Can Others Feel Kundalini?

This was a question that came up a while ago and it was something I was certain was obvious to anyone who would be around me after whatever it was that had happened to me: blast of light, lightening strike, rocket engines taking off, take your pick of what “that” thing was that happened on that fateful day that left you in deep mystery about what had happened.  Well it was kundalini, that’s what.  I was asked if this energy was obvious to others and it triggered an old memory I had those first few weeks after my awakening. And the answer is no.  Those not awake will not feel your energy.  Okay, mostly. Sometimes they can.  Alright, that didn’t sound very clear, did it?

Clearly, no one was feeling my energy. I literally thought that I had a giant neon sign over my head that first month after the energy raised.  I really felt exactly that way until I realized, no, no one was picking up on this!  What a relief!

Except that as time went on, I began to see clusters of curious behavior that suggested that some people, not everyone, was feeling something. I wasn’t sure at first, so I did what I always do: I sat back and observed to see if I could gather enough data on the subject that would inform me more one way or the other.  All of this took a while, it didn’t happen overnight.  So the answer here is that in some cases, yes, some people can.  Mostly, they don’t. Clear as mud?  Read on.

This is why it may be that you might want to be aware of this when or if someone starts acting weird around you.  It seems that there is a range of reactions in my experience.  It tends to be either a bliss response (or approaching that-say an unusual attraction or enthusiasm in your direction) or the opposite, which could present itself along the lines of anger, upset, frustration, and fear.  I am telling you this because it has been an observation of mine and it might help to clarify some odd instances of how some people will react to you.  I have had both.  I really wish that it was more nuanced, but in my experience it usually isn’t, at least for me.  People here are not mature enough to know how to deal with the energy that could catalyze their own flow of prana in themselves.  I am hopeful that this trend will change and I think that if it is going to change, now would be the time in our history that it would do so (fingers crossed).  To do this, I think that we need people who are more accepting and surrendered in their lives.

In my garden…

I think that the best thing to always do is to remain neutral when it happens.  Someone is responding to something in you a certain way and my sense is that it can move them to extremes.  I now prefer to keep my bliss to myself and not have hitchikers or hijackers along for the ride. For those who act more peaceful and give me that look that tells me they are spellbound, I have to realize that they aren’t spellbound by me at all, they are actually responding to their own insides and how it makes them feel.  Yes, in some cases they may think it is coming form me, and in a sense they are right, but what they feel as a result of that actually has more to do with their own capacity to feel what they are capable of when it comes to a flow of prana and the bliss it can bring.  In short, when someone is feeling prana that might be attributed to me they are feeling it in their own world on their own.  It is like how we are all breathing the same air.  Is the air me? Is it you?  Well now perhaps you can see how silly it might be to think the air comes from someone like myself or anyone for that matter.

I will add one caveat to all of this, which is that you can project this energy to a person. The energy body is not limited to location, and this is why people can do reiki atunements, or why the power of prayer can make sudden changes in outcomes.  We can send energy to people, yes, it is true, but I don’t know that we really know everything there is to know about how this even works from an energy standpoint, we just knows that it can and does work. Are we sending energy or are we communicating with that person’s own higher self or energy body and they accept the idea that there is more energy available to them?  I say this in the way I do because it is like me bringing you a bucket of water that I just filled from a boundless ocean just fifty feet away from us.  Do you see what I mean by that? Am I actually sending energy or am I sending the suggestion that more energy could be available to them, and because they pick up on it, they do….and they do this based on my own thought of sending X amount of energy to them? And who knows, it could be a bit of both.  I really wish we were further along in our study of this energy than we are.  I suppose we could set up experiments to make some important determinations about how this all works. Okay, I know, you probably think I am just splitting hairs, here.  You might be right, but this is what I think about because I have always taken this attempt at being objective and asking lots of questions that maybe most don’t think to ask, but might be worth looking into if only for curiosities’ sake.

The best thing to my mind is to always bring it back to the person so they don’t focus on you as the source when these odd interactions happen.  There are gentle ways that you can do this and it all has to do with intention.  If they can feel the vibe then they can also pick up, perhaps subconsciously, your intention which might be that while you might inspire the energy, the energy is theirs.  If there is a conversation, keep bringing the talk back to how great it is that they are feeling what they feel and how it is something that they are doing and how great is that?  I have had people ask me if I was doing something to them.  I said each time that no, I was not doing something to them.  Instead, I would say, I was just serving as inspiration, nothing more.  I think this is correct and also keeps everything appropriate.  People can get hung up on the small truth and not be able to see the bigger truth that is looming.

I went through a period, a very definite one, where I was literally turning heads.  This started to happen when I was myself at peace with the energy flowing through me.  I just let it flow and didn’t worry about it. As a result, I felt so much better.  It was a breakthrough for me, actually.  I was able to embrace the inherent sensuality of the experience without feeling like I needed to tamp it down or feel shame about it. Its odd to think that I once felt shame about something so incredible, but I did.  But once that was being released,  and this happened quite suddenly in my life, I noticed how all of a sudden I would have these really quite comical things happen to me with the people around me.  It was the double-take or the rubberneck effect as I think of it. Maybe you have experienced this.  I might be walking down the street or driving in my car and I would see these people craning their necks to look at me.  In many cases these were people looking in my general direction with a look like they were trying to find something.  I had many instances where a woman would walk past me and would turn on her heel to scan the street in my direction as soon as she passed me, with a looks like she was trying to find something but had no idea what it was she as looking for, only to give up and keep walking. It was worth a giggle or two, yes.  I knew it wasn’t me, it was the energy.  If it had only happened once or twice it would not have meant much to me, but it was happening multiple times a day during a particular period in my process.

I have also experienced the dark side of what this energy can do to people.  I knew two people who quite literally wanted to destroy me because of it.  Both behaved nearly identically and instead of being able to part as friends, they had to demonize me just to move forward.  I also saw that as I removed blocked energy one ex would go into fits of rage within a 12 hour period of each block that I removed.  I have written about this before on the blog.  I counted nine times in a row where I had released blocked material and the person I was with would go into this rage meltdown each time within about a 12 hour period each and every time.  It continued to happen, but nine times in a row was enough for me to make a causal connection to what was happening.  There was NOTHING that I did to cause the person to go into a rage meltdown.  It was always something that she had somehow procured within herself as the source of the problem.  You just never knew who she was going to focus her rage at at any given time.  So there is that.  Usually in these cases, in my experience, there is always some kind of resistance in the person that precludes them from embracing whatever this seemingly disruptive energy means for them on a personal level.

People who are resistant to change will tend I think (just my own opinion thus far) to go into the negative range of expression or reaction.  Either you realize this and seek to engender a more compassionate understanding and patient approach with encouragement, or you just leave well enough alone.  In my case, I knew that nothing I could do would amount to any substantive change in their reaction.  And it is just that-a reaction-so don’t beat yourself up about it. It really isn’t about you.  It is very easy to hop on their karmic merry-go-round and then get caught up in their own pattern, which can be very hard for you.  It is sometimes better to leave well enough alone.

Those are my two cents on the matter. I think that if you yourself go in the direction of using it to your advantage, this will only result in bad karma, so please don’t do that.  Let it be what it is, a sign, an indication, but nothing more.

There is another instance where your own energy is affecting another person and this is what I would call the twin experience.  Some call it twin flames or twin souls or rays, take your pick. In this case, two people have become effectively entangled in their soul energy where a significant degree of telepathy is involved. These in my experience have always been karmic in nature even though those who have been so affected will hold out for this being something divine. While it leads to our divinity, it is a connection to the soul-self which operates under a very different sort of premise than the self in time and space (in this lifetime).  As a result, there is an overpowering draw to that person that goes beyond mere location and transcends the physical senses. It feels significant, and it is, but it is what happens when two people become connected, and it is always because of karma.  If anyone can illustrate situations where there is no karma whatsoever in one of these connections, I would like to learn more about that case because I have yet to see an instance where karma is not involved as the trigger into the experience.  It isn’t that I am narrow minded, it is that I have looked and observed and experienced this phenomenon and at no point have I found a compelling reason to say that this is a horse of a different color beyond karma being one important element in kicking off the connection.  So I am open to having my mind changed, I just haven’t seen it happen yet.

These are unusual instances and are unique to the two people involved, although there are many cases where once someone has had one connection, they may wind up with another, or several.  Again, all have karmic material at its foundation. That isn’t to say it is bad, not at all.  It does present challenges, though, very real ones, and you should be aware of this.  It can lead to loving their soul but having real challenges that are nearly diametrically opposed to that soul which feels perfect to you about who that person is in their present life. This leads to a conundrum for people in relationships like this.  It is, to my mind, a call to learning how to step into the soul-self in a more embodied and authentic way.  This takes real work to do and it can take a lot of time and requires a lot of patience.  The soul, though, will always seem beyond your reach in this lifetime for the simple reason that it does not exist in time, but rather projects parts of itself into time in order to become flesh.  In so doing, there is a new version of the soul created with a personality and a body, all of which were chosen in order to hopefully achieve certain specific goals. The soul does not appear to have any of this. It just IS.  I suspect this is why we reincarnate in the first place, which is to work through things that the soul cannot in its no-time-space state.  There is a song that says, “In heaven, nothing ever happens at all…” and there is a certain truth to this.  How do you have things happen when there is no time or space?  Where is there to go when you can be aware of being potentially everywhere and everywhen?  It seems the soul needs these projections in order to focus itself more narrowly, to take on roles, conditions, and the mask of personality in order to work through certain dramas central to its needs and concerns, whatever those might be.

Those are my two cents on the phenomenon, and it isn’t to strip it of its meaning or importance, only to leaven it with what I think is an important ingredient so that we don’t have a blindside to some important aspects of the experience.  There might just be a very real reason why you react and respond to the Other the way that you do especially when it is a negative reaction.  That bit of resistance that you are feeling is pointing out  the work you need to do most likely. I think this is the only way these unions will ever see a significant level of peace within them, which is to say they could be a call to change, real substantive change.  Otherwise, you will be caught up in the maelstrom of your own triggers, all karmic in their foundation, and it is possible you will be something like those people I discuss earlier who would go into melt-down after melt-down.  If you have had an experience along these lines, I am all ears (and eyes).  I am open to learning more, so if you have something to add, I would love to hear about it.

Blessings, P.

Is There An Energetic Connection With Restless Leg Syndrome?

Restless Leg Syndrome is a condition that many people experience. It can be a distracting sensation, which is often a desire to shake or move their legs, although there are other symptoms that are also part of this syndrome. Because of my posts on leg chakras, some readers have wondered if there is a connection between our vital energy (prana or chi) and restless leg syndrome. I have begun to wonder about it myself as a result of reading comments from readers.

While I cannot say for certain, what I can say is that there are a few coincidental elements that might connect the two. If there is, it will most likely be related to how blocked energy can be present in the legs. What I mean by this is that it has been known that for whatever reason, there appears to be a connection between past repressed emotion and certain places in the body that will seem to store that energy until it is released, which generates emotional relief for those who do this kind of work. I will say, however, that while I have myself experienced hundreds of these releases of stored emotional energy and understand the many ways that it can be released, I have not made a clear connection between that and RLS. What I do know is how much harder it is to release the blocked energy in the legs. I suspect that because of their distance from the core of the body that their energetic potential is different, perhaps less intense, and as a result, more difficult to bring changes in the same way that are seen in the core or torso region where the “larger” more powerful chakras as located.

The thing about the chakra system and the vital energy system in general is that it is not an entirely physical system. This energy system, while appearing a lot like nerve channels to those who can sense them, are not physical in the way that nerves or the vascular system is. It is one reason why modern science does not take the subject seriously despite the fact that the Chinese have carefully mapped out these energetic lines throughout the body with such specificity that their mapping has brought us the meridian system that is used for acupuncture and acupressure therapies that hospitals often use because they have found that they work for certain conditions. They don’t pretend to know why it works, only that it does and because this is minimally invasive, they use it. Additionally, in India, this same system was also mapped out and are instead called “nadi” instead of “meridian.” The nadi were known to house blocked or stored emotion and the ladder of yoga as it is referred to often details exercises intended to dislodge this blocked material from the nadi system. But it is the very same thing as the Chinese system, but with the addition of the chakras, which are described as being like wheels, and all sorts of illustrations have been made down through the centuries to help people to visualize them (like lotus or other flower forms for instance). While the Indian system does not appear to identify the points along the meridians that the Chinese use for needling in acupuncture in order to open up blocked energy pathways, neither does the Chinese system conceive or acknowledge a wheel-like vortex called a chakra either. I suspect that this is a cultural difference, and may also be attributed to what the adepts were doing, an outcome of their abilities and their focus when it came to subtle energy like prana or chi.

