Archives for the month of: July, 2015

I have *never* posted a recipe. Until now. I love to cook, I love to eat.  I love to be creative, and I love looking down the barrel at infinity.  This recipe reminds me very much of what my organic foods co-op near me sells that I have loved for years.  I think you will like this kind of thing for healthy snacking, traveling light (great for a day out at the museum or park).  If you get around to making them sooner than me, let me know what you think!  Omit the softer ingredients for more of a hard bar great for backpacks and similar vessels.

cranberry protein bars

3/4 cup unsweetened coconut shredded •1/2 cup pecans chopped • 1/3 cup sesame seeds • 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds • 1/4 cup sunflower seeds • 1/4 cup ground flaxseed • 1/4 cup unsweetened cranberries • 1/4 teaspoon sea salt • 1/4 cup raw honey • 1/4 cup sunflower seed butter

Preheat oven to 350

Line a square 8×8 pan with parchment paper.

Lightly grease with olive or coconut oil

Throw coconut, pecans, sesame, pumpkin,sunflower seeds into a large frying pan.

Place over medium heat & stir occasionally for 5 minutes until toasted…remove from heat.

Place in large mixing bowl with ground flax seed, cranberries & sea salt

Add honey & sunflower butter into the mixing bowl mix well till all ingredients are evenly distributed.

Transfer to pan & press. PACK WELL

Bake 15 minutes

Let cool & lift out parchment paper.

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As simple as a cup of coffee in the morning

something in me opens up

I am curious

a map unfolds

a world opens

atoms in my body

dance and sing

as two energies

move through each other

in a dance that I know has been eternal.

The room begins to throb

quietly

I feel the electrons spinning in my body

inducing a field around me.

It has been years now

and so much I have gone through

and it still feels the same.

Its earthy

but cosmic

it builds dimension

and leads to great longing

and desire.

I feel a field moving

rippling around me.

I know that this is what moves mountains

and awakens minds.

It all sounds so high and mighty.

I step over and slip open a book

and there is a description

of Buddha who had thousands

who awakened whilst he was here

on Gaia…

and I know

we all serve as this

in our way

a steady torsion field

of influence

of the serpent people

the dream makers

the tapestry weavers

the love makers

the magical brethren and sisteren

that waits with heaving breath

in hope and wish

of ushering in the new way….

Whilst coffee and tea are made…

I look into your eyes

which are the eyes of legion

everyone

for goddess dwells in everything

everywhere

-split the stone and she is there

she is everywhere….

a calm breeze

a rush of realization

of the sacred androgyne

that this makes of us

and explodes all notions

opening us up to the new

as skin after skin is shed….

as I feel you there

in the kitchen

as the water hasn’t even begun to boil

but the universe opens up

so simply and wildly.

I am reaching the goddess

reaching the goddess within

so as to heal the god

and make my world

a garden with no competing weeds

You react in the air around me

as I ride this wave

moment to moment

day to day

a great big silly silence

with nothing present

no one there

with a room full of something

entirely quiet

but screaming too…

the universe yearns this way

and bids us to

so we might create as it does

moment by micromoment

in scales measured in

millennia curled up within nanoseconds

as all time expands perfectly within its one great moment

alive in all other moments

and my inners seek the flow from one polarity to the other

to unlock my own secrets

that I am here to find

in the eternal garden of the soul….

Somewhere years ago I read that when adopting a pose for meditation the one thing you DON’T want to do is place the soles of the feet together.

So for years I followed that. Until last night. As I was meditating, I dropped into my instructional mode, the place where I ask for information about things I might think I know nothing about. I got into this state pretty quick and began seeing a rapid fire series of thought-images. And the result? There is nothing bad about placing the feet together—the placing of the feet together is the same as placing the hands together for bringing focus and concentrating energy awareness in body and mind. It was pointed  out, also, that at each termination of a limb, there is a reversal of the energy, effectively a “flip” in energetic polarity, known also as a zero-point. We actually have TEN of these on our arms since there are ten fingers, with each one carrying pos/neg energy down one side and the other, with the “flip” happening at the tip of the fingers. This, it said, was why hands are used so much for healing.

