To all of you Magnificent Spiritual Beings on my e-mailing list,

Well, it has been a while.  A little over two months to be exact.  There are several reasons for that including that I needed to spend some time working on my Journal to make up for all the time I let it go while I was doing the site design on Joy2MeU at the beginning of the year.  But that would have only delayed this update a little while in and of itself.  What I believe had a greater impact is the New Page on which I announce site additions and news.  Previously, I would wait and post new articles, links, awards, testimonials, whatever - along with any news - at the same time and send out an update announcing them all.  With the New page I feel free to post things any time I feel like it.   It is possible that in the future, this 2 month period of time will be more normal than abnormal.  It is also possible that my life is about to change dramatically and that I don't have any idea what it will looks like a couple of months from now.

More about that later however, first about the new and the news.  There have been quite a few additions since the end of March.

The new articles started with one that I call Questions about Alcoholism.  It came about because of a whole list of questions that someone asked through the ExpertsCentral web site.  A lot of what I found myself saying in the answers I wrote I realized wasn't on the site anywhere so I decided to make a web article out of them.

The next web article originated with the Question and Answer pages of the Joy to You & Me site.  This one is about Buddha, Buddhism, and Japanese cultural dysfunction.  I wrote the original Question and Answer page back in October of 1998, and had been thinking about adding it in an expanded version to the Joy2MeU site for awhile.

One that I just added a few days ago, is Spirituality for Agnostics and Atheists - which was sparked by someone who I have been working with on the telephone who is an agnostic.  It is another of my articles that turned into a series.   In this series I will be looking at different facets and types of spirituality with the final article being about my Spiritual belief system.  Though I have lots written about my concept of Spirituality on the site and in the book, this one will be about the passionate commitment that I mentioned I was going to write about a while back. I thought the next one in the series would be Quantum Spirituality - but now that has been pushed back to third.  How many there will be I really don't know yet.  I will probably look at paganism and Goddess spiritual beliefs among other things.

An article I am calling The Recovery Process for inner child healing - finding Balance, is almost finished.  I thought I would have it posted by now - but that's what I get for thinking I know what is going to happen.  It may be posted tomorrow - it might not be until the end of the week, or longer, the one who knows is not me.  I started writing it back in March.  In my March update, I was processing through an issue.  Some people seemed to be a little confused about that update - and there were also inquiries in regard to my reference to forcing myself to take some action.  So, I wrote this new page about processing to try to explain the process of processing - and taking action - a little bit more.

In the process of working on the processing article, shortly after I finished the Spirituality for Agnostics and Atheist article - I found myself talking about spiritual integration (which goes with, and in many ways, proceeds finding balance) in a different way than I have previously.  So, a part of what I wrote as the processing article, will now make up a page on spiritual integration - the follow up to the Agnostics and Atheists article.

The processing article also touches on the Sexuality series of articles - to which I have not added anything, and will not until I have a chance to rewrite the article in an structural sense.  Even though I haven't reread it since I posted it, I know that I want to make some changes in the way it is structured because I didn't like the way it flowed and because of the way I now envision that series.  I see that I am going to be touching on a lot of topics from "free love" to emotional incest to abortion to masculine and feminine energy to who knows what.  It is going to be a series that covers a lot of different facets and levels of our relationship to our own sexuality and gender, and will be organized differently from my other pages.

So, I now have two series of online columns going and I have no idea of how many articles they will end up being, or how long it will take to finish them.  It amazes me all of the words and concepts that are percolating around in my mind wanting to come out.  I also may be doing a follow up to the Buddhism article as I just got an contentious e-mail about that article which is a perfect example of some of the things I talked about in the article.

Other additions have been:

Links wise, I just added a link to Relationship Web which seems to be a really good resource for all kinds of information about romantic relationships.  I also added links to web sites about Hinduism and Yoga, and one about Celtic Spirituality.

A real glowing testimonial about my telephone counseling was added and two testimonials about the web site.  I will only be adding one or two testimonials each update period from now on because I have so many posted on the Testimonial Page.  Just ones I especially like are being added now.

There was also an addition to the Referral Page - someone has recommended a therapist in Sarasota, Florida.  A new award - The Critical Mass Award - which you can see on the Awards Page.

I don't know how many of you have noticed, or used, the form that makes it easy to recommend one of my web sites to friends.  It is called Let em Know - and up until a few days ago I had it on the Site Map page of the Joy to You & Me site and the Information Page of the Joy2MeU site.  I had not put it on any other pages because of concern for page size.  It just dawned on me the other day (I can be a little slow sometimes - this was one of those "duh" realizations) that I could just make a separate web page for it and put links to it from any number of pages. So I have done that. It is really a pretty cool program which sends an e-mail with a short message about the site to anyone you want to share it with.  I have had it for sometime now and trust that they do not use the e-mail addresses they get in any other way.