That said, being able to divest this energy that is stored from the body has as its end result in helping to release the stored burden upon the psyche or of the self. It is liberating to do this work, and it has the effect of shifting the physical chemistry in a long-term fashion of the body, which has positive effects on physical and mental health.

Consider if you have stored fear or anxiety, psychologists know that this stored or repressed memory has a recursive nature that can stay with a person their whole life if the issue isn’t dealt with. Every time that the person is triggered, so too is a burst of adrenaline or norepinephrine released, which puts the body into a pitched flight-like mode which most associate with fear. If allowed to be triggered often, the body wears under such a condition and disease of a degenerative nature could creep in if this trigger is, exercised often. The body does best in stasis or a balanced state.

What medical science has to say on the subject is best summed up by this article about a potential breakthrough in understanding the physiology of the condition which was published in November 2018 in Science Daily:

This new research indicates that the involuntary leg movements in RLS are caused by increased excitability of the nerve cells that supply the muscles in the leg, which results in an increased number of signals being sent between nerve cells.

Targeting the way messages are sent between nerve cells to reduce the number of messages to normal levels may help prevent the symptoms of RLS occurring. This could be achieved by new drugs that block the ion channels that are essential for the communication between nerve cells.

The research conducted by the University of Gottingen in conjunction with the University of Sydney and Vanderbilt University involved measuring the nerve excitability of motor nerve cells of patients suffering with RLS and healthy subjects.

The next step is to investigate the effect of different medications in patients and the effect on RLS.

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114234848.htm

If RLS can be attributed to chi in the body, then a treatment will most often be more of a bandaid, a therapy that would likely never change the condition itself, but would bring relief through taking a chemical into the body that aids in the ionic actions that the quote describes. While it may be possible that vital force of chi/prana could have a role to play in stimulating RLS chemistry in the body, it could prove helpful to investigate alternative therapies before using chemistry.

So is there any relief produced using acupuncture or variants of it? It turns out that it has been used. The following article, while technical, provides the point locations used in a therapy and could be reproduced with a skilled acupuncture therapist. I will note that the article describes both acupuncture and what they call “acuinjection” of a synthetic dopamine-like compound (from the look of it) into the acupuncture point. Anyway, it may be worth reading to learn more about this technique. It can be found here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028364/

In this article the result was that an extensive study did not return a conclusive result.

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2020/01170/acupuncture_for_restless_legs_syndrome__a.90.aspx

The following article is interesting for the method of massage that a Chinese practitioner can perform that is said to be helpful for RLS:

https://www.acufinder.com/Acupuncture+Information/Detail/Acupuncture+Helps+Restless+Legs+Syndrome

I hope that this helps those who have inquired about this topic. I had hoped to have had an opportunity to speak with a noted energy healer while on the Hawaiian islands in March, but we wound up not covering this topic before the trip ended. My hope is that I will be seeing this healer again but this time in California before too much longer and will see if I can make a video of the encounter. Since uncertainty with Covid continues, no specific date is set, but it has been a topic of our discussion but we were so busy that we had trouble fitting it in on our last meeting. Hopefully I will be able to put something up in the next few months.

~Parker

Sailing Through The Pandemic

Hibiscus, Kuawai, March 2020

 

It is easy to get caught up with the swirl of emotion that is gripping the world right now, and with what has recently taken place with the events surrounding Covid-19,  the George Floyd death and the fallout from that, it gets hard to keep perspective. I will say, though, that being impacted by what has been taking place in the wake of the events in Minnesota are important to be touched by. This relates to increasing your level of awareness about what the trials that others who are not like you in terms of race or class go through.  With enough people aware the sheer mass of numbers of people doing this can help press for change.  While this process may be messy and imperfect, here in the States it has become clear that we have not made the kind of progress that our sisters and brothers of color have needed. It is easy, though, to get caught up in the tornado of emotion and to get swept away by it, and then finally to find ourselves in a deep state of division. Everyone on both sides will have a reason for why that division exists and it has mostly to do with something about how values and beliefs are different between those groups.  Regardless of the side, the situation as it is right now often helps to encourage  fear and upset. I have seen a nation gripped by angst, upset, anger, and frustration over conditions in our country, some of which are not immediately changeable (like the President in office) while others are (like treating people unlike you with common decency).

I find it curious how much time my friends spend paying attention to tweets made in the middle of the night by our President and allowing themselves to feed on upset and triggers. Why would you spend so much time on someone who could be gone in a year?  Are you afraid he might win again?  Work to make sure your voice is heard and contribute to campaigns like I did.  I will note, however, that the two people I had hoped might win the nomination in our country did not.  I gave a decent amount of money to both campaigns.  I hoped it would bring change, but it didn’t.  I didn’t lose sleep over it because that is how it is going to go.  This is the direction we are going in. When you can learn to accept things that you wont be able to change, you will sleep better at night.  I hate how I know that gravity is going to make me look old, but I don’t let that worry rob me of sleep or peace.

It is important to learn how to cultivate calm.  Not forced calm. It is important how to learn how to be aloof.  This calm aloof nature does not mean that you don’t care, it means that you are not prepared to have your peace and joy taken from you because you dipped into the well of unresolvable human emotion.  The fact remains that a tweet by Trump will not itself resolve itself on your terms. I know he is a buffoon, so why would I act surprised by what he says?  It’s like hoping gravity will somehow be negated one day and everything will change because I wanted it to.  Pish! Nor will similar words of his spoken or written by others ever resolve in a way that you want.  No, clearly, it is important for being at peace to learn to find it on your own terms without having to rely on anyone to provide that for you. This is an inside job.  Only you can do it.  People will be people, the world will spin and events will unfold.  Are you willing to allow the upset of others and your perceived ignorance that they embody to turn over your own boat on what could have otherwise been calm waters? Do what you can do, help those that you can help, and then be at peace knowing you did what you could do.  If you tilt at powers beyond your orbit, you will tend to come up upset, you just will.

It is useful to consider this quote:

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kind-hearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings you,
and when death comes, you are ready.
—Tao Te Ching, 16

 

I know how hard it can be to get swept up in fear and to have that fear rule you.  But what is your fear based on?  Are you afraid of catching Covid-19?  It could help to educate yourself about it, to read widely and to make sure that you are sourcing your information beyond merely mainstream media.  Why?  Some have come forward to point out that the deaths from Covid-19 are in fact more in line with flue and other deaths each year in he United States. On a pure numbers level, so far at least, the numbers and the severity of the pandemic has itself appears to have been hyped by many in the news.  I know how unpopular this assertion will be with most of you, and you might think that I am off base.  Now of course it is possible that we in the States will not act in a careful way as a group and the virus will spread more.  It’s possible.  Covid is real, and it is a real concern that we each need to treat with care and awareness, but this does not mean that it should rob you of your joy or peace.

When there was a lot of mixed messages being sent about Covid-19 in the early months of its spread, I was finding that there were those arguing about the efficacy of face masks.  Fauci himself has come forward to explain that he and others cautioned Americans against using the M-95 masks for fear that those in the medical industry would run out.  The problem here is that this caused news to spread that masks were not as useful as had previously been thought.  This then led to a debate about masks that continues to the current day.  OSHA recently released a statement explaining that masks reduce oxygen levels to what they consider to be unsafe levels and that this needed to be understood.  What all of this has served to do is to create an atmosphere of uncertainty for many people, and with uncertainty comes fear.  Keep reading, keep educating yourself, but expand your reading beyond mainstream media because as I said in my previous post, the mainstream media, now owned by about six billionaires, has its own financial interests that serve to keep them from reporting as truthfully about they news as we might need them to.

Absent this, after having traveled half-way across the world recently at the earliest stages of the Covid pandemic, I saw how I had been in airports and locations where the virus was actively spreading in large numbers.  I kept to myself, I washed my hands and I exercised care and awareness about touching my face and all of those very basic things. Had I gotten Covid?  As far as I can tell, no. Was I asymptomatic?  Possibly, but I wouldn’t know that for sure without a test, and the testing itself has been questioned in terms of its accuracy.  So I did what I knew was best to do:  I stayed home.  I made strategic trips and then relaxed and used my solitude to meditate, to do breath-work and to find my center of peace.  I found that this was an excellent opportunity for me to cultivate this peace I am talking about.  I allowed myself to be still, to do nothing.  This reminded me of many of the cornerstone moments during my initial awakening experience, say, five years in.  I had allowed my mind to become much more busy since then, cluttered, even. this was a call back to the woods of my deeper self.  What a wonderful opportunity! While the world seemed to be burning, I was finding calm.

I was able to go to my studio and work alone. Well, truth be told, this wasn’t all that different from before because most of the time I work alone.  I was able to get caught up on work, to focus on getting ahead post-pandemic. I saw the silver lining and how if I could be careful financially, I could turn this into a win.  Unfortunately, not everyone has been so lucky.  For some folks they are out of a job without a sense of what they will get when they go back to looking again.  Others seem to have sunk into a deep morass of sorts emotionally.  There is always hope.

Limit Your Social Media Exposure

One important strategy has been to limit my exposure to social media.  I run my business on social media, but I just found that by ignoring my own personal accounts, I could focus on my artwork.  There, it is an island of calm filled with beauty.  My personal page might scrutinize what this or that leader may be saying or doing, but I have this one island where none of this ever even comes up.  The people who follow me now seem to like that….a lot.  I get to be one of the messages on social media that is positive.  It isn’t that I am ignoring what is going on, I just don’t go there.  I don’t.  I know that to discuss it would invite discord and infighting.  I have seen a lot of it already.  People are on weird hair triggers lately, it seems.

The Power of Gratitude

There is a feeling, an emotion almost that I find is critical to authentic joy and that is gratitude.  By being able to find gratitude in any moment, the self is transported to an entirely different place.  Joy grows there.  By being willing to let others freak out and be in an uproar, I could allow others to feel what they needed to feel.  I just didn’t need to feel that range of emotion.  I didn’t need to tune in or tap into that well of uncertainty, anger, frustration, chaos and fear.  There is this sense in some people that if you aren’t caught up in these same feelings of others that you somehow don’t care.  No, that isn’t it.  I do care, but I have found that it does not good riding the same merry-go-round as everyone else because doing that never gets me anywhere.

So bliss swells within me.  I often feel more remote, alone, but I remind myself that the whole business of awakening is itself a solitary act of reclaiming my sovereignty as a person.  I don’t need to feel as others feel in order to understand what they are going through.  I just don’t need to have those emotions as part of my journey to awareness and innermost change.  I grow more simple, and I grow more happy.  I am so grateful to even be here seeing all of this take place.  I know that this will all lead to change most likely, and I place my mind on how I would like to see that change manifest.  I remain hopeful, but I will also accept what comes instead of railing against it.  If the change is not deep enough, then it just means that we keep pressing for change. The more of us all saying the same thing, the more likely it is to change.  There are forces behind our systems of finance who want very much to keep the apple cart upright, so it may not all happen overnight.  I am well aware of the strands of consciousness on the planet that would like to keep the system as it is for the simple reason that it serves their needs.  Chop wood, haul water: more work needs to be done.

Breathe

So breath work is an amazing tool to help alter how you feel.  It has the benefit of bringing you to a state of deep calm in short order if you do the breathing the right way.  Also, alternating nostril breathing, which consists of holding one nostril closed while you breath in through one nostril for a series of breaths (say four, for instance) and then alternating with the other nostril for another round of four breaths in can be amazingly helpful.  Also, the speed with which you breathe is important, too.  I have noticed that the breathing that creates the greatest calm for me is the same kind of breath that I take when I am sleeping.  I suspect that when you breathe like this you are sending a signal to the brain that you are in fact calm.  You might not be, but the trick in all of this is that you can trick your brain into changing all of the signals for chemical production in the body that will then support a calmer state.  This means dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and other feel-good drugs that the body produces.  The way you breathe is by drawing in a long slow breath in, hold that breath for a couple of seconds and then exhale long and low until your lungs empty of air.  Then, just like at full breath, you pause for a moment before taking the next lung-full of air. By breathing in this way, you set up the signals that you are calm.  And it will calm you.  In fact, if you feel upset and simply sit down and do this exercise for four or five minutes you may just realize that you have forgotten what it was you were upset about before!  If you do find yourself in just such a place, examine how you feel and that particular state you are in.  I bet you will find that it is sooo different from your usual form of focus.  Yep; being a little defocused can help you to be calm and at peace. The problem was that you thought you had to be hypervigilant.

Length of time is also another important factor in getting good results from breath work.  I have found three to four minutes will do it for me quite well when I am upset. That length is shorter.  Sometimes I can take just a few breaths and feel renewed.  Try it and see how you can put this powerful technique to work for you.