There was the caveat that more primal energy is stored and blocked the lower one goes, so it said to be aware of that.  I wondered, was this the same enigmatic kind of answer the adventurer gets from the wise old sage when trying to find a northwestern passage to find Shambalah to be careful with the creatures of the night…..only to find he is surrounded by tigers encounter who all want to eat him! I decided that I had not gotten any sense of harm or alarm in any of my probing a of the Infinite Fabric Mind……and decided to ask you if you wanted to join me in an experiment.

But what would happen if I were to place my feet together? Silence. Is it something I should avoid? The answer was a kind of stunned silence. “Why would you need to avoid it?” Came the reply. I explained that I had asked the question. I was asking a silly question, it would seem. It would also seem that for me at least, doing a posture where I hold my feet together is not something that for me is bad in any way.

So I laid down on my back so that I could comfortably place my feet together, and then placed my hands together, placing them first at my solar plexus region and then up to my heart to see if there was any difference. What happened was dramatic in implications, even as I sat there quietly. I don’t want to say too much and instead would like to offer any of you who do release work and meditation to try this pose and remain quiet and still and simply record what you experience, feel, or find yourself thinking.

Of course, having asked this, I am sure someone is going to point out that this pose opens up the 57 chambers of hell (well okay, 57 2/3 to be exact). Anyone game to observe and report back? You can email privately at info@staffordartglass.com.

happy journeys, and let me know what you find

acupuncture-chart

NOTE:  I know….another long post.  Sorry about that, really. But I am asking you on an adventure and we can’t do that with a bunch of bulletted text, can we? So here goes the long version that asks you take a cup of tea and a cookie or something and just soak into it…

Imagine that overlaid on your body is an extremely fine webwork of energy lines, fine as spiders thread which create a vast jungle of pathways that align to organs and centers in your body that are physical that these lines help to feed the necessary nutrient of life force or prana to. You can’t see or touch these lines, but you can feel them.  In fact, there are people, like myself, who can see the energy radiating off of them which can tell you all about where that person is physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It sounds a little wild to some people, but really, its only because you have never heard of it or experienced it directly for yourself.  But when you do, it is a game changer.  But you don’t have to see this energy in order to work with it.  There is a lot that you can do with it that is healthy and beneficial.

These lines that make up the energy body begin so small that they are difficult to see.  They go down in scale to subatomic since the energy force literally does feed right into and out of the subatomic.  Its a very very detailed system for carrying energy.  Most systems for understanding this only show the seven chakras that go up the core of the body.  In the same way that your vascular system goes from extremely small structures that feed into organs and cells, they get bigger and bigger like the branches of a tree.  Finally they go up a central main trunk, which is where the most obvious centers of vortex energy reside.  We call these “chakras” which mean “wheel” or “disc” in the Sanskrit.

You don’t need to know anything about esoteric traditions to know and understand what a chakra is or what your energy is.  I can tell you that by becoming sensitive to energy fields that are in others around you and by feeling your own energy, you can learn right away FROM the energy itself to know how it behaves and how incredibly complex but beautiful it is. By learning directly with the energy, you can allow your own natural intuitiveness to bloom.  Most people feel they have to learn this from another person, but I say that you literally have the capacity within you to decode the information for yourself because it is what you are.  But absent that, a few very basic guidelines about how to reach a place where the energy of the infinite can move through you with calm and peace.

Blocks As Solid (Ideas and Emotions)

We like to think of energy as something that is not solid, but I want to propose to you that at the level of energy itself, the energy body has amazing structure and a kind of “solidity” to it that makes the lines that run through it that the Chinese have charted as “meridians” as incredibly consistent from one person to the next.  Far from being just a current or amorphous flow of energy, the energy that makes up our consciousness is amazingly structured.  It is out of this “solidity” that energetic objects can get stuck in the system that is our light body.  In the same way that food can get stuck in your throat, energy can be stuck, sometimes for years, lifetimes even, in your energy body.  The result of removing the block is that perception and awareness changes and the person feels much more peaceful and happy.

But we are a cluster of thousands of these blocks.  These blocks are always emotions that were not fully felt in one way or another. Do you fear your rage? Do you find yourself putting it away or stuffing it down?  That breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend where you pulled yourself together and stopped crying because you were afraid you were going to just fall apart? Its possible that you were stuffing something down. Or how about that moment when you feared something that you did not understand…a feeling that just hung there like dirty laundry on the clothesline?  Afraid, we leave it alone…..and we shove it down.  By not fully processing any form of emotion, we literally create a kind of bottled knot of whatever that emotion is that gets stored in the energy body.

