Between the Cracks: A blog by Albert Clayton Gaulden

Thanksgiving is just ended and already the stores are trying to sucker and shame you into buying a lot of presents for family and friends for the Holidays. Their collective message should really be “Buy a lot of stuff so we can keep our doors open”. Oh, they’ll have mark-downs going into the Holiday shopping rush and discount more as Hanukkah and Christmas draw closer hoping that all the Blogs and Internet passionate pleas to keep your favorite emporium cha-ching cha-ching cha-chinging so they can bank your bucks while you get deeper and deeper in debt.

Step out of line. Deep freeze your credit cards. Instead ladle soap in a homeless shelter. Find a family or two less fortunate and make their tykes’ eyes open wide when they open your presents.

Here are a few Holiday suggestions that won’t break the bank and will keep your family out of the poor house:

1. Have the youngest member of the family draw and color red a large ‘get-out-of-debt thermometer. Hang it in the kitchen near the fridge where everyone sees it several times a day. Start a pay-yourself program. Have a gallon jar near the thermometer so all members of the family can contribute to eliminating bills. Mark the thermometer with the amount of money the family owes, except house notes and car payments. As money comes in, begin to color the amount paid off green. I know families who have done this and it is more fun than all the surprise presents you’ll ever open.
2. Make presents instead of buying them. Find photographs that family and friends cherish and put them in a home-made photo album. Shellac a favorite picture onto an unusual piece of wood. Make a frame.
3. Go online and find second-hand books on Amazon.com that your Holiday family and friends might enjoy reading. There are books in decent condition for a few pennies.
4. Draw names and limit the amount one can spend on a gift-$5.00 maximum.
5. Have a pot luck dinner and have someone bring a gift for a child. There are a lot of organizations that have lists of needy children.
6. Visit shut-ins at Assisted Living Facilities or seniors you know in your neighborhood who would appreciate a cake you baked or a drop-in to just say hello.

I don’t like to tell people what to do but I am big on sharing ideas that have worked for me and people I know. Let’s all make a pact that come January 2, 2009 we will have less debt that we did before we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukah. Send me your solutions to less debt and a happier Holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Holidays! God rest ye merry gentlemen and ladies and young boys and girls! 

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://tinyurl.com/5gycfm.

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No matter whom you voted for in the recent election, we now have a new President and we ought to give him our loving support through prayer and proactive behavior. As I write and counsel, thought impressions are more powerful than knives and guns. Words sting but silent and invisible nasty vitriol can affect the energetic universe in which we all live. This swirling movement of resonance impedes the efforts of the Divine to reach us with guidance. And what is at the root of such imagery is fear-fear sired by dark and dangerous pits of anger and rage camouflaged by trying to speak in the name of a great teacher. Christians must be particularly careful about letting their personal dogma or beliefs color their sensibility.

So what did President Barack Obama inherit as Commander-in-Chief of this great nation? What are his challenges? What part do you play in the return to greatness of our country that was founded upon freedom to worship as one chooses not as a Christian nation (this is the most errant pitfall in thinking that many of us in the United States preach. If you are guilty of this, change your sermon!)

Barack Obama must understand and implement a policy of under-spending; the effort to become solvent again begins with us as individuals. Our corrections here at the Sedona Intensive, and personally for each of us, began with spending less and paying down debt. If that meant cutting out services and dispensable purchases, we are doing it. As a nation, we must reduce the debt by collecting taxes and paying down what we have already spent. The deficit is beyond comprehension but it is not beyond our capacity to reduce it measurably. As I say constantly, Obama and all of us are going to have to rebuild the house that greed destroyed ‘brick by brick and stone by stone’. We are in an era of the Great Reconstruction-from ground zero-back up to a house we can make an affordable home.

Barack Obama must influence our nation in staying out of countries that do not want us and can legislate and govern as they so choose. Dictators rule because the people let them. The United States fought a Civil War because, among other reasons, one half wanted to free the slaves and my ancestors wanted to keep them. Let other countries fight their own battles-let them decide to what lengths they are willing to go to be free, to establish a government they are willing to die for to have-and it may not be the democracy that we have in this country. Oil interest bullies, Rovian rogues and clandestine operators get us into wars. We know from the facts the war in Iraq started by lies and distortions. Obama has pledged to seek peace and not war. The part you play is to pray for peace and to send vibrations of harmony out into the universe.

Barack Obama must be more non-partisan than a Democrat. He must reach out to those who opposed him, who voted against him, to garner their good will and support by listening to what they have to say; to take outside opinions into consideration. And he is smart enough to recognize the lunatic fringe from the freedom fighters; the bellicose religionists from the bountiful righteous.

Most of all Barack Obama must engage dialogue with the Divine, a Power greater than himself, God, if you will, for guidance in these glorious, but heretofore, perilous times. Although I have never believed that this place, this world, was the real reality, it is where we find ourselves to make the corrections for bad girl and bad boy behavior, engendered by a divided self from which intolerance and hatred are inflicted toward those whom we perceive to be “different” than we are.

Lastly, Barack Obama must once and for all lead us toward a colorblind Consciousness from a platform of not only tolerance for those of color, but to see us as one, the same, color be-damned. Our storyline may be different, our backstory in some cases involved more strife and struggle but we are in the eyes of God the same. Barack Obama can help heal this hundreds-year old rip in the fabric of this nation and turn to YES WE CAN with unanimity and harmony.

Did it ever dawn on you that you may have played a part in the devolution of this country? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror and seen your selfish and self-centered attitude that ‘it’s all about me?’ Well, as at 9/11 when I asked my friend Scott ‘What did I do to cause this tragedy?”, I have looked at myself and I have begun to implement psychic changes in consciousness to do my part to change our country. To change this nation I must change myself.

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Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://tinyurl.com/5gycfm.

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Nobody used to love to go places more than I did. In the good old days of Clinton-omics, “let the good times roll…” played on the jukebox in my head. I had my bags packed and passport in hand for whatever Port ‘o Call beckoned this motley crew. If the dollar fell while we were in El Cordoba or Timbuktu, non problemento-there was always an ATM that would throw cash at us. And like that sassy profane and trailer-trash belle from O’Hara, we’d cry, “Let’s think about that tomorrow.”

And ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the feeding frenzy of easy money and endless credit came to a screeching halt. I got word that the ‘one-stop shopping with an unlimited equity line of credit had been reversed just as I was trying to get some dough from that slit at the money machine: This account is overdrawn and there will be no more where this came from! And then the record changed. It lamented my loose ways with money as it spun “Ain’t that a shame…”

As they say on TV and in the movies, fast forward six months and you will catch me balancing my check book, cutting back on vanities and living on what I make every two weeks. Sometimes it feels as if I went to sleep a ‘fat cat’ and woke up dead broke with a bad memory about how it happened. But I have been a student of Buddha too, too long not to know that his core message is “Wake up and pay what you owe!”

Okay I am rewriting the wisdom of this great teacher, but waking up to what things cost and how and when they must be paid for has changed me more than any other single life lesson I have ever remembered.

So the next time you want to blame the banks and the traders and stock brokers-the stupid real estate market that dared crash and diminish the value of your house thousands of dollars-think again. We all got caught up in “get rich quicker” and forgot a caveat so ancient it’s probably in the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone: “If it’s too good to be true…” You know the way that old saw goes. So do what I do: go back to basic arithmetic and reinvent your budget. Save not spend. Get to know your neighbors and stay away from London Town. Be patient. This lesson will roll back around in a few years. Let’s hope we’ve learned that it is more blessed to save than spend.

-Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You.  For more information, visit: http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

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