Setting up that page caused me to realize that I could do the same for the site search engine that is also on the Information Page.  It is really an excellent search engine and they add new pages to the data base quite promptly.  I now have links to a page with the site search engine on it, on several other pages.  This is only for the Joy2MeU.com site.  There are numerous places one can get a site search engine for free on the net but all of them that I have found are only good for domain sites - not sites that are hosted on third party servers like silcom.com

While I was doing that, and playing around with a couple of searches to check on how well it picked up on obscure words or search terms (very well) I also discovered that the same people that provide the search engine have another service that looked worthwhile.  This is called Net Mind, and it is a program that you can use to get notified when a favorite web site has any changes.  I have place it on the bottom of the New Page.  If you wish to keep up on additions to the site, you can enter your e-mail address and they will send you an e-mail anytime the New Page is changed.  It seemed perfect for my news page, and since the search engine is such a good deal I thought I would try this out.

The other thing I did was to make some changes in the price of the books and audio tapes.  The cost of shipping overseas and to Canada hasn't been quite as much as I thought it was going to be, so I lowered the overseas cost for the book by $ .50 and the tape by a $1.  I eliminated having a separate set of secure links for Canada and Mexico, and included them in with the US price - which I raised $ .50 on both the book and tape set.  My goal with the prices has been to give you all a good deal so that you can buy the book and tape set for slightly under retail when shipping is subtracted.  This sets it up so that the prices for one of either the book or the tape set are about $1 less than retail.  They are also over $3 less than if you buy it through someone that charges $3.50 or $3.75 for shipping on top of the retail price.  (Since I posted the new prices two days ago I have shipped books to England, Ireland, and Canada.)

The book is selling at a record rate - the fastest and most consistent since it came out.  (The official publication date was January of 1996 - though I actually received the book from the printer on November 30th 1995.)  I have already sold more books this year than in all of 1999.  I will probably surpass the best sales year, the first year it came out, before the end of the summer.  The web sites are getting over 35,000 page views a month, and ranking high in most all of the major search engines.  Still no word from Yahoo.  Oh well.

I also made some changes to the home pages.  Quite a bit to the Joy to You & Me home page and changes in the quotes mostly on Joy2MeU.  It is actually painful for me to play around with the Joy to You & Me site too much because I think it needs a major redesign but do not see where I will ever get the time to do that in this lifetime.

Speaking of which, as I mentioned at the beginning of this update, there may be some big changes happening in my life.  Through a series of message that I got from the Universe I was led to do a paradigm shift/change my perspective on my future as I see it.  I got the message that I needed to let go of the "Oprah is going to call and then the book is going to be a best seller scenario."

This is so typical of the way the Universe and Bubba (my nickname for my Higher Self - which derives from The Dance of Wounded Souls Trilogy  Book 1) work in my life.  Just when the book is selling better than ever, and the web site is reaching more people, it became time to let go of the Oprah scenario.  That scenario actually got me in a lot of trouble. 

For those of you who are newer to this mailing list, I will give a little background.  I raised the money to publish my book from investors who believed in it and in me.  When I got a large sum of money to do the publishing back in the late July of  1995, I started doing all the things I needed to do and spending that money.  Spending that money caused me to get quite a bit of credit.  Because of my deep belief in the book and it's importance, I thought that it would become a best seller in a comparatively short period of time.  So I used that credit to market the book.  A big mistake - which was of course perfect in the Cosmic Scheme of things and not a mistake at all. 

When the book didn't take off, I was in trouble financially.  I spent close to 2 years just struggling to make the minimum payments on my credit cards.  I moved away from where I feel at home to Santa Barbara to try to earn more money to help me get out of debt.  I finally just couldn't keep it up and realized that declaring bankruptcy was the most Loving thing I could do for myself.  That happened just prior to me starting my first web site - Joy to You & Me on silcom.com - in February of 1998.  A year later I invested some money in starting my own domain site - Joy2MeU - and getting online credit card processing.  Then I lost some sources of income and ended up homeless for about 6 months.  Not homeless as in on the street - but homeless as in crashing on a friends couch.  I still had an office where I had my computer and did my writing - but I had no living space to call my own.

Anyway, things are much better now - but I am still in debt and just barely paying my rent each month.  This whole process has been a wonderful opportunity for growth.  And an opportunity to see how much faith I had, how good I could work my program, how good I could become in practicing the principles of acceptance, patience, surrender, etc.  Except for the articles and columns that I had written prior to starting my web site (which have an "originally published in" note at the bottom of the page) the majority of the things on the web site were written during this very trying period.

(In my Joy2MeU Journal, I not only am publishing my next two books and telling the story of my Spiritual Path, but I am also sharing a pretty intimate personal journal of my life since the Journal started in April of 1999.  In it, I talk about the recent messages that I received and the process of this latest paradigm shift in my life.)