The Body Thinks

There is a lot of evidence that I am finding that shows HOW the energy body and the physical body work together to either store or to release these blocks.  It has to do with the nervous system, the brain, as well as the current of prana and how it is polarized in the life force field itself.

The light body is made up of two fields of energy that are joined and that replenish each other. They aren’t really even “two” but two ends of a spectrum of energy that represents a kind of cosmic totality that makes it possible for you to then connect into the totality that exists beyond you.  This is the way this energy works, and is why you can feel the rush of the universe move through you in moments of nondual awareness (or as a continual awareness depending on the extent of your experience).  Two-in-one (energies) who then birth a transcendent third energy.  You see? All of this activity is felt as taking place not in the head but all through the body.

What I am getting at is that there is already evidence to support that the body “thinks” and stores memory.  Now this stands in direct opposition to what we all have been taught, but what we have learned about our capacity to store memory is simply lacking.  Consider that the tissues in your body contain neurons, enough neurons in your gut for the brain of the average cat.  THAT is a lot of processing power.  What do you think our gut is doing with all of that?  What does your gut tell you? 🙂 So you see, the body has this capacity for dealing with memory, yes, and there is also a way to use somatics (body knowledge) to aid in releasing these memories.  Unlike the brain, the body seems to be more selective in the memories it stores.  It seems at this point in time, to be storing memories that it has had trouble with.  These can now be released once the individual is ready to release them.  And doing so is a saving grace because whatever the short coming was, or the fault or hurt or fear or rage, it all evaporates after releasing these blocks.

In the work I was doing with my friend Alison who is herself awakened and a gifted intuitive, we found that even matter itself has a propensity to hold blocked energy.  I one experience that unfolded that I write about in my book, I describe how we unlocked an energy that had been blocked at a physical site that involved the murder of a man who had been drowned in a lake.  At the time, we did not know that a body had been found in the lake that we saw in our inner vision, but it had been discovered as the waters receded in what was then a dry lake bed (and his body was discovered along with some of his belongings enough to identify him).  We were able to describe a scenario that had a group of friends going out on the lake in the middle of the night with one of their friends not returning.  By simply recognizing the truth of this event, we were able to release it.  Six months after our encounter our local newspaper printed a story about the man who had died in the lake!  It was pretty amazing that events in the physical world would be so closely tied to our own encounter.  The newspaper story told the story of the four friends who took this man out onto the lake.  What we saw was that he was murdered for an elicit love affair with the wife or girlfriend of his friend. It was perhaps the reason why the blocked energy could be released….because someone was able to see what really happened on that night.  No one else would have been able to really see the events as they took place.  While we had testimony from his friends as part of the historical record, it is interesting how no one seemed to even entertain the idea of foul play at all.  Basically, it came down to four people all saying that their friend drowned. As long as everyone sticks to their story, then no one is the wiser.

And of course, this lead the skeptical to suggest that I saw something that was not there, or that I was making it up or seeing a real event bu interpreting it to fit my own life where I felt as though I had been drowned. And I will concede that this is certainly a real possibility.  What suggests to me that we were seeing real events was because both Alison and I were picking up on all the same information, information that was in line with the story when it came out in the newspapers.

And this is where the second lesson in doing this kind of work comes in.  When we went up to this lake, we were simply going to see the sun setting.  But what unfolded was an event not unlike one that had taken place in my own life. There was something eerily similar to what had happened to me and to our friend who drowned in the lake.  While my life was not taken from me, my experience in my marriage was that I was being held underwater to be drowned before my own children.  It was itself a really painful experience that happened to me, something that people in the psychiatric community call ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome.”  One parent tries to destroy the other parent in the eyes of the children.  When it happens to you, it feels like the life is being sucked out of your body.  it feels like you are drowning.  It was appropriate that I would pick up on this eerie energy that was skulking about in those hills.  It was scary at first….sinister….but as we worked through the memory, I found that I was touching on a whole host of feelings that were in me as well.  By working with one block we were able to clear the other block.