Change Your Mind

Learning to train the mind to not constantly obsess is also an important skill to have.  To do this, it will probably most often mean diverting your attention away from what is bothering or upsetting you, and then allowing yourself to feel differently.  I know that this might seem a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but really, it is just a firm decision that you make and then you use your imagination to get you there.  That’s right you heard me say: use your imagination.  The truth is, the way a yogi or yogini will change their state of mind is through posture, breathing, and also how they use their imagination. What does imagining yourself in a beautiful flower garden do for you?  What does imagining sitting on the beach do?  Begin to imagine your happy place and use that to help shift and change your desire to go into repetitive thought and emotional patterns.  You can do this, and once you try and begin getting results, it can begin to snowball.  If you keep with it regularly, you will find within a certain amount of time (it might take a few weeks so be patient) that your mind is more calm and you are less vigilant and feeling fearful.  We have been a population all worrying about a brick falling from the sky and killing us.  I don’t think that a brick falling from the sky would be something you would see coming, so is it really something you should be worrying about?  Covid is like this. Do what you can.  Be careful, wash your hands, wear a mask, do all the things that will lower your chances of getting the virus, but does it help you any to constantly worry about catching it?  I would bet that you may have even imagined what it might be like if you caught the virus, how it would impact your life, and how you might feel, circling the drain of your life.  There are far better uses of your imagination, I can tell you.  Drink up this life while you have it. Others are now long gone long before they should have probably died, and you are still here.  Celebrate that.  Some things will be out of our control, but practice what you can that is in your control and then stop letting the unknowns rob you of the present moment, which is the point of power in your life.

Eat Good Food/Sing/Listen To Great Music

Take care of yourself.  Eat simply, you can, on a budget.  Let the economic uncertainty be.  Cook beans and rice and dress it up from time to time.  Be in nature.  Burn sweetgrass, sage, and copal.  Write, sing, create art and music. Listen to music that soothes you, lifts you up, and helps you to flush your system of what might feel like toxic emotions. It will all help!  Express yourself however best suits you.  It is still a wonderful world and you can feel wonderful within it.

For me, this pandemic has been a wonderful opportunity for me to go within, to examine, and to work on my inner peace.  It’s been great and it has helped me to keep my head.  In every bad situation there is always something positive to come out of it.  After years of reading why it is so beneficial to invest in a down market, I finally was able to do so recently. Most often people try to catch an investment wave after it has already gained steam and as a result they often lose out, always chasing after one bubble after another. By patiently waiting and then being ready,  doing this one simple thing resulted in my net worth nearly doubling within a very short time. When you consider that many are in uncertainty economically, being able to have this one small silver lining is a blessing.  I zig when others zag.  I did that not out of emotion, but through a calm state of awareness.  You can do the same kinds of things with other events, too, and it can bring you a better result than if you were just carried away by emotion.

While others fear what they will be doing next year, I am working on building awareness of my business in a way I have never done before.  I am doing this cheaply and carefully, yes, but wisely.  I am designing new work, some of which is made to be affordable for my customers.  I want to help them, not soak them financially.  They will return the favor with their excitement and gratitude.  That is a good life to have, in my estimation. Doing what you love and living a good life filled with peace and gratitude. In time I have found that the more you cultivate this the less prone you will be to worry and fear.  Fear is the mind killer.  Isn’t that what Frank Herbert wrote in his novel Dune?  Isn’t it better to have a heart filled with gratitude and love instead of fear? It is all a choice, and you get to decide.  What you decide in the moment will tell the story of your life.  You get to write that script. You can change all of this at any time. You can even choose to ignore what I am telling you if you want!  How cool is that?

I hope the very best for you, I do.  If you find yourself in times of trouble, try putting a few of these practices into play and see how you do.  I wish you all the best! Once again I will provide you with the quote I used earlier as a reminder for how to be:

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kind-hearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings you,
and when death comes, you are ready.
—Tao Te Ching, 16

Disinformation In the Age of Covid

I was going to list some basic problems facing us as consumers of the mainstream news today as it relates to Covid-19, but upon reflection I realized that there were other issues that were just as important that are NOT being reported on and will be information that might be new to you.  Luckily, if you want to get up to speed, you have someone who spends most of his news time digging deep into the news and finding the sources that are doing the hard work and who are not a part of traditional mainstream media who are being paid by rich billionaires, which is the case with mainstream media today (six billionaires own the majority of media within the United States). The mistake many make is assuming that the mainstream media is better than any other source. Unfortunately, if you didn’t already know, there is a crisis of information in the midst of a wealth of it.

The problem a lot of people have is they can’t spend all day tracking down whether a news story has been reported correctly.  So many have become used to getting their news from mainstream media.  The only problem with most of the media giants is they have business interests that preclude them from being willing to just tell you like it is.  It may sound cynical, but I have observed from news cycle to news cycle that this winds up being true.  As a result, if you want the full story, you aren’t going to be getting it from MSNBC, NBS, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, or FOX.  The problem though is if you do watch these news outlets, you may feel there is nothing wrong with their reporting and may wonder if I am off my rocker and gone full tin-foil hat. You wont do that until or unless you dig deeper to find that in reporting by the New York Times that important facets of the story have either been ignored or are just being incorrectly reported full-cloth. Anyone who knows what happened in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration will know what I mean.  That, however, has not been a one-off.  Instead, it exists as a continuing modus operandi where certain key interests come into the picture that effect reporting honestly.  The thing is, you don’t know about the existence of these interests in the midst of news reporting.  Digging deeper, though, outside of their news reporting will most often begin to pull back the curtain on what these interests are.  It isn’t like they will tell you because they themselves are biased by the forces that come to them from above.  Again, I know this sounds conspiratorial talk, but all you need to do is to do the work and dig deeper in order to see just what it is that is being left out or being so skewed.  Then it becomes much easier to follow the money, because that is precisely what this is all about.

While I have no interest in going into a deep dive on why mainstream media hasn’t been doing its job for years now, I will provide you with a few examples of how these media giants fall short and why.

Remember the meltdown at Fukishima in the earlier portion of this decade? At the time, most news reporting appeared to be clear-eyed and upfront:  there had been an explosion in their reactor and some radioactive water had been released, but it was being contained. News reporting on NBC was interestingly muted on the topic and the other media giants more or less followed suit.  I had been looking at alternative media, which was back then composed of people doing investigations in Japan and along our Western coast to measure the radioactivity of rainwater both there as well as here along the North American continent.  I was able to see that none of this information, which was alarming and of great concern, was making its way into the mainstream news cycle.  Why would NBC be resisting doing hard hitting investigation into what had happened in Japan in March of 2011?  The corporation that owned NBC was G.E.  G.E. had supplied the nuclear equipment to the company that ran the plant in Japan.  Want to see your stock plummet anyone?  Not bloody likely.  G.E. stayed the quiet course and then came under criticism for it only later.

A generation ago our own C.I.A. developed a way of working or operating that involved using news agencies as a cover for operatives.  That all sounds well and good, but an outgrowth of that program was what was called Program Mockingbird involved the C.I.A. planting stories in media in order to influence American opinion about a host of subjects that the C.I.A. obviously felt were important to be told.  This amounted to propaganda pure and simple, and the effects of this program was that many news agencies  had become handmaidens of the intelligence state and had become subverted in being able to tell the truth to the American people.

In one case when a magazine began to reveal what the C.I.A. was doing within its own ranks, the C.I.A. sought to blackmail journalists who worked for the publication in order to keep them from revealing the truth of what had been happening, which was that the C.I.A. was running a propaganda program within their ranks and those of other news agencies.  This was done by a small liberal-leaning publication in 1967 called Ramparts.  Instead of the news media being an unwitting victim of C.I.A. infiltration, it was revealed that the media itself had become complicit in publishing propaganda, which was affecting news reporting in a variety of ways across the spectrum.  The C.I.A. had gone outside of its mandate of not acting against U.S. interests by pursuing an information war against the U.S. public, and this happened with the cooperation with the news media.

What happened years later with the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent reporting done on it across mainstream media is an example of how this took place again in our present day.  You need only examine how many C.I.A. operatives serve as “consultants” on shows that air on both FOX, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC, along with CNN.  In most cases the backgrounds of these consultants is never even disclosed, which in some cases result in direct conflicts of interest, or impropriety at the very least.

The fealty that U.S. media pays to outside interests like the C.I.A.  also results in having news cycles upended because of the financial interests of those who own the business.  It might be oil, or it might be to get a pipeline through a country that is resisting such a move. Bloomberg News recently had no critical reporting of its owner who ran as a late candidate in the Democrat primaries.  Similarly, The Washington Post, now owned by Jeff Bezzo’s shows no sign of doing hard hitting journalism on the slew of issues being exposed by other news companies about Amazon’s treatment of its workers.

NPR fairly recently hired CEO John Lansing of USAGM, which is the parent body behind better-known Voice Of America as its own Chief Officer. The only problem with this is that VOA is a news agency funded by the U.S. government as a propaganda arm of its own operations.  What makes this  so bad is that VOA and its many subsidiaries that operate in other countries was found to be ginning up a new war with Russia.  Further, Lansing has been on record stating that his work for VOA was real journalism that was free from government influence.

To understand what is at stake for us and for those who listen to NPR regularly, it is important to understand what Laura Flanders said in a recent article on Common Dreams about the subject:

The high dudgeon ill-suited a man who, as he spoke, oversaw an empire of federally-funded influence campaigns with origins in Cold War US psy-ops: The Voice of America, Radio y Televisión Martí, and Radio Free Europe, as well as Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Persia. According to Yasha Levine at Pando, when Lansing took the reins of this holding company, which was then called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, it had a budget of $721 million, reported directly to the Secretary of State, and was managed by a revolving crew of neocon and military think tank experts, including Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

SOURCE: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/15/voice-america-npr-new-ceo-lansings-glass-house

Now contrast this with the view that most people have of NPR as that friendly, left-leaning news agency that begs for money each year, supposedly helping to boost its image as somehow more independent than all other forms of media.  Admit it, NPR always struck you as being fair-minded and inclusive.  In fact, many of you even listen to NPR and feel that they can be trusted…..because they feel so friendly.

When media isn’t hiring propagandists, it is not choosing to exercise full rigor on vetting information that others provide it.

To show how information is poorly vetted by mainstream news, recently the mayor and governor of Minnesota both claimed that the majority of people being arrested in their cities during recent protests and riots were outsiders who did not live in their area.  This was picked up by most in the mainstream media and was trumpeted as true even though there was clear evidence that this was in fact not true. Either both leaders were themselves misinformed, or had lied to the people. Other news agencies dug into the story in order to point out that this number was in fact incorrect and was really just propaganda (I am betting that the leaders felt embarrassed that their own people had done all of the demonstrations, the rioting and looting that had taken place and chosen to lie instead of telling the truth). The problem is that CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR and others were all reporting this information without doing their due diligence first. This effectively amounts to malpractice, but when are they taken to task?  Sometimes, though, a news agency will do the right thing and admit errors, but more often than not, they don’t. Even when a story has been shown to have been made up out of whole cloth many news agencies will simply refuse to admit error.  This effectively serves to keep the propaganda story in place through the sin of omission.

In a later article in Slate, this assertion about what took place in Minnesota was revealed to be incorrect. In that article it goes on to state:

The officials were questioned about their claims after journalists went to look at jail records and found that the overwhelming majority of people arrested in connection to the unrest in Minneapolis had Minnesota addresses. NBC affiliate KARE 11 found that of 36 cases, 86 percent had Minnesota addresses. Fox 9, meanwhile, has a slightly different number, but it tells the same story.

SOURCE:  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/minnesota-jail-records-arrested-inside-state-george-floyd.html

Susan Rice, who served in the Obama administration came forward at this same time period in an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and said that what was happening in Minnesota was “right out of the Russian playbook…” While she admitted in the interview that she was no longer privy to intelligence reports, she suspected that this was the case. What?!? Bear in mind, Blitzer sat quiet and still as Rice made this statement and did nothing to dig deeper into it or to question it’s veracity.  There was no push back, which is an important job, a duty, of every self-respecting journalist. We know now why this statement, which had absolutely no supporting proof whatsoever, was allowed to be trumpeted across the news. The news media, including CNN had become invested in an evidence-free conspiracy theory about Russia for close to three years. To understand this a little better, we need to understand how such a conspiracy theory was allowed to run free throughout mainstream in the U.S. media for three years.

Russia Russia Russia!