Enough digression!  The paradigm shift came about because I was contacted by a famous alcoholism treatment center to see if I was interested in working there.  I had to change my perspective in a major way just to be open to seeing if I was willing to do that.

I really don't want to do that.  But I am willing to do it if that is where my Path leads.

I don't want to do it because, though I love the treatment process and know how it saved my life, it is a very basic level of recovery.  What I do best is really about advanced recovery.  I would be working in an area that I know and can do - but so can a lot of other people.  I don't know of anyone else who understands advanced recovery like I do.  I know more about codependence and the recovery process than anyone I know of.  I have a gift for being able to communicate pretty complicated concepts in fairly understandable language that most people can understand.

I, of course, would not stop doing what I do - this is part of my mission in this lifetime.  I would just be severely restricted in terms of the time and energy that I would be able to put into it because I would be working 40 hours a week.  I will keep my web sites going.  I will keep writing.  I am amazed that I have so much more to write about.  I am growing and learning and understanding things on a more sophisticated level than ever before. Any time I do a workshop, and often in individual counseling, I hear myself saying things that I have never written about.

It seems to me that the Universe should be kicking down more abundance that will free me up to have more time and energy to put into doing what I do best.  It would seem to me that it is important to get my next books published.

However, I have learned very clearly that the Universe's plan is always better for me than my plan.  Perhaps the Universe does not intend for me to go to work at this place at all - it would not be the first time I have had to become willing to do something that I didn't end up having to do.  It would not be the first time that I let go of something and then got it.

What I know is this.  I do not want to go to work at this job.  I also know that I did not want to get sober.  I did not want to go through the grief work and have an emotional break down/through.  Sometimes what I want isn't what is important in the Cosmic scheme of things.

I do know that I want to have more money in my life.  I want to be able to pay off my debts.  I want to be able to see my 10 year old son more than once a year.  I want to get my next books published.  I want to live someplace that is my space and is comfortable in a real simple way.

Taking this job would give me more money.   I asked my Higher Power for some added abundance in my life and I got a call from this Treatment Center.  I have learned to pay attention and go where I am guided.

I will probably have an interview at this place in the next two weeks.  It has to be in the next two weeks because I am going on a trip through New Mexico to pick up my son and on to Nebraska to take him to visit his Grandpa and Grandma's farm.  I am making this trip in my trusty car with 204,000 miles on it.  I will be out of the state from about June 8th until July 1st.  If I get this job is would start in July - since that is the first I am available - so that I may come back from my trip with about a week to find a new place to live and get moved.

The adventure continues and gets different - and More Will Be Revealed. 

I will still be able to get my e-mail while out of town and will be filling orders and all.  The only problem will be if someone sends me an order by regular snail mail during that time - it will not be filled until I return.  I will be posting any news bulletins on my New page - so if you are curious you might want to check in from time to time.

I don't know what is going to happen but I can tell you that I really Love this adventure.  Most of the time.   I have recently found myself slipping into a space which I refer to as my James Brown space. What I mean by that is that I feel  like - and often do - break out in song "I feeeeeeel GOOD! da da da etc . . .  Like I knew that I would now."  In other words the Joy is coming back in a major way.  And I did know that it would - but the the last year or so has been pretty weird. Not just for me, and not because of money or being homeless or anything like that - this Joy is not an external thing.  This is the Transcendent Joy that I was tuned into for a period of months back in late 98 and early 99.  Not all the time, but a lot.  It was during the time that my worst nightmare came true in romance and I still felt the Joy.  (My Adventure in Romance article.)

No, this last year was something different.  It had to do with planetary conditions, astrological configurations, openings in consciousness on a massive scale, and who knows what else.  I certainly have not been the only one that was affected.  But it feels like the transmissions lines are clearing up again - so to speak.  And that is GOOD. 

Even in the really trying times that I have gone through I have still had moments of Joy and happiness almost every day.  But this is Joy that just kind of sneaks up on me when I am relaxed and at peace.  It comes from doing my healing and following my path to the best of my ability.  It comes from paying attention, and being willing to do whatever I am led to do. It comes from having faith and letting go of the future.

I Love this Spiritual Path because it works.  It works to help my experience of life be better today.  What tomorrow is going to bring is not any of my business today.  I will find out what is going to happen when it is time to find out.  More is always revealed.

I am just very, very grateful that I know who I am today.  I am grateful that I have tools that work to help me cope with this human life business. I am grateful that I know I do not have to be perfect to know that I am Loved.  I am grateful to be alive today and to be in recovery.  I am very grateful to feel passionately committed to my Truth and to be following a Spiritual Path that is exciting and wonderful much more often than it is painful and terrifying.

I hope you all find some Joy sneaking up on you too.  Just try to relax and let go - and who knows.  ;-)

With Wishes of Great Joy to Me and You all too,
Robert

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