But what took place in the wake of this experience is also very telling.  In the same way that clearing a block in your body leads to a world of new possibilities, the area where this drowning took place also underwent a lot of changes in the years following our event.  Renovations were called for in the main buildings, a new arts initiative was called for with new people with progressive ideas coming onto the scene.  It was as though a new window opened for the people who lived and worked around this location.  To date, a slew of new initiatives have been undertaken on the part of the owners of the property where this lake is.  Its interesting to see how a location can be stuck for years only to see how it becomes unstuck, with a flow of new people, new ideas, and new possibilities entering the scene.  The same happens to you when you release these blocks, too!

Complimentary Blocks And The Law Of Attraction

Until a block is cleared, the block can be the basis of an attraction by others who are either similarly blocked or complimentary blocked.  What this means is that you either have someone who has had the same KIND of experience or someone who compliments the experience as in the case of someone who has a fear of being pushed, say, and you attract a person who seems to like to push you a lot!  THAT would be an example of a complimentary attraction.  A positive complimentary attraction would be somethign similar but in the positive, not negative.  In either case, however, the two people feel the similarities even if they are opposites, and these dynamics open up the flow of energy within us. They fill a role be it positive or negative.  These aspects of the other person can lay dormant for decades before expressing themselves, or they can be playing in the background all the time.  However, when you release this material, you release any possibility for this same kind of blocked material to ever be of any consequence to you in the future.  it is gone like a poof of smoke.  And this is why this kind of work is so important and life changing; you can change your whole life based on one big critical pivotal move in clearing your blocks in your body.  The result is that you NEVER feel energized by behaviors that would have effected you before.  It’s as though your mind has been completely rewired when it comes to whatever hot button issue this block represented to you in the past.  There is a lot to suggest that this event does literally have the power to rewire the brain in seconds flat!  How’s that for a speedy transformation?

It really is that fast and that easy.  When you have enough of these you realize that you can actually become a free person in ways you have never experienced before.

Ways Of Clearing Blocks

The best way to work through blocks is to pay attention to the ones that come up the most for you.  This is one most obvious way.  But these blocks may also be the hardest to clear away.  I am of the observed opinion that clearing smaller blocks is the way to go since it can loosen up material surrounding one block only to result in a kind of energetic avalanche with other blocks going at about the same time.

You can identify blocks in your body by simply observing when you feel a sense of resistance or even pain in your body when you move a certain way.  Your energy body changes frequency from one end of the field to the other.  As a result, different emotions are stored at different places along this “column” in the body.  This is why some issues are stored in the root chakra than in the crown. The root chakra deals with nurture, abundance, and safety of self, for example.  When you feel a sense of resistance or even pain from tightness in a given area, you can gain a good bit of understanding about the block in general by thinking about where that block is located.  If its between two chakras, then it will contain aspects of BOTH chakras in some way.

If you can identify the spot where the hurt or twinge keeps happening, you can point it out to a therapists who can work on that spot for you.  The types of therapists who can do this work will be people who do both energy work and body manipulations such as deep tissue massage.  Acupressure, acupuncture, reiki, and deep tissue are all methods that can help.  In pranayama yoga there is a lot of attention given to moving certain parts of the body, something called “locks” that help to move blocked material.  All of these involve vigorous movement of the part of the body where the chakra is located and, presumably, the blocked material.  Even placing your attention on the spot and holding it there through the day is one way that you can help loosen up a block in your body.  If it gets enough aware energy, it can trigger the release of the block sometimes.

Chakra Clearing VS. Meridian Clearing

This is especially true for the chakras.  When a block is in a meridian line and not in a chakra, it seems to be harder to release it unless you are using acupressure or reiki, systems that actively move energy through the meridians of the energy body.  The chakras, conversely,  have a churning effect on blocks so that if you can use the chakras in meditation to swirl and move around a block, this can be very helpful because unlike clearig one small block in a meridian, a whole cluster of blocks can often be released all at once when its associated to chakra movement.  This is achieved by simply visualizing it and allowing the chakras to open fully and begin their movements, which often feel like you are moving or floating or even flying sometimes.  By placing your intent to clear the blocked material in a given chakra, the energy can begin to melt away the block.