A U.S. president-elect colluding with Russia sounds like a very serious thing.  It might be, were it true. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. If you watch Rachel Maddow, you would see her sow fear on her show night after night, even going so far as to say that Russia might turn off the gas to countless Americans during a cold snap in the winter. After countless efforts to frame a story around Trump being involved or those in his transition team with cozying up to Russia, the story grew legs and did so with the flimsiest of information that was touted as true. In order to understand what a “show” this all was, you have to do what I have prescribed, you have to dig into the details and follow where the information takes you.

The whole collusion mess hinged on several pieces of evidence, which came about in large part due to a hack of the DNC servers in the midst of the 2016 Presidential campaign. The DNC claimed that its servers had been hacked by agents inside of Russia, but when it came time for the F.B.I. to examine that server, the DNC refused.  Instead, it hired a company to examine its servers that was not connected to the F.B.I. and the F.B.I. appeared to blink. To date no source within the U.S. government has yet to examine the DNC servers.

Next, the F.B.I. claimed that a troll farm known as IRA had been acting on the part of Russia to sway public opinion during the Presidential campaign.  What the Mueller investigation did not directly reveal during Congressional testimony was the exact nature of the interference.  While that information was in the report for anyone to see, no news agency reported on it specifically within mainstream media with any degree of rigor.  It turns out that this troll farm had spent about $46,000.00 in Facebook ads during the campaign that included ads of Sanders bare-chested sitting atop a horse with Putin. Another ad was an ad to help men with problems related to masturbation by a Christian group, offering to, I kid you not, “give you a hand” with their problem. Other memes that came from the troll farm produced memes which were equally hard to see as being tied to the election at all. Then, after the election, in January and February, the troll farm directed about $100,000.00 worth of ads at Americans.  This, the F.B.I. insisted, was their proof.  As if I needed to point this out,  the Clinton campaign alone spent about one billion dollars in its ads during its campaign.  The amount spent by this troll farm was like using a toothpick to swat away a mosquito. Most of the money the troll farm spent fell outside of the election cycle.  And yet, if you search the internet you will see story after story about how influential this company was in changing the minds of Americans during the election. $46,000.00 would be a fraction of  a small company’s add spend for driving customers to their web sites in one month.  But you don’t know that, and as long as Americans are kept in the dark on this issue, the lie can be printed and no one will question. Those who do tell the truth are demonized and discredited, all of which are ad hominem in nature. Many of the stories that have been produced, one by NPR, still stick by the story that Russia was spending huge sums of money in this effort for changing the hearts and minds of the American public. In a story in February of 2018 The Atlantic admitted that the efforts of the troll farm were ineffectual. yes, technically Russia was involved in social media awareness or propaganda campaigns but the degree to which those in media and political circles tried to puff them up were laughable.

You wont at present see much in the way of how ineffective the efforts the IRA actually were in the press, but there are sources that point this out in very specific terms.  One of these is a study that looked at all of the available data covering the activity of IRA on U.S. internet sites like Twitter and Facebook.  You can find that study source HERE

The MIT Technology Review reached a similar conclusion.  Yes, there was interference, but it was minor in nature.  However, as the article points out, concern over the power of the Russian bots is probably overblown in the minds of most Americans.  This writer suspects that the concern is overblown because of how both those in the media and government have seized on the Russian interference and blown it out of proportion, to effectively seek to turn attention from the real problems here at home that we should all be attending to.  In short, this rather small fact has been the subject of a propaganda campaign to both paint Russia as an enemy and to divert attention away from the reasons behind why Hillary Clinton lost to a game show host. Hint:  things have gotten so bad in the U.S.politically that after decades of candidate hopefuls to the presidency, little if anything, has substantively changed. This is, in my personal view, the topic that should be at the forefront of our discussions today.  It is important because it hinges on how the popular perception of the loss of the middle class and the poor have not just been left behind, they have been crushed under the weight of support by these presidents to corporate interests. But I digress…

Gucifer II & The DNC Hack

The DNC hack has been shown to have been an inside job by whistleblower Bill Binney formerly of the NSA and the chief engineer of the internet snoooping software called Thinthread which collected data in a constitutionally responsible way in order to help combat terrorism, and not the result of internet hacking as has been represented.  But before this was discovered, a source came forward that seemed to be someone who knew about the DNC hack happening as if it had happened over the internet.  The source of the hack was described by media and political operatives here in the U.S. government as belonging to Russia based on an admission from a self-proclaimed hacker named Gucifer II  who had used a computer whose ISP originated within Russia and which also revealed that a Cyrillic keyboard had been used in his communication. Those in the intelligence field have pointed out that hackers wont tip their hand in terms of the type of computer that they use.  This hack, it was claimed, was proof that someone within Russia was acting against U.S. interests in the election. But hang on.  Wikileaks, it was claimed,  was the recipient of the hacked DNC data, which is one reason why Julian Assange was taken out of the embassy where he had been given asylum recently.  Assange, when asked, has said consistently that the information in the DNC emails did not come from a government source nor from a government actor, which also supports what Bill Binney explains, whose own analysis follows.  The problem with this assertion about the hack as has been proposed as having been performed over the internet are the details contained in the data itself.

It turns out that whenever a file is copied from a computer, phone, or similar device, a small bit of meta data is produced that tells you both about the computer from which the data is copied as well as the manner in which the data was copied. It becomes something of a general fingerprint that may not tell you precisely who acted, but it will tell engineers and forensic experts a lot about how the data was copied, whether it was copied over the internet or onto removable data, and the transfer rates involved, for example.

In interviews with top NSA technical director and whistle blower Bill Binney, Binney has helped to reveal that the meta data contained in the emails, those packets of information that are attached to the transfer of computer generated data,  shows that the supposed “hack” did not involve files being sent over the internet.  There are two reasons for this Binney says:  the file contained two indicators that it had been copied to a removable drive and that the time in which the file was copied, the time lapse between copying the data and full acquisition of it on another device, effectively its  “download speed” meant that it could not have been copied using the internet as the medium of data transfer.  The transfer rate, Binney explains, is much too fast for the internet.

In interviews with alternative media, Binney explained that he and other former and current intelligence officials, members of the group VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) which is a group of current and former officials of the United States Intelligence Community, including some from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence Bureau (INR), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) attempted to put the assertion that the DNC hack was done over the internet to the test. The group was formed in January 2003 as a way to protest the use of faulty intelligence  upon which the Iraq Afghanistan war was based. These members of the intelligence agencies transferred  data across the internet using servers all over the world to see how data rates compared to one another.  Their conclusions were the same for every service provider that they tested from Russia, the Balkans, Europe, Asia, and the U.S., which was that the data could not have been transferred in the time that the metadata indicated that the DNC emails had been copied. In fact, Binney explains, the transfer or copy rates were consistent with the speeds found when copying data from one computer to another through a wired connection and not through the medium of the internet.

Binney explains that when a file is copied to an external drive such as a thumb drive or a CD or DVD or other removable media, it results in a FAT file being produced.  A FAT file has as part of its protocol to always round the time base of the copy time up to an even fraction of a second, which is exactly what the Wikileaks file contained, even numbers.  All of these facts, Binney explains, is why the hack did not happen through the internet, but came from a removable drive.  SOURCES:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv0-Lnv0d0k

 

The implications of this find is that the hack was not as represented at all.  Instead, it is much more likely, Binney says, that an insider within the DNC who had physical access to the computers was involved in copying the email data between Clinton and others like John Podesta.   This may also mean that the DNC launched all of this as a way to shift attention away from the leak that happened from within their ranks by suggesting that it was Russia who did the hack.

The Steele Dosier

The Clinton campaign paid a company to try and dig up dirt on Trump through what is now known as the Steele dossier.  This document has itself fallen apart under scrutiny.  It contains heresay and innuendo, but was used in order to attack Trump and his allies.  In an article by The Hill on 5/09/19 it explains that,

Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.

The article goes on to say,

The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.

Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.

It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.

SOURCE:  https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442944-fbis-steele-story-falls-apart-false-intel-and-media-contacts-were-flagged

A dossier paid for by the Clinton camp with false information in it about their opponent that was used as the pretext to spy on Carter Page. Got it.

In recent developments, Flynn was exonorated in his part of having spoken to a Russian diplomat during the transition phase of the Trump Presidency, a move which the DOJ has proclaimed was itself not an illegal act.  In fact, the very conversation that Flynn had with a Russian diplomat was completely in keeping with conversations that high ranking officials have during transitions of this type. While Flynn may not have been entirely correct in his descriptions of what he remembered, this did not itself mean that he was somehow dealing with a Russian diplomat in a way that was improper.

As a result, the entire Russian collusion story was written down to an evidence-free conspiracy theory which took over two and a half years of time in reporting by the mainstream press and held many opponents of Trump in its sway.

It is important to note the players who were involved in doing the journalistic work that revealed the specious character of the Russia Collusion hoax to the American People,  none of which are in the mainstream media. Those who did that reporting are noted below and I will also point out are without exception, self-proclaimed liberal-leaning individuals.  Most of them are:

• Aaron Maté of Pushback
• Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept
• Mat Taibi and Katy Halper RollingStone’s Useful Idiots
• Chris Hedges of Truthdig and Common Dreams
• Jimmy Dore of The Jimmy Dore Show
• Crystal Ball and Saager Enjeti of The Hill’s Rising show
• Kyle Kulinski’s Secular Talk Radio

There are other news sources (like Joe Rogan) that are not thought of as bonafide journalists who do important work digging up information important to knowing the full story.  I will note that if you do your own search of news stories online that many of the examples I have shown you remains unavailable through mainstream sources.  Even now, you will only find limited admissions on the part of mainstream media that their reporting was wrong.  There remains a considerable bias which these outlets and others like them have revealed in mainstream media including Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Middle East (most recently).

This is why it is important to use media sources that are involved in reporting the news without the bias that exists within the billionaire-owned media outlets that have monopolized our news cycle. I will note that all of these reporters are either given broad leeway from their outlets (The Hill and Rolling Stone), or are independent media with no dog in the fight.  As a result, views of traditional media have been falling for years while viewership on alternative media has been rising.

The head of Comcast recently said that alternative media was killing his company.  Interestingly, Google, through Youtube, has been deplatforming (banning) some of these alternative news outlets or they have demonitized their shows as a way of marginalizing their content creation, trying to just get them to go away, or to cap their growth.  Fortunately, this is not working as for most, it only serves to galvanize support for a movement that seeks to be less politically polarized in reporting the news so that the public can know just what is happening in the world. For many of these journalists, they view this work as a battle for the heart of truth and freedom here in the United States.  Kuddos to all of them for bringing this truth to light.

In my view, these are the real journalists. There is plenty to not like about Trump, but if everyone who does not like Trump responds entirely in a knee jerk fashion to nearly everything he says, we may miss some important points about what is happening in our world.  In just the same way that many conservatives believed that there were weapons of mass destruction years after this assertion was proven demonstrably false, so too does a new generation of liberals believe that Russia is out to get us.  In the latter case, there is a very real concern that latching onto this narrative could fuel a new cold war effort with Russia and the same kind of arms race that once kept every person on the planet under the specter of nuclear annihilation.  The forces that are interested in just such a new cold war are  those who would profit from the buildup of arms from such a war.  We need to resist such moves if we are to have a more just and sane world for ourselves and our children.

Bloomberg News made it clear that they were not going to cast a critical eye on their owner while he was running as a candidate in the Democratic primary.  Also, in similar fashion, The Washington Post will not be overtly critical of its owner Jeff Bezos owner of Amazon either. Truth dies in darkness, or something like that.  These examples are plenty of fuel for concern about the principles in place over media ownership and where their interest lie and how those interests come into conflict with their being able to report on the news.  So buyer beware.

Now to make everything else so crystal clear, let me also say that on some topics mainstream media does very well, it’s just a certain sector of the news where they fail miserably. But that sector is an incredibly important component to our understanding how the world is working, behaving, and how to make sense of things for ourselves.  It may be that in some cases, were we to know the full story, we might vote someone out of office, someone who is helping an elite class with their business dealings like big pharma or the MIC (military industrial complex).  These are just examples for cases that have popped up in the past as problematic for the truth tellers to…..you know, to tell the truth about. In many cases parts of the story are told rightly while other bits are left out, or outright distorted or lied about. As a result of this, large swaths of the populace have begun to flock to alternative media.  I saw the writing on the wall when I began hearing “fake news” in 2015 in the run-up to the next election.  I suspected then and know now that those who decry the fake news are most often the ones who are dealing the most in it.  I didn’t have to wait but a few more years to hear Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept come forward with his own critique which amounted to saying exactly the same thing.

Until then, be safe and get outside! Tell jokes, smile, and hold your love ones close.

 

Up Next:  Using pandemics and social unrest as a test for your own level of development spiritually.

