened in a flurry of news stories of other cases of US police using deadly force. With the news came several disturbing photographs, including a photo of two police officers pointing their guns down at the man’s dying body sprawled out on the Walk of Fame.

I experienced a powerful wave of complicated emotional response. Images of riots, tear gas, guns & ambulances flashed through my mind. It was overwhelming.  I felt my heart cave in. I immediately fell to my knees in prayer, tears streaming down my face. This is bigger than gun laws and law enforcement, bigger than Hollywood, bigger than racism. When things like this are happening, it is an indication of something nefarious about the world we are living in, about the health of our culture, and about the future of the reality we are creating together.

As it turns out, experiences induced by dimethyltryptamine (DMT) may be doing better for the belief in an afterlife than conventional forms of religion have in recent decades. Many of the testimonials from individuals that have traversed the ‘astral planes’ by means of DMT, whether it be through ingestion or pineal secretion during a kundalini awakening or near death experience, describe a sort of spiritual awakening, often returning to ordinary consciousness with new feelings and thoughts on physical life and existence in the universe. For some, this awakening was met with a glimpse of an afterlife and existence beyond its physical form.

“DMT is responsible for providing users with powerful trips in which they often experience the presence of calming beings believed to be from an underlying layer of reality which then expose people to the idea that the information we receive through our physical senses is limited. When people make this deep connection and understanding that there is more to reality than what we can experience through the senses they begin to suspect that there may be more to life than the physical.” – Professer Rick Strassman

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Magnesium is a mineral used by every organ in your body, especially your heart, muscles, and kidneys.[1] If you suffer from unexplained fatigue or weakness, abnormal heart rhythms or even muscle spasms and eye twitches, low levels of magnesium could be to blame.

If you’ve recently had a blood test, you might assume it would show a magnesium deficiency. But only 1 percent of magnesium in your body is distributed in your blood, making a simple sample of magnesium from a serum magnesium blood test not very useful.

Most magnesium is stored in your bones and organs, where it is used for many biological functions. Yet, it’s quite possible to be deficient and not know it, which is why magnesium deficiency has been dubbed the “invisible deficiency.”