Clearing along a meridian line is more exact and may only clear one block.  It can also lead to other blocks letting go, though, and these blocks can be worked through by acupuncture, acupressure, and deep tissue most often.  The larger blocks can be “swirled” away through vigorous chakra movement and can sweep away lots of blocks at once, leaving a person feeling as though they are a changed person.  Many people who have these types of clearings describe feeling as though their body was being purged by a wave or by a force that sent a whole series of bubbles or shots of energy up along their spine and out their body.  Fundamental to all of this work is intent (willingness) and willingness to surrender at a deep level even into the body.  By reaching this deep state of vulnerability, you will also be reaching a deep state of awareness somatically about your body and your own body of feeling, too. Trust me, when the moment comes, it will be like suddenly seeing things in a very different way, the way perhaps that things really are instead of the way you have chosen to see them through the colorings of the particular block that you have.  Be ready to see things in a very different way, or to feel them very differently.  And remember; this is nothing at all to do with reason.  This is NOT about working through your emotional backlog rationally.  To try to do so is a trap.  Yes, reason can keep you OUT of the thick hot stew of your feelings and can help you to calmly identify what needs to be released.  However, you need to actually jump in the water with no fear or resistance to what you will find since this is a necessary state of mind and heart that you will need in order to clear the block. If you turn away, you are effectively saying to your body that its okay to keep the block in place.

Some blocks go quickly.  Some take months, even years to dissolve.  A good rule of thumb is that if you have a strong investment in a given block, the harder it will be to rid yourself of it.  The more ego focuses on it, the harder it will be for the block to simply dissolve.

Part of prana is the energy body that expresses itself as a vortex, a kind of doughnut-shaped field of energy that is common to most anything that has an electromagnetic field around it.  It is this field that carries your consciousness and also the energy that feeds into your cells. When the energy is blocked, illness and neurosis can result. Life force is literally being squeezed out of you when it should be more abundant.

When you remove these blocks you can realize stronger energy, a more peaceful state of mind and greater bliss that is not at the whim of whatever blocks are turning in you at the time.

Until you are able to release a block, the block itself will be energized by prana in your body and it will remain active.  It can cause any number of problems, all of which will revolve around some kind of meme that is less than who you really are as a divine creature in earthly robes.  These blocks can cause no end of trouble for you.  There is little else work that is as important as this is.

There are numerous ways to clear away blocks in the body.  One method is through energy work like White Crane Chi Gung.  This method of blending movement with energy work will aid in the removal of blocks throughout the body.  In order for it to work, it requires patience and persistence.  By working at it for weeks and months at a time, you can begin to see results.  Deep tissue massage by a practitioner who knows or understands about blocks is helpful.  Also, body movement is key.  The very act of shaking or massaging or moving the part of the body that is blocked can aid in removing material from it.

Until you have cleared one chakra region, you will be dealing with what blocks remain in that region.  You will likely find that less obvious blocks come to the fore in your awareness now after having one bigger more obvious block removed.  Your attention can become much more highly tuned in this way to detect blocks in your system.  As this happens, you can also become much more sensitive to the presence in blocks in yourself and others if you are interested in learning a healing art.  I have dug so deep into myself that I have had some practitioners unable to detect the blocks.  One actually scolded me, saying I should not try to CREATE problems when there were were not problems there.  This practitioner was not able to pick up on this material, and I went on to have a number of clearings surrounding this region, so yes, there was more there, but not all of us will be as good about picking up on it.  While I have done the bulk of the clearing on my own, I have used a variety of methods to assist in clearing my system, and these have all worked well for me when they came along in my awakening journey (almost as if they were perfectly suited for the blocks kundalini was churning away on at the time!).  In many ways, I have been very gifted to have found a certain modality at a given time, as though the timing was perfect.  I was talking with my latest therapist about doing more work in the Fall recently as she expressed some surprise with the level of release I was experiencing with her work. I had to explain that while my being able to release blocks was different from her experience, it wasn’t from my experience.  For many people, it seems they get a deep tissue massage and maybe loosen up some material a bit.  For me, I am headed into the final stage of releasing material, a process that has taken years of steady daily attention and work, and I am having flashes of past lives, of deeply held traumas from my ancient past. It seems the deeper I go into it, the harder it is, the deeper the shadows.

So don’t be afraid of the shadow, I say.  That you get down into such shadows is cause for celebration.  Who on the planet has managed to get this deeply into themselves….to overcome the world?