 

Everything Has Changed, Nothing Has Changed

The quarentine has been the best test for my progress and development. Before the meme (below) spread across the internet I was at home working in my studio and keeping to myself and keeping a pretty good level of peace. I had a good wrinkle emotionally after having a close family member in the hospital and out of touch for weeks during the quarantine. That has been the hardest difficulty in the last six weeks. This has pointed to more work to be done – how do you not let a child being sick not get to you? So my reactivity needs some attention.

I am going to be delving into TRE to see if I can shake some things loose. If you don’t know about TRE, do a search on my blog and you will find a very good video that I linked to that shows how to fine tune your body in order to release stored or repressed emotion. Do I need to remind you that it is this type of emotion that is giving you the most trouble? I can say with great confidence that your biggest challenges come from these submerged emotions, what you call “triggers.” It is a fact that when you do this release work, you will release not just the emotion but also the trigger effect. I will add that some triggers are also clusters of very similar traumas over time because individual trauma events are all recorded perfectly and individually. As a result, be patient. That said, clearing consciousness has been THE way to return to peace. Peace is our native state because our souls know that we are immortal and without limit and born from bliss.

Enjoy the meme-do you feel me?

UPDATE: 5/18/2020

I settled in last week and performed TRE. In fact, I watched a video I had posted a couple of years ago in order to get the finer points of one part of the method, which is a posture that stretches more of the base of the psoas, the muscle group that gets effected and where so much trauma is stored.

I got into the position in order to fatigue the muscles. I was in that position for five, ten, then fifteen minutes and those muscles just weren’t fatiguing! I thought how it would be great if I could have someone sit on my stomach in order to get those muscles fatigued and beginning to tremble!

I kept at it, and you know, it wasn’t happening. Instead, I began a psoas stretch instead. I took a low long stretch, alternating between each leg.

After the stretch and into the being before going to bed, I found myself feeling increasingly grouchy, emotional. This wasn’t a full release, but I went to bed knowing I was going to work on this again. Maybe find a weight to get my psoas muscles trembling!

*To learn more about the psoas and its role in stored trauma or emotion, search on this blog and you will be able to see images of the psoas and exercises that can be used to stretch that important muscle.  In India, they call it the seat of the soul, and based on how much early emotion that can be locked up into it, your destiny emotionally certainly appears to hinge on the health of the psoas. Want to feel more at peace? Working out the wrinkles in the psoas can have a role in some of it.

 

Now Is The BEST Time

If you want to know where you are in cultivating presence and whether your quiet-mindedness holds up only because you know there will be something to relieve you of having to hold that “pose, ” now is a great time to test whether you are as far along as you thought. And no, this isn’t a competition. It is a test, and while it is easy to say where you think you are, the actual boots on the ground experience will be what actually gets to tell the story. And don’t beat yourself up over it if you feel you came up short.

I say this because in the beginning of my work, because so much was happening so quickly, I thought I was further along than I thought. I didn’t realize one release does not cure the whole system. It is one step, one erasure of something from the past. This is painstaking work. Be gentle, be kind, but also be honest with yourself.

Why?

I knew her before and after awakening. Her reaction to her awakening resulted in her going through all manner of meltdowns, most were in front of me. In each case she would say I was at fault for her preterbations emotionally. That of course wasn’t true, and as an observer it showed to me the sheer volume of emotional junk that she was dealing with and how she was going to deal with it going forward. I was able to see pretty clearly how she thought she was further along than she actually was. Everytime there was some release or some shift, a grand pronouncement was made. Everything was suddenly better I am healed!

On the one hand it was congradulations on the change, but the reality was there was still way too much remaining for her to be able to behave and feel without ripple, without upset, without problems. Let me be clear, we are human, and we are not going to be perfect. We also must rid ourselves of the old patterns in order for the presence of the higher self to come forward to aid and guide. It (the higher or core self) helps a lot, but you are still human and you are still having to deal with duality. So it is a balance. Each release makes something easier (whatever you were repressing). It doesn’t make the whole thing better necessarily. You have to want it. Repressed emotion will ALWAYS make you want something different from what you THINK you want.

What???

Be honest. Be true to you, no one else. Have compassion for yourself. This isn’t a race. Didn’t get everything you wanted to get done in this life? You can do it in the next one. Sure, challenging yourself can be fun, so do that if it is your bliss, but go easy on yourself. And still be honest, too. This may all sound unusual, but it is a good prescription. We have all time.

I wonder if she got to where she hoped she would be? I suspect she still suffers from that problem of overstating the cure. I think I served as a test for her development. Ten minutes with me would reveal all of the places that still needed work. Our connection meant that I could feel all the places that needed work. She was a real “fixer-upper.” I could feel her blocks because they were not mine, but I could feel them as if they were mine (except they weren’t-and this made it possible to know all of them).

In a similar way this pandemic can be the same test to see where you are in your work. Just wait for it until you start feeling hard or rough. Where did that come from? Ask yourself, your inner wisdom, to show you where it comes from and then wait. It might come in meditation, when falling asleep, taking a shower, who knows. It will show you if you trust it and are willing to place yourself in a blind spot. You are receptive, blind to what you think it might be. Sssshhhh…..

The blind spot is an ability to not know while letting another part, your subconscious perhaps, maybe it is superconscious, to do the work for you. It has the peculiar quality of feeling as though you yourself didn’t get the answer but something else did. I think it is you, but that is for another time. But it is imagining the problem having a string tying itself to some part of you deep down. You grab that string and it leads you down into the watery depths where the core self resides, or at least the source of this issue in you. This works only because you are going blind, only because you keep your rational concrete mind in ignorance. Then, once you reach its end, you just feel. Don’t rationalize now. That will not work. Feel. Sense. No judging. How did it start? Was it in another life? If so, it may show itself as its released. A feeling might bubble up. Let it go. As it does it might reveal its origins. If it doesn’t, that is okay too. It is gone, that is good enough. Some part that was hard is now easier. It is like a walkway made up of tessera, that is, mosaics. One piece might stick up more and you find yourself tripping over it over and over again. After you do this, it is easier in that one place (within you). So doing this work is like repaving a rough walkway of small mosaics. After a few years you notice a difference. It takes time. It is a labor of love. When you return, you will have a smoother foundation for a new story that will be easier. I promise this is how this works. When you reincarnate your foundation will be so much easier you will wonder why you didn’t discover and started using this sooner.

So what bugs you the most? Selfish people? Duplicity? Dishonesty? It will take looking into yourself first to turn that hard feeling into bliss. But you can do it, and I hope you do. You are worth the bliss it will bring.

-All My Blessings-

~Parker

Find Your Zen

How you feel is a choice. If you can see how feelings are just like thoughts you can see how you choose them moment by moment. You can then begin to choose different thoughts and feelings. This can lead to big changes after a period of practice. The first step is in observing your thoughts, getting in the habit of stepping back and watching yourself. This takes time to cultivate and isn’t the focus of this article.

If you have trouble with your feelings getting the best of you, take a cue from my cat Georgette. She is now 17 years old and she is rocking being present and being in her bliss. She is happy right were she is.

If you feel like you have lost your bliss let me know what’s not working, maybe our mechanic can help fix what ails you during this pandemic.

I have found that many people are confronting hard emotional material during this idle period. We are so used to going all the time. May I suggest that you use this time to quietly reflect. Learning how to silence the mind could happen at this time. Learning how you can use breath to assist you in shifting how you feel is of great benefit. You wont be changing the world until you change yourself….

Breath work is a singular technique incredibly useful in changing how you feel. It shuts down your busy mind and helps bring you to silence, calm, and if you are able to slow down enough, enter into something called Presence.

You want a breath that is deliberate, slow, with pauses at the top and bottom of each breath. The rate of your breathing should be about three seconds in, holding your breath for about two seconds, with an exhale at that same rate, with a one to two second pause at the end of the exhale. You can play around with this rate to find a rate that makes you feel most relaxed.

You will want to do this type of breathing for about 3-5 minutes at first, just enough to see how it is done and you begin seeing results.

If you don’t see any results at all, I reccomend placing all of your attention on your breathing and nothing else. Listen to your breathing. Take your mind off of whatever is normally occupying it. You may also need to do something that will relax you beforehand, like sleep or taking a warm bath or shower. You want to shift your mind away from the busy mind that you have become so accustomed to having. This will take some practice. It will take time. Once or twice is not enough. Trying this at the same time of the day can be helpful in establishing a habitual trigger that helps you to relax and quiet down.

Another version of this type of breathing is alternating nostril breathing. It is done the same way as our earlier breath except you close one nostril at a time to breath in and breathe out through one nostril only before alternating to the other nostril. I have done four breaths in one nostril before doing four in the other, as well as simply one breath per nostril. The point is in keeping the number of breaths balanced between each nostril.

You can also use imagery with your breathing. I often feel a shot of energy all through my body when I breathe like this, so I will think about my breathing and how it will stimulate my root chakra, sending a shot of energy through all of my other energy centers.

I might think about the energy ending up in a center I am thinking about only to find that the energy goes there, dutifully following thought. I then feel how that energy feels moving through my body, and I can learn a lot about the state of my own energy body, for instance by how the energy feels as it moves like this.

If a part of me feels tight or tense, I imagine directing breath to that location. It might take some practice, but it is feeling the energy generated through breath being sent to that location that does it for me The more vividly you can imagine it, the better it will work. Prana will go where thought goes.

If you slow down, focus on listening to your breath, and breathing nice and slow, you can find breathing rates that can bring calm and even bliss (if you keep going deeper). The clue that it is working is you will feel like you are out of your mind or body a little. You might feel weak-kneed and you might have a hard time focusing or remembering what you were thinking. This is the very state that you want. This is the threshold of the zen state, the practice called zazen, a cultivation of quiet single-mindedness. It helps bring peace. Be patient and feel free to ask questions.

I hope that this finds you well and my hope is that you will use this to help take the edge off of how you feel. Let me know how it goes.

~Parker

Locational Healing – On Hawaii

Beach on Oahu

Have you ever been to a place, felt a shudder,or had an emotion move through you that made you feel as thought maybe there was something special about the place, or that maybe you had been there before? Have you ever found yourself reaching into that feeling and finding yourself tumbling down the rabbit hole? Have you had that deja vu moment, a sense you have been there before?

Waikiki, Hawai

I recently had an experience on the island of Maui that shook some of the things I thought I understood about myself and the origin of experiences I had as a very young boy. I wound up seeing things that I had seen in visions and out of body experiences some 50 years ago that were now on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian island chain. Was an old circle being completed?

I had gone to these islands as a result of an invitation from a friend who had a timeshare on the island. It was my birthday and my good friend wanted to help me celebrate. I had been planning on beginning to visit locations such as Hawaii in order to get photo documentation of fish for a sculpture project that has been in the works, possibly a new business, I have had in the works. I just didn’t think I would be able to go so soon.

While we were there, my friend suggested we go to the other islands. I had read about the snorkling in Maui and I knew I wanted to go there to film and photograph fish. When my friend mentioned Kaua’i I said that island felt too emotional for me, I didn’t know why. I went first to Maui after landing in Oahu.

It turned out that Kaua’i was the calm one and Maui was the emotional one. I hustled over to Maui to get the opportunity to shoot some fish and I was not ten miles from the airport when I began to get waves of emotion along with a growing perception of a man, another version of me, who had lived there some time in the past.

In what wound up being a very quick and efficient clearing of past material within me, I found myself cleansing not only a past life but my life as well of the particular quality of stuck energy that this self had in him. And boy was this guy stuck! He was like a rock. He must have been in some leadership role because of how monolithic he felt. Maybe not, but goodness sakes, he sure did dig a hole for himself!

Years before this experience the same friend who invited me here had been telling me about Ho’oponopono. This is a pretty amazing healing modality based on the concept of radical forgiveness of self by asking forgiveness from the universe while knowing simultaneously that we make up a part of the universe energetically and physically. I had not been able to use this method in all the years of having known about it, though. I sensed I just wasn’t there yet with Ho’oponopono. I knew I had to be in the right “space” in order to be in the grace necessary for it to work for me.

This was the breakthrough moment for me. I already was aware of a life as a Polynesian a number of years ago, I just…..couldn’t connect into Ho’oponopono like I felt like I should. I needed this moment to reach that place. So much of this isn’t mental, rational, head or book learning. It is more about a capacity to feel, to include, to encompass, to wake up to. It sounds grandiose, it really isn’t. This isn’t a problem we solve, it is something we let go in order to feel or focus on what lies hidden behind the stuff we are dropping or letting go. Big difference.

