Welcome to this beautiful spring morning—Easter Sunday—a day of resurrection, a day of rising up, a day of newness and freshness springing forth. Are you feeling it? I’m glad, because everything outside, everything in nature, is definitely feeling it: the birds are singing so intensely; and the flowers are popping open, little faces in pink and blue and yellow are smiling. That’s what happens when life moves. Life manifests because that’s its nature!

I live in Cape Town, South Africa, so I’m just a visitor to the Northern Hemisphere. Where I come from, we are actually in autumn, in the fall of our yearly cycle. So it is a wonderful treat for me to be present in this blossoming renewal of life manifesting through each one of us and through everything around us.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been considering the creative process. How life works through the cycles and through the seasons, how things naturally unfold, naturally emerge if we let them—and usually if we, with our clever ideas, get out of the way. So here we are, at a point in the cycle where we can take a new look at things, where life is moving out of a darker place, a dark season where things have been quietly germinating, moving out into expression, a fresh external expression of things.

It seems the opportunity is to think about what has been germinating during this dark phase for you. What has been working away in your innermost heart, and maybe in your deepest thoughts? What is it that has been quietly working, that now you need to consider how to give form, or how to let it out, or how to let it actually show up in your world?

All of these cycles and seasons are part of the process of manifestation. It’s the way by which life, or spirit, shows up in all its glory, in all its myriad shapes and forms. And each one of us is a shape—that’s us. So I’m a Ruth shape. I can’t help that—it’s the way I am. It’s what life does coming through this package. And that’s true for each one of us.

What then is our next step in expression? Expression means you get it outside of yourself, from inside onto the outside. It shows up. Usually it shows up through our thoughts and our feelings, first of all. And by the way, if you think that you’re just a thinker, that you have all these brilliant ideas and clever thoughts, just check for a moment what the feeling is behind them. Our feelings actually inform everything that we do. Even when we think that we’ve got them all sorted out, clarified, battened down, behind each thought there sits a feeling.

So how about the process of letting spirit show up? As I look around my world, I realize that things don’t always show up the way I thought they would. Anybody else have any surprises recently? Anybody say, “Oh—I didn’t expect that; I didn’t plan that!”? You know the story, how to make God laugh: tell Him your plans. It’s true, isn’t it, that sometimes we look around and say, “Well, who are these people? What is it that I’m doing? This wasn’t quite what I had intended.” It seems whatever we are open to, particularly emotionally, is manifested and that’s what shows up.

What about being open to spirit, being open to receiving from a larger design, being open to just what’s present? Anybody have difficulty receiving compliments? “Oh, no, no, no—no, this is an old thing. No, it doesn’t look that great.” We all probably recognize that habit of batting things away. So here’s another pattern that is often so subtle it passes us by.

Habits. We may think that we have good habits, but I bet you would acknowledge that you also have some bad habits. What is a habit? It seems to me a habit is something that once was a creative good idea. But like a jelly mold that you pour the jelly into, when you turn it out, you make exactly the same shape every time. That’s a habit, because every time you do that thing, exactly the same thing comes out. That’s not being alive—in fact, it’s dead. If it’s exactly the same, repeated, it’s dead, because the essence of life is to give forth glory, to give forth abundance and variety and juiciness. It’s all in our hands, all available to us, in every moment.

So what’s the feeling back of the habit, the form? If I’m feeling frustrated because what I see in front of me is not exactly what I had planned, that should be telling me something. If I’m feeling impatient—all those little things that we think are not important are the process by which we are creating our worlds.

The process of manifestation is the act of letting spirit show up exactly where we are. If I’m experiencing frustration or impatience, or I’ve got a really strong idea about how things should be, a plan or a concept, then there is something distorting the pattern of life as it comes through. It shows up through the emotional ripples in my energy field. It is distorted from the original impulse. So if my manifestation isn’t quite what I had expected, is it possible that something like frustration got in and distorted that pure current of abundance and glory?

We speak about the spiritual nature of life, and then we look around at our day-to-day experience and can’t make those two mesh very well. It is a collision, with the expression of spirit meeting our everyday world, and most often there’s a rude awakening. So what does it take to be in the present moment, because our thoughts can certainly take us back into the past, and sometimes we project them into the future? And when we do that, we miss the flowers blooming, the birds singing, and our best friend shining next to us. Missed opportunities!

The opportunity always is to be right now, right here, just as I am, and be able to step into the next moment fully aware. I can’t step into the next moment if I’m six paces ahead or ten paces behind. The act of being fully present, the act of letting Spirit inform me and letting it unfold, that’s the discipline, that’s the opportunity that we have for transformation. Whatever we have round about us is then exactly what we need. It’s exactly what we want, because we have not let the distortion occur in the process of moving from the invisible into the visible, into solid form.

I wrote myself a mantra this morning: “Manifest Spirit’s intention. Manifest my true nature.” And I’d encourage each of you to think about that. Manifest Spirit’s intention. Manifest your true nature.