It truly is time to put a little focus in Whole Brain Living. While AI is getting better at what we have been focusing on, and leaving our Left Brain functions for dust, we must now fire up our Right Brain functions and do differently. Subscribe to the TarotwithJoannaRuth.Online YouTube channel and see if you can match your Left with your Right and get your entire Brain working together. www.youtube.com/@TarotwithJoannaRuth.Online

I just thought I would pop in to let the new members know how welcome they are. You are welcome to look at the resources, don't forget you are welcome to start a post, ask a question, just keep with the themes. Tell us who you are and what interests you about Spiritual Literacy. Welcome one and all. It's only a little group now And I intend to keep the topics tight Share whatever you like Hopefully our numbers will grow And we can be the leaders who are in the know! See you around the community. xJoannaRuth

In 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was taken to a stake in the center of Paris. A crowd watched as she was condemned as a heretic. She was burned after she refused to submit or take back her words. Her crime was writing a book. Marguerite Porete came from the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. No one knows her exact birth year, but it is usually placed in the mid 1200s. Very little about her early life is certain. She joined the Beguines. They were women who chose a spiritual life without the usual monastic vows. They often lived in small communities and supported themselves through work. The Beguines lived with a level of independence. Many served the poor, prayed together, and tried to draw closer to God outside strict church structures. To some church leaders, women doing this without direct clerical control could feel threatening. Marguerite took that freedom further than most. Sometime in the late 1200s, she wrote a mystical book called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It is written as a conversation between allegorical figures, Love, Reason, and the Soul. It describes seven stages of spiritual change. At the center of the book is a bold idea. A soul, she says, can become so united with divine love that it no longer needs the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries in the same way. In the highest union, the soul gives up its own will to God completely, and in that surrender, it finds perfect freedom. "Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love." She did not write in Latin, the language of the clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French, the language ordinary people could understand. That meant her ideas could travel beyond monasteries and beyond the usual channels of control. And they did. Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes. He also ordered Marguerite never to share it again. She refused. Marguerite believed her book carried divine truth. She said she had consulted respected theologians before sharing it, including the Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines. Whatever support she believed she had, she would not let one bishop silence her.

Have you considered the disincentives?

We do it all the time, but it blocks our healing. A sign of readiness to heal your emotional wounds is the courage to remain in the discomfort.