As I drove, I was being coaxed to do something. I was feeling this aspect of myself, unsure if it was me or a past self, or a bit of both, being pulked into something. I don’t always know what is about to happen, so I go into witness mode and observe. As I felt this personality my inner guidance kicked in. It said,

You are the doctor. You chose this time to heal all the other parts of you. You can do this now by filling this man with what you have. Help him, help yourself.

That was what it was telling me. I felt how closed he was. I felt him lying on the beach at night in the firelight, listening to the waves, and watching the flickering firelight and feeling like shit. He was so stuck. I had a little “Wait…what?” happening. Do you know what I mean?

Okay, here is a little more of my thought process, ” You are lying in a hammock under the stars, listening to the waves on the sexiest beach on earth, the fire feels fantastic, and you are feeling like shit?! Are you kidding me?”

That boi. He must have been raised the wrong way. Maybe he raised himself the wrong way. Maybe he felt a man has to be hard, strong, unmovable, unemotional, ya think? Basically these are all the things we teach boys to do that we later decry as “toxic masculinity.” Is it any wonder?? Poor guy. Living in paradise and suffering in hell.

So he had no way out. I, however, had a way in, and I was NOT stuck at all, not in the way he was. Okay, I could feel his stuckness in me, but I had enough mobility to slip into his moment there on the beach. I hated how he felt, but boy did I enjoy lying there with him next to that fire listening to those waves! Okay, about three seconds worth, but I had to soak that in! Time to work, to invoke an extra juicy form of grace…

I could feel something in me sinking down into him. Me, sinking into another version of me. I was like a germ that his spiritual immune system had no defense for. In this case, what I am doing is “infecting” his pride and rigidity emotionally. I was able to feel the fluidity, the forgiveness, the softer more mobile form of consciousness and adapted it to him. I infected him with me. I could do this because he was another me.

“Wait. You said this was about forgiveness! Right? This doesn’t sound like forgiveness, not really.”

If you have felt what happens during a radical form of self-forgiveness, you might have caught how forgiveness involves a giving, which is much like giving something away which then leaves an empty space where something else can then fill it, something from the true foundation of you, that kind of substratum where the soul is accessible. In this case, what fills the empty space is a ressonant field that is at once your awareness and the energy of the universe. The hard feeling is given up as this healing feeling is given on my end to the man on that island. A pure moment of being able to feel, and in feeling just a bit more, that sense just obliterates that stuckness. What an angry kind of guy. He’d be a 60’s biker in So Cal and he’d be no one to mess with. So fuck that, right? I’m pretty sure all the yogi’s and yogini’s secretly want to say that very thing, but aren’t allowed to because, well….fuck.

---

I am driving on my way to a special bay known for turtles. As I drove, tears in my eyes, I feel like I really want to clear this spot out as much as I can. I realize that as this is all happening, I am sinking myself into that same space necessary for me to “get” Ho’oponopono. Yes, there is this deep humility and reverence needed for me. I need that reverence, I don’t know about anyone else. I realize that the way to create the circuitry necessary for this to work in my own consciousness, I seem to need reverence. In that moment I could feel my mind reaching out into that vibrant field that is the All and it was responding. “I am sorry. Forgive me. I love you. Thank-you!” I just hadn’t been able to do Ho’oponopono before, not effectively. Not until this very moment. The capacity filled me, bloomed, or emerged in me at that moment. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, or by what route, only that it did. Something clicked, which is how all of these hundreds of healings have happened over the last decade and some change…

All of this went so quickly, so smoothly. I think that is how these events go for me, so quick, so efficient. I make a turn in mind and it is like the ju-ju grabs hold. I really mean it. I think it is a hallmark of the higher self being given space to work. This only seems to work, for me, through surrendering my control. Then, as those parts of the brain are shut down, nonlocal consciousness can step forward. Thank-you small self for letting in the larger.

The juju was starting as I was boarding the plane to go over from Oahu before I had even departed to go to Maui. I kept seeing these Polynesians in the airport. I hadn’t sern them like this before. They only spoke Hawaiian. They were older, people who looked like I looked in that lifetime, except I hadn’t had the experience yet. It is easy to second-guess myself in this moments. Maybe I was just taking the visual material around me and crrtating a fanciful narrative. Thing is, it is always the other way around. I am seeing these things because an event of importance is about to take place. How I felt. Maybe not so stuck. I kept running into them, hearing their soft language slipping into that place within me that has that powerfully charged sense, the emotion, like where volcanos always start, in a blistering moment that leads to creation. Strong raw creative. Better be careful. Respect that force in nature, maybe in you, too.

The energy I am moving clears out that spot in the man. This feels like a warp in time. Did I just go back in time and fix this guy? It feels and looks like a warp. Did I create a new time line? Or, by intervening, did I alter his own actions in his own timeline. If that is so, I did what time travelers aren’t supposed to do without generation new timelines or time branches. Changing his line alters mine and it by extension altered his physical line in an ancestral way. His great great great grandchildren are different now, but in a small way. A small burden is lifted, however inconsequential. Ripples spread outward. I have waited my whole life for this moment to arrive at this time. I catalyze it by being ready for it. Only then do I have the means to reach back through time. Let me emphasize, this is fundamentally different from most every release or cleansing that has taken place thus far.

I feel like I sank into him by way of using this location, Maui, as the means of connecting in to this man’s life. As this began to happen, I could feel him feeling me moving into him. It felt like a moment of inspiration where something of himself, maybe a more developed self, a future self, was present and was there with a heart full of love-no judgment at all. Here is that liberation you were looking for my brother…

The fire crackled, the waves crashed in the moonlight, and his eyes filled with tears as this simple thing happened. With no effort on his part, this burdened mind softens, shifts, and is relieved. No rituals, no method, no bullshit.

He looks up into the night sky and he says something, a thank you to ancestors or a god or goddess. I don’t know. What I do get is his intent. I understand that about as clearly as a maidenst knowing smile.

Copyright, the author

I was still only halfway to my first stop. I relaxed and sank into the trip. Once I reach the first bay, surrounded by black volcanic rock, I see almost no fish, but lots of really nice coral. For over an hour, things were kind of….meh. I began to make my way back when I get up in shallow water near the rocks and suddenly come across a moray eel, it feels like a sign. I get on the rocks, and as I sit there a turtle comes right up to me. Very well; I will follow you, miss turtle. I get some pretty good photos. I head to shore and while standing in thigh-deep water a turtle comes right next to me. So I just follow along and am able to get a series of excellent photos for my work. Right after, it begins to rain. Perfect. Everything on this day trip is happening like clock work. I feel this voice that says what to do next. It is halfway my wish mixed with this “Okay, you need to move on to the next step for the next event to happen.” If I had gone too quickly or too slowly the things that happened would not have happened as they did. That is, the last part, which is what makes this post so long.

Photo Copyright, Author

It is lunch and I drive to the next location. Again, great snorkling, and I am able to get scores of excellent photos of fish for the project. I think how nice it would be to be on the island and make work for galleries on the islands. How nice would that be, right? Everything is beautiful, and everyone just seems to be enjoying themselves so much.

And Then Things Get A Little Weird…

Once I am done, I realize I need to get on the road so I can make my flight back to Oahu. I am going to go back in a direction I hadn’t been through before. As I drive, I am going out into the most rural parts of the island. I come across these cliffs that look so similar to cliffs I had seen in an out of body experience as a child. The color of the earth was surprisingly similar to the cliffs I saw as a child. It is looking like a match. It’s been 50 years but the color of those cliffs in my experience as a child look for the life of me to be right here along the road on Maui. These were the cliffs I saw over and over in my oobe as a child.

I feel a little nuts, questioning whether this is a thing or not. “It’s just really similar” says that part of me. But I know if its for real, synchonicity will squash that part of me, leaving no doubt. The thing to appreciate is I hadn’t seen a cliff face that looked like that cliff face from my childhood until this moment. Not only this, but the cliff face could have been completely missed had it not been for the rain which caused me to go a different way. I couldn’t see these cliffs headed in the direction I was going originally. I had to turn around to see them.

I keep driving and wind up on a single-lane road. It is raining harder and harder. I get to a bridge that has close to two feet of water rushing over it. I turn around and go back after I stop and walk across the bridge to test depth and flow speed. Yep, no safe way to cross, not in that little car of mine. But here is the weird part: only by going back in the other direction do I see a cliff face that is eerily identical to what I saw as a child. Only by going in the opposite direction. By doubling back, I was concerned about making my flight on time. I do make my flight and I get to my gate just as boarding began.

So what is the deal with this early childhood experience?

I have written about this before.

At the age of about four, I began having a series of identical experiences that would take place while I was awake. I might be outside playing and I would get this feeling that would come over me. I would feel incredibly heavy but incredibly light all at the same time. I realized my body felt incredibly dense as a new awareness cane on line and….cleaved itself from my body. I later learned that I was experiencing sleep paralysis except I wasn’t asleep.

I would go to this location that for the life of me looked like a giant cliff face. This cliff face had these striations in it that put my young mind in mind of pot roast. Yes, funny, I know, but this cliff face didn’t look like anything I had seen before. I had nothing to compare it to. It was this deep iron red. It looked like flesh. I thought of it as part of the flesh world. The carnal (meat) world.

At the same time, I also would see these forms which looked a lot like dandelion fluff floating down from the top of the cliff face. They would float downward, all so very much like Mary Poppins. I understood I was witnessing the souls of people who were going into the bodies of babies. Just floating down into matter, into our world.

I knew that souls entered bodies like this. It wasn’t a big mystery. It wouldn’t be until several years later that anyone would say anything to me remotely similar about spirit in flesh. These episodes would just happen. Each one was the same. I had a handful of them before the phenomenon stopped, emerging years later as real dreams in another level of consciousness, helping people who had died to cross over completely to that nonphysical world, effectively returning from whence they came. In a way, I guess I got to see both sides of the cycle complete. Here I am, all these years later having spent the better part of my time here now thinking about the next big adventure that is beyond this one life.

What’s next is the interesting bit. I am telling my friend about all of this and she explains to me that in the Polynesian mythos there are locations on the island where this very thing actually happens, and it happens from the top of a mountain where souls come down into our reality, our world. The story sounds like a creation story. But inside of it lies the shadow, too. Well now, given what took place on Maui as well as Oahu and Kaua’i, I am finding myself reconfiguring my past a bit to allow for the possibility that this idea has its origins in that other life. Was I experiencing the living myth of creation using my knowledge about the Polynesian tradition as a frame for that OOBE?

I had always thought that my “location” was a nonphysical one, more like a visionary image. Instead, through a series of unlikely events, it appears as if I am being confronted with this that is connecting me to those islands by way of an actual location that looks exactly like the location in my OOBE from 50 years prior. In addition, I find myself in an encounter with a self from the past needing help from me, something that has at the same time made instant change in me as well.

Turtle on Maui, photo by the author

I think what I want to get across with this experience is to follow your instincts. I was going to go to Kaua’i first, but I kept going back to Maui in my mind. I ultimately went alone to the island, something that probably opened the door for these events to happen just as they did. With additional people, we could have wound up somewhere else, or I may not have been quiet enough inwardly to feel this building pressure inside. I might have pushed it away or tried to ignore it.

Sometimes when things seem like they are going wrong, it may mean they are just getting underway the right way. By holding a state of surrender, it is easier to reach the state necessary for processing these things with awareness. I say all of this to show you what can he done, to take heart, to turn your own corner over and over. It gets better and better, I promise.

So that is the crazy long story, a caution for others that you too might have one of these waiting for you. The result I notive most is my root energy feels strongee. My creative energy is flowing very strongly as my sexual eneegy has also increased. What is interesting is how this isn’t leading to any obsession or overt attachment. Being a tantric at heart, I don’t see these things as a problem, only how we respond or relate to what is. That is my postmortem on the experience. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them.

Mahalo!

~Parker

Tapping The Collective

I see people who write about “forecasts” for energy and development within “the collective.” While I have been able to read energy of people and locations long before awakening came along, I have tended to feel like these “collective ideas” have generally missed the mark for the simple fact (most likely) that they are describing their experience instead of actually reading the collective. I say this because if the assessments made are to be correct, then the writing would apply to me since I am part of that collective. Most often these do not apply to me at all and seem much more likely to be one person describing their present state of development and wanting it to apply to the rest of us so the label is put on it and off we go.

I contend that observable phenomenon is of vast importance when it comes to knowing whether one is accurate or not. I spent a year comparing my energy perceptions with another seer when I first began seeing auras in 1984. Many hundreds of times I would have my friend to read someone’s aura that I had already read to make sure that what we were seeing was “of a piece.” In 99% of all attempts, this was entirely accurate, which gave me a reasonable assurance that my inner senses weren’t just making it all up. This process was done in a blind fashion in order that the control did not know what my results had been moments before.