This is why clearing blocks is so important; it is all about overcoming the world.  Would you like to see with new eyes?  With clear bodies, we can build a clear world.  And that is why I am writing to you today.  Pass it along!

~P.

Years ago, right as kundalini rose and my whole life made a 180 degree course correction, I had a life.

In that life I had a home that I bought.  That home was a nice home, but I soon outgrew it, or it outgrew me as my own life morphed and changed.  I am now in the midst of doing work to bring my old home to a state of readiness for sale.  And for the life of me, I cannot disengage the house renovations for my own inner renovations.

I can’t because all of the objects we find in our lives are delicately intertwined, the outer with the inner and visa versa.  To show you what I mean, when I went to close on this house I discovered that the owners were selling the home to settle a divorce.  I would divorce a year and a half later.  I would discover things about the house that showed a number of very odd correlations with events in my own life there and with my family.  Coincidence, or events that have a way of coinciding within our own in such a way that like attracts like?

I am aware that how I am blocked may be how my house is blocked. Physical objects are subject to the same “rules” governing energy as people are.  Energy forms matter, and all things are energy.  Why should we think that sentient beings and objects made out of matter are really all that much different?  The aren’t.  Locations can be just as stuck as people are, and can be just as haunted as people as well. I have had many very pointed experiences in this area that shows that you can actually free a locations of its “glitches” or snags.  One powerful way of doing this is changing yourself.  Because this is a dynamic process, what you do on the outside can change what is on the inside sometimes. If I make a change in me, the vibration that is taking place or that is attached to my home is freed to change as well. So with that in mind, I have turned the renovation of my home, which amounts to a lot of fixing and painting, into a meditation on my own insides.  I can say that so far it has helped a lot with blocks of energy and continues to help.  This is one example for how work of this kind can be an active form of meditation.

No Whitewash

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I didn’t want to simply slap paint onto the surface of my home.  Paint had accumulated over many decades.  My home is almost 80 years old and it looks like it has not had any paint stripped from it at all.  I took torch and scraper to the paint and began the laborious process of removing all paint from surface to deep core.  As I did this, I could feel how all the memory locked into the surface of the paint just peeled away and became like a crispy crust that I tossed into the trash.  Likewise, I could feel how allowing myself to be scraped deep, to open myself to such radical clearing was one important way to clearing away material that was keeping me blocked in my life.  Lot of it, I wasn’t even aware of.  But that is how some of these blocks are.  You almost rely on a kind of “further knowing” a knowing that feels like its beyond you, to know what you can’t possibly know.  And yet you do.

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Things looked like hell for a while.  But isn’t that how it is?  Once you get honest with yourself, you can disrobe and let all of the surface details go to get down to the real you.  Thing was, this old house has such nice bones.  Surely, this bodes well for each of us.  But we often pretend to be something we aren’t, or aren’t even AWARE enough that we are something more than what we are.  One thing is for sure, we sure can be pretty unaware of our broader potential sometimes.

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As work progressed, more and more paint was removed. Trees were taken down and turned into mulch.  Gutters were fixed and small trees dug up and bushes trimmed.  It was a hair cut that was some five years in the making.  The old lady was going to look a lot better once I was able to get some good paint on her.

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I can’t cut corners when I do a job like this.  I just can’t.  I can’t bring myself to buy the paint that one worker bought who was doing some painting on an other part of the house.  I directed him to a gallon of paint I had bought that was easily double the price of the paint he had with him. The thing is, when you look at the two paints on different parts of the house, you can tell a difference.  Cheap paint just lacks the body and the luxurious look that a paint that is more expensive will have.  This old lady needed to be dressed up nice so that she glowed.  I wanted to give this house some love because we all deserve this. The love outwardly became the love inwardly…

And things began to shape up.

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Month by month this work dragged on.  I probably missed the window for the most active time for buying homes but I don’t care.  I want to do this job right, you know?  I will only sell this house once and its a doozie of a home.  I wont see her likes again in a good long while.

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New gardens put in help to shape the front and helps add a splash of color.  Sitting at the top of a hill, the roofline of this dutch colonial is perched perfectly to look out across town.  Private, but in the middle of everything, just as I like it so often, the house is situated nicely amongst the homes in the neighborhood.