My instinct to do this has been born out over decades and has helped me to inderstand a phenomenon that can elude most researchers and casual observers. I have seen instances in my own experience where a person I once knew claimed to know what was going on with me and went on to describe vivid recollections and experiences which she was utterly convinced were dead-on accurate, citing the aphorism “energy doesn’t lie.” The only problem was the information she told me she knew about me was in some instances 100% inaccurate. I say “in some cases ” because there were some isolated instances where she got closer to the truth, but even then it was off by a significant amount. When I scanned what she was doing I got that she was not sufficiently clear of her own inner junk to be a clear enough chanbel through which to see the insides of things. This work takes lifetimes, and the number of truly gifted psychics is an illustration of just how few attain this on the earthly plane. Most, I suspect, attain this after leaving the cycle of reincarnation.

I have a friend who is one of these “clear windows” who realky can see things clearly without distorting the data. In this case, I have had hundreds of instances of being able to show how this psychic can literally pluck information out of the air accurately and consistently. And? When I scan her everytime I get this awareness of the sheer amount of time she has dedicated to honing her skills into “gifts” which appear to me as having emerged over many lifetimes. Her lifetime now is a remarkable example of how she has chosen to come in with little to no filters in place.

For myself, it has been helpful to see the contrast in these two people. Both do healing work, but in one case my friend works miracles on a daily basis for people. In the case of my misinterpreting friend, there is more evidence of turbulence, attracting clients with the same remaining issues that she has yet to resolve. One is clear, and one is not. One is at one end of the spectrum from the other. One is lijely just stepping into the waters of awareness whild the other gas been at it much longer. Through it all, being able to apply their perceptions to repeatable testing is important if we are ever to treat this as a valud field of experience. It also means sifting out the BS. In this case, it’s not enough to want to do it, you have to be able to do it without letting your own blinders get in the way. I for one have seen how easy it is for others to do this, so when I can have a way to gather independent information about the target I am reading, that is helpful (but only after doing it in as blind a fashion as as possible).

I have considered that what we call “the collective” may in fact be a relatively small group of people. Yes, you may be tapping into a group, but it may not be that big of a group you are tapping into. It helps to observe, search, and do some real world science. This might be hard to do in some cases, but I have found that if you need it bad enough, the data will come. It can even fall into your lap quite unexpectedly.

I have been traveling recently in my work, which took me to the Hawaiian islands of Oahu, Maui, and Kaua’i. Being there resulted in some very interesting outcomes in terms of getting in tpuch with a life I had on one of the islands as a very emotionally stuck man.

Photo copyright by author

While there, I had the chance to read the energy on these unique islands. I found that there were correlations between the people and the land itself, which should surprise no one.

What was interesting was how the level of angst was pretty low. Again, we could all guess that. It’s interesting because you might expect it to be low, but not necessarily. On an island that is relatively small, concern could actually be much higher if you had a situation where you had flights from countries that had active outbreaks of this corona virus outpacing your own country (such as Japan or Korea, for example, which was happening in Hawaii state-wide when I was there). Things were feeling pretty calm despite what was happening in the rest of the country.

Then I returned to the East Coast and as I returned, a different feeling emerged altogether. Bear in mind that I had not been watching news or looming at forums during my time on the islands. I watched about twenty minutes of coverage iver the course of the week to stay up to daymte on numbers and whether it might be better for me to stay if tjings got worse. It wasn’t until I returned to the East Coast that I just felt different.

The feeling that I got in those first 48 hours was nearly impossible to cope with to be honest. Bear in mind, once I was home, I shopped quickly and stayed at home for a week. I wasn’t out and about. I only had a group conversatiin with friends moments ago on a conference text. Otherwise, I had been isolated.

During this time I felt an energy that was shaken with fear, and as I scanned the energy, it showed a large anount of energy clamped down in the heart center, then blocks in other areas to lesser degrees. So strange, I thought, because the heart is a center for compassion. The voice of my inner guidance spoke saying,

There is a lack of true compassion…the body of this group is wrestling with true compassion, some feel it, but others do not. Some are polarized…some closed in the heart but open in the root, some closed in the root but more open in the heart. There are strands of influences swimming through all of this.

I wondered if the level of crazy was actually happening. I wondered, and while writing this, I have seen comments on broadcasts such as a Bernie Sanders live stream with comments all eluding to incredible fear, angst, and anxiety. I dropped into the connected world to gauge what people have been feeling.

People have lost jobs. People are unsure about how they will pay their rent, or their power bills, or when the epidemic will pass so things can get back to normal. Yes…so there is an unusual amount of uncertainty and fear. I am getting it. It has closed down hearts, it has also had a corresponding root impact, too, related to survival and abundance. For the first time since FDR, it looks like Congress will pass sweeping social actions to put money (energy) into people’s hands, a surprising move given how Trump is so pro market and how much the country appears to have rejected the socialist philosophy of the Sanders campaign (which, by the way, is completely in line with being a “New Deal” democrat despite efforts to beand Sanders as somehow radical or communist. Now everyone is embracing the spirit of his policies. So curious an outcome.

It is hard feeling all of this, so I am left with how to deal with all of this at a personal level. It took me several days to work through it in order to not feel flattened by it.

If by chance you feel the collective in a similar way, these strands of feeling can trigger you pretty easily. It’s weird…anger, fear, all of this hard emotion. To cope with it, I bring up all the bliss I can from my root so that it joins in the heart. This has been the only thing that has helped me, which is essentially bliss. Just bliss, and an ability to stay on or in that bliss continually. Doing that has been the life saver. I have been oscilating in and out of it this past week but have been able to shelter back under it recently. For the great unwashed this bliss is an expansive energy of creativity not focused in creating and which also has an orgasmic component. My experience has been that this energy has been directly responsible for healing a slew of ills over the last dozen years, and makes for clearer eyes and calmer hearts when allowed in. I highly suggest giving it an opportunity to work. The only way I can feel this bliss un the face of such potential calamity is thrpugh surrender as well as not busying my mind with unknowns or with a desire to control outcomes. This shifts me away from fear and ibto bliss quite naturally. This has happened before, it will happen again. The soul remains immortal. Do what you can but align in a “right” way. The Polynesians call this “pono.” Deep down, it is our unner compass, our divine compass that transcends ordinary notions of right and wrong to strike to the deeper causes and truths that reveal right and “wrong.”

I think how those who do not know about bliss move from anxiety to calm using methods that distract them mrnrally and then emotionally as a result. Maybe they find something to keep their minds busy. We all have our ways of coping. I wish I could give everyone the gift of bliss-it isn’t that hard to find. Sometimes all it takes is a glance.

Amidst this, the odd notion arises: by witnessesing these states in groups here, can we begin to change our reality by being able to bring a whole other vibration to the moment? Or is this only a drop in the sea? Some would say yes, some would say no. Is it even a relevant question? Does it matter in the bigger picture? Does the universe set itself free to see how it will play out?

Maybe acts will be what do the heavy lifting, but our state of mind determines what those acts are. It may be acts of kindness to others from a distance may be the best way to lighten the load for all concerned.

My heart goes out to everyone, those touched and those not touched by this epidemic. This isn’t permanent, but it is also active. Each one of us is now, by remaining isolated, are throttling down the volume that this virus will have. For now, some areas have not yet seen the “peak” or apex of the epidemic. New York State and city anticipate the peak to have passed by April 2!st according to modelled projections. That number may be close or off depending on what is done between now and then.

So some facts from Governor Cuomo on covid:

Of 30,811 who tested positive in NY so far (as of 3:00 pm EST March 25)

12% have been hospitalized.

3% of those hospitalized gave been admitted to an ICU or intensive care unit.

These are small percentages, but can be big numbers because of our population. Knowing whether you are in a risk group is important. Then act accordingly by keeping isolated so you stay out of the growth vector of new cases. Stay at home, read books, watch movies, read blogs, write, take walks (yes you can!).

Hang in there everybody!

~Parker

Interview With Diane

 

In this next interview I have a sit-down with local artist, healer, and family friend Diane to talk about her experience with her kundalini awakening.  Recorded several years ago, this interview was transcribed but had gotten swept up in a computer crash that only recently was recovered.  Her interview can also be found in the section at the top of the blog.  I am including the events surrounding her awakening first and I will have a second part of the interview, which was the earlier portion, in a second post a little later.  The format for the interview is different from the other interviews as it was a more open conversational style.  My questions and comments are all italicized and her responses are in normal type.

Today I talk with Diane who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and who, coincidentally, is a close family friend. She is a wife, mother, artist, and mystic of some note. Diane’s artistic talents including writing, photography, sculpture, and performance art. She is part of the artist group Web Six who have, over many decades, produced multimedia performances that are part visual art, poetry reading, and performance centered around their experiences as women. Their performances have covered the trials and triumphs that they face in their day to day lives. Made up of musicians, writers, poets, photographers, and painters, the troupe has performed throughout our region over a thirty year period.

Diane is a gifted healer who has, over the years, brought her insight into her work through workshops and retreats on issues related to the shamanic journey and spirituality, to name a few. She also owns a business as a masseuse and has directed Yoga Nidra classes. I sit down with Diane to discuss her experience with her awakening.

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Can you identify anything that triggered your awakening?

I had been to the first workshop for the Institute for Shamanic Studies with Mary North. It was always a vivid experience for me, and I had power animals…

Was this based on Harner’s work?

Yes. I went to this workshop and just jumped into it. I think I need to work on that. I did these workshops, I just jumped into them. Well anyway, that’s maybe beside the point.

Well did you feel like a tension had built up over the slow loss of your mother might have triggered anything?

Well, she was my friend, we said we were soul mates. But she would be sitting across from me having coffee and she’d ask, “Do I know you?”

Did this make you feel lost?

Well my father had already died, and I felt like I was losing my rock, yes. The daily grind of care was hard because she did not sleep like she used to. My sister and I would trade her off so we had some time off, which was a blessing. So it was during this free time that I decided that I would take a workshop on developing your psychic ability. Mom and I had actually had psychic things together. And she was psychic, but she never developed it. She introduced me to Wayne Dwyer. So she introduced me to that world. She would say that someone was coming, and we would need to clean house to get ready, and sure enough, later, a cousin would show up knocking at the door.

One night as I was lying in bed, after she had died, I had a dream where I saw this sphere in the room, it was this pulsing sphere that looked like water. Then I heard a voice that said to me….and now I am going to cry….it said, “This is her last gift to you, and someday you will understand…” Then I woke up and the ball was still there, and I was awake. I even pinched myself, and I could still feel it coming into me. I think it gradually dissipated. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to take this workshop to develop my psychic abilities. But then this whole thing happened with this person named Tom. So….

So was your awakening a clearly defined….was there a galvanizing moment..

Oh yeah. [laughter]

Yes. [laughter] So what was that?

I went to the workshop. I was so relieved to be there, I walked on the beach. I didn’t need to take care of anybody. I went to the center and was sitting down, and we were having this introductory meeting that gave us the bones of the thing. I heard someone laugh, this was like some enchanted evening, except it wasn’t. I heard someone laugh, and I turn around, and there is this huge guy, big big neck, the kind of guy I am like “Eeew! Get away from me!” Had a pony tail pulled back. He was squatting down and he was talking to people, and he turned around and looked at me and it was like….it was like on point…like a bird dog. He was looking at me like, “Oh my God, there she is!” which was what he was thinking when he talked about it later when I found out that I was in a dream of his.   I was looking behind me, thinking “What the hell?” So I was pissed. I was having this great time and there was this guy looking at me.

Later I decided to join a sharing group, people you would eat breakfast and lunch with and you could share your experiences. So when I went in the room where the list of the sharing was, I didn’t want the guys name on it, and I was relieved to find his name wasn’t on it. But as I was there a woman erased a name and put his name, Tom, on the list. There was this feeling of inevitability to it. So I found that he was actually quite funny. He had this self-depricating humor, and it was mostly about himself. He worked in sanitation for the city of Philadelphia. And one day after our meal he asked me if I wanted a ride up to the conference center, and I said no, and then thought, “Well that was kind of mean…” so I said that I would take a ride with him and we rode up to the conference center together. And I thought I was getting a lesson on not judging a book by its cover, because he was quite nice and funny. And it was while people were talking there that all of a sudden there came this feeling that came up from my spine to the top of my head. And it was like a wave of emotion. It was very emotional. Tears came to my eyes. It was like someone divulged some secret of the universe to me. It was like awe. And I began to shake. I even looked under my seat. I thought there was electricity under it. I started sweating. I had to hold onto my seat; I was rocking. I looked over at Tom and he was shaking. He was rocking. He was holding on to his seat. I thought, “Holy shit!” I wondered did we eat something? Did we have food poisoning? We both wound up leaving when the break came. We fled. I asked if he was okay. I asked “Is this you, are you doing something?” I walked around thinking, “what the hell is this?” I thought maybe it was a blast from the past, was this an issue raising up? Maybe it was something we ate. I decided “I am not doing this, I came here for R&R…whatever it is, it is going to have to come get me because I am not doing this…” Later, I came out of the meeting and I was going to walk on the beach. The parking lot was empty. But Tom was sitting there on the hood of his car. He looked horrible. He looked sweaty, he looked pale. So I thought, okay, I am going to talk to him. I asked him how he was doing. He said “I feel like there is a pillar running up from my bottom to the top of my head and it’s going to explode.” I remember reading something about that pillar, I had read about it and I thought, hmmm….okay. I felt like I was on automatic, ”do you want me to take you to the hospital? Do you need me to drive you?” He said he didn’t think he could be around people. He was kind of staggering around. So I said, without even knowing I was going to say it, “Give me the car keys. I will drive you. I will get you some Advil.” When I got him to my room and I gave him the Advil, I felt like I was seeing this almost outside of my body, like this was something we had agreed to do this before.

He sat down on the chair and then he went berserk. He starting yelling and screaming. He tore up the bed! I had been to enough workshops, so I knew that this was something you were supposed to do, just let it happen, so I said, just let it out. When he calmed down I asked him if that was a seizure. He said that it wasn’t a seizure. He was walking down the hall and I thought, okay, something weird is happening.

The next night, I hadn’t seen him, I had been doing some yoga, and there was a knock on the door. I knew it was Tom. I answered the door and it was him. He was carrying some flowers. He said, “Whatever you did last night, it really helped me, and I wanted to thank you.” I said well I wonder how my husband would feel about this, and he said, “ That isn’t what this is, and you know it”…and I thought, shit, he was right, it wasn’t.

He asked me what I knew about my work. He wanted to pick my brain, he wanted to do work with me. So we sat across from each other and looked at each others face. As we did this, I saw this young man in his face with the turned up bangs, and I drew the picture in my notebook. Very innocent and young looking. He saw my fear of growing old, which I do, because of my mother. That night, I woke up and I thought that there was an earthquake! I had the same thing he did. I had to get up and go out on the beach. And I ran.

So did you feel like you had this build up of tension and movement helped?

Oh yes. I wanted to move. I wanted to feel my pain, I wanted to feel my breath , I was on the edge of the surf. I wanted to feel it all because I couldn’t stand it. Later when I was in my room, there was this flickering inside, like something was crawling that went up and down from my solar plexus and my head, up and down, up and down. I took a shower and held my pillow and fell asleep. Later, we would do work together.

I did this shamanic journey and I saw the image of this armadillo and I saw all these cracks on its back and I could see this image like it was written on the sky that said, “Pain” and when I saw that and told him this, he said I have to show you something, and he showed me his back. There were all of these scars that were like these hands that were reaching for his spine. He would have been like Quasimodo if he hadn’t had his spine broken, so he had been in a body cast, it had been in a Catholic hospital where they didn’t let his parents visit. He had just had a horrible time. So somehow, we had come together to work on this.

Okay, so I am going to ask you something that I know about personally about nearly all of the people….no….all of the people I know who have awakened together. They might be sitting across from one another or across the miles. They all have this unsettled karma together. And a lot of time there is this experience of revelation, or apocalypse where there is this sudden revealing where all this stuff comes up, all this stuff….you don’t even know what the name is for this experience, but its this energy that needs to get out. And then in the midst of this you sometimes can have this little “Aha” moment. Did you ever have that?

I did.

Did you have that moment where you understood what it was that was not finished?

Somewhat. I think it was somewhat.

When I went to do the whole holotropic breath work, which I wanted him to do, but he didn’t want to do it. That was when I felt a goddess moving up through my body. At the time I didn’t know it was Shakti, you know, the goddess they speak about. It was definitely female. Then I saw myself. I was both outside myself and in my body. I saw myself sitting in a circle of stones. I knew that I was a willing sacrificial woman. I had red hair and was wearing a white dress. I was coming down into the scene. The stones had runes scratched into them. I had always thought they were Celtic, but they were Viking. And he [Tom] looks like a Viking. I saw my throat being cut. And I saw the blood coming out of me and I became very white. He was standing at the end of the circle. Then I turned and asked who he was. He was standing there, like a shaman with a metal helmet, with fur. Then his face changed and he turned into an old man with a wolf head on his own head, it was this headdress. Then he turned into a woman in a long white dress in sandals standing on a dais with white columns with a really blue blue sky behind. I asked, “Well, who is he?” And the voice said, “He is a gatekeeper.” I have learned that this sometimes refers to the person who helps you with your psychic life, who is the gatekeeper for entering your psychic life.

I had this incredible dream the night I felt the…thing…I dreamed….I am going to cry. I was sitting on the porch of this ancient building with columns were crumbling and the steps went down into the ocean. And in the ocean, walking out of the ocean, was this wolf girl. She was part wolf and part human. And I knew she was me. She pointed behind me, and there was this ancient door with these rusty hasps and she pointed that I needed to open the door. And I couldn’t open the door. I woke up and thought, I have got to open this door! So I went back to sleep and had a dream about a crowbar, but I could never open the door.

I have had shamanic journeys about the door, and I have had experiences where I have been led to what is behind the door. Some people have said that it is love, but I am not sure. So anyway. [laughter]

How has your awakening progressed?

I had different….I have written about the whole thing what happened to me with Tom about that. I had it for about three years, before I could not feel it in my body. I was terrified a lot of the time, and even though I went to the holotropic breath work, but I would have movements of extreme ecstasy and then extreme fear. I had all kinds of things happen to me, like a snake coming out of my throat chakra. But I also had amazing synchronistic experiences. I had an amazing experience with reclaiming my relationship with Jesus. I would go to workshops and would feel drawn to them and would start talking to them and would find out they had had an opening. I went down to Greensboro to study hypnosis. I met this women who was doing this work and she wanted to do this work with Mary Magdeline and she laid me down on the table and began touching me where Jesus’s wounds were and I found I just opened like a flower. I found that I was meeting others who had this same opening, like you, who also had this same thing. One day while I was meditating, I felt like I was going to give birth, so I moved into the birth position and felt as though I was giving birth, and afterwards, I just rolled around on the floor lauging and feeling great.

You know, it’s interesting, but this is an experience I have read about many women who have had. Men don’t seem to have it. Maybe its an archetypal Jungian kind of experience where we are dealing with higher order energy within our psyche about creativity, and birth. So its interesting.

Did you have any physiological effects related to dealing with the fear in this? This whole shadow and the light…

Sometimes I would have the shaking. Oh my god there is an earthquake. Oh, and I also had a spontaneous orgasm, which I hear is normal, which was great! I thought that was pretty cool! I am standing there at the edge of the bed, and there is no one near me.

I am not trying to pigeon-hole you, but I am interested in how people are dealing with their shadow stuff. How did you deal with releasing this energy?

Well I would have this shaking, and at night I would have this feeling like I was just full of fear and that there is this darkness. Darkness was upon me and darkness would be upon me. I would lie in bed with Richard [Diane’s husband] and would just shake. But he does not go there. I would sometimes say, “I am running some energy today” and he would say, “Okay, don’t want to get into it, but it’s okay.”

I often had this anxiety about myself, why I was feeling this way. I would often sit and pull some runes and would think about it. I began to see that a lot of what had to do with Tom was about the male dominant energy. I saw that he represented my own male energy that I had been dealing with for lifetimes. But it was a real issue dealing with this male energy which when it comes into my life has always wanted to be dominant…..but the fear of it was overwhelming sometimes.

How did you get through this?

Well let me think about this. I would read and do a lot of shamanic work. I always felt like it was a place I could go and feel solace. I don’t know….it gradually died away. And as I did that, Tom fell away, too. He was my….he awoke….he was my gatekeeper, I guess.

You know, this gatekeeper….this is not a monodimensional…

Yes…

But its this thing, I mean, who knows, but it might be more than just here and now, it could be many places and times. Sometimes when we step back and let our intuition flow sometimes we get this “Oh….why didn’t I understand that before?” I also see how so many relationships point to the nature of this, and it leaves me seeing patterns that exist in them. Do you feel the same way about this man and the experience?

No. I feel like I reached a different level of consciousness. It also had to do with my having cancer recently. That was in 2010, so this has been going on for a while. I think I didn’t know what I did, but I just kind of held on and it happened in a different kind of way.

I always felt calm when I was tapping into some kind of energy. When I do massage I know I always felt calm. I just felt like I could tap into something that makes me feel more at peace. But sometimes when I think about the shaking I feel like I can bring it back.

So with all of the “violence” of the stirring of kundalini do you feel like you are more at peace?

Yes. I don’t feel the fear like I did before. But sometimes I will wake up in the morning and will sometimes have this thing where I have this reaction…and there is this moment of bliss as I wake up but then feel like there is something yet to do and I will feel that sense that causes you to react, [quick draw in of breath] you know.

Occasionally, I will have this experience, recently I looked at a tree and I just saw it shimmering and I was….wow! Sometimes I find that when I go into the Witness, I feel this amazing sense of peace. I was ironing recently and as I did this, I could feel how I was a physical being having a spiritual experience. It was so perfect.

Once while I was with Tom, we were sitting by the water and as I sat there I could hear this voice behind me and it was a woman’s voice. It was Sheila’s voice! And she said, “You are done! You are done!” And I knew that it was time for this to end. I turned to see who it was, and there was no one there. And who knows, it could have been my own psyche doing that.

And maybe it doesn’t matter, whether it is you or her, I think the soul doesn’t care what face that is put on it. So yeah.

I think about how we got over the fear. Sometimes we would sit and pull the runes. Tom was able to work with this and sometimes he would just fall to the ground sometimes and go into convulsions. So during this time, having him in my life, helped a lot. We would share our experiences throughout it. I think that helped me move through it into something calmer. And I went to workshops and did readings. I had you, and Vicky.

Do you employ any practices like meditation or yoga?

[laughs] I am pretty bad at employing a practice. I find that I don’t like to do anything regularly. I am very spontaneous. I go here and there, where I feel drawn. Sometimes I call on my spirit guides, spirit animals, and they help me.

Do you find that you reach a state of deepened meditation anywhere, anyway….like at a grocery store or wherever you are?

Yes. I can often feel this pulsing of energy and I will see this blue light.

How has this impacted the work that you do, your creative work? Have these changed?

Well I wrote that book about my mother. I think that I am able to focus on that kind of thing better. But there was a time when I wanted to be well known, but now I am more interested in just making the work and finding the right world. My relationship to all of this is changing and I am going more inward. That’s what’s more important is my inner life. What I love is talking one on one with people. That is my true love in my life now.

I recently read the book Goddesses in Every Woman, and that is Aphrodite, and I never thought of myself as an Aphrodite. I always think of her as the young beauty on the shell. Actually Aphrodite is the one who likes to talk deeply about the deeper subjects…you know….she likes to sit and talk deeply with people. That is what I love. I love this.

What are your thoughts about these mass awakenings happening?

You said it best at the beginning of this, which is that it is the return of the Goddess. And I think she is returning right now to the earth. I know popular culture doesn’t see that but there are people like Sera Beak, have you read her book Red Hot and Holy?

No…

It’s wonderful. She is a young goddess lover. Went to visit Mariom Woodman and you know, she is a little too much for me. I am a little too old for all the sex toys and stuff but she’s bringing it back in its full vitality and richness. And I think there is a whole movement out there. She calls it the Red Volution, instead of the revolution. I like her because when she speaks, she doesn’t try to be on top of it the way men often do, she is just up there with her trembling voice saying, “This is me. This is me. I am a goddess, and so are you!” You’d like seeing her. She is very beautiful.

I think we don’t need to go back to matriarchy, either. Patriarchy is changing, too. I think we can go to the balance. It’s a mystery. It is a deep mystery. I have learned to trust the mystery and not try to control every little thing.

This energy that is kundalini. How did you relate to it? Did you feel like it had sentience?

Oh yeah!

Did it feel like it was a part of you or it was separate?

At first I thought it was separate, but later, I felt that it was me. When I felt the goddess, I knew it was me. But before that, I felt this thing that was like a devil in me that I wanted to just cast it out….but I think that is what is happening, it is the goddess touching you. But because the patriarchy was so long in power that it has to be the goddess coming back now to balance it. And with Tom he was such a powerful form of the masculine that I had to touch that to balance that, to bring balance to its opposite.

Thank-you, Diane.