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As I work, I think about my own body.  I think about driving up old splinters and hurts and forgotten sorrows and joys so as to liberate them so that they no longer turn like a stone that refuses to return to dirt but instead tumbles and rattles in our insides for so long a time we forget it is even a rock doing that…..an old rock of an old feeling we just have not had the courage or willingness to let go.  Maybe its a feeling that will make us all think we are just crazy….a feeling that we know that if we let go, we will never feel again.  No matter how incredibly broken it may seem to admit that, we humans love the devil we know rather than the angel that we don’t.

We can though look at a house and see how its not so different from us in some ways.  We can dig up the old bones and let them see the light and realize that now no more secrets need to be kept.  We can enter into the glory of a new life.  Doing this is a moment of pure honesty….a moment that most of us seem more afraid of than a hundred monsters in our closets.  But looking honestly at everything is a brilliant maker of lives because it helps us to build on a foundation built right rather than one that was poorly set to begin with.

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She is looking good and I have high hopes for using this sale as the catalyst for big changes in my own life.

I’ll keep you updated.

heart

I am doing some research for my book that helps to support an awareness I have had that the shift that we call awakening is mirrored in the brain and that this shift is one that leads to a flowering or catalyzing of a greater amount of the right brain functions in us. To keep it short and sweet, I will mention that current research has shown that the right brain, most notably the right frontal cortex, is considered to be the seat of many mystical experiences.  it is also the part of us that is most capable of glimpsing the very big picture that the experience of nonduality offers.  But along with this blooming of the right brain also comes the emotions that have been associated with that part of our brain, which is most notably feelings related to sadness.

Is the right brain sad?

In a sense, the answer is….kind of.  Our capacity to experience or process feelings of sadness do appear to be located right alongside our mystical experiences.  This part of the brain has been associated with the experience of deja-vu, sensing “Presence” (spiritual beings, God/Goddess, etc.) and being able to see how things are connected in our lives and world.  It is, in a word, one important way that we are able to perceive the “implicate order” of the cosmos and builds this awe-inspiring sense of how everything is quite literally completely interconnected.

So if the right brain allows us to sense deep into our sorrow, does the left brain do something different?  Turns out that it does!  And this is an important tool for each of you reading this who have struggled with awakening symptoms and effects.  While you may feel as though you have been launched into another world by this experience, the lesson here is that you might need to consider bringing your left brain along with you, too!  The left brain has been shown to allow us to tap into our more positive forward-looking emotions.  While its important to recognize what ails you, its just as important to know how to pick yourself back up with your left brained capacity to feel positive about life.

I think it really is all a question of balance, personally.  I find that people who are more analytical tend not to let the weight of the world get them down, but many times they also can ignore the material that needs careful processing in order to get through it properly. This could represent a kind of cognitive and emotional blind-spot of sorts.  On the other hand, getting too deep into the sorrow end of things is just as bad because it can become a trap.  I know.  When my awakening took a sudden turn in 2009 after about three years of symptoms related to it, I found that my right brain was called upon to deal with the sheer volume of stuff flowing into me.  Correspondingly, I came upon a place in my inner work that I write about in my book that I call the Sea of Sorrow.  At first my inclination was to just face this sorrow and let it out.  I spent time each day just letting myself cry.  That was a big first for me since before this experience, I could only think of a couple of instances in my adult life where I was actually able to have a good cry.  I had learned the well-worn ways of being a man who had to be depended upon to be that emotional rock for everyone else around him.  The only problem with this is that…..we are not rocks. So getting to this place I thought was a milestone.

I thought that I could just purge myself of all this sadness.  What I experienced was the sense that I was in a vast sea of emotion, a collective grief, if you will, and I went from thinking it was mine to realizing that this belonged to all of us.  The day came when I wised up and realized, “This is all of our work to purge if it even NEEDS to be purged…..this is just too much for any one person.”  With that, I set about doing meditations that showed me setting up a sail in my little boat away from these sorrowful waters.  I had to make the intention that this was no longer a place that would bring me any lasting benefit.  This was an issue for a different time. It may also be that this is an issue that we each will face in our own way, but getting down into the collective muck is not the answer.  I sense that this grief will be cleansed when enough of us chose to forgive and forget, seeing all of the hurt and deciding that it is time to just let it go. I also sense that higher force in us will have to do this work, and so I pray that if this is correct, that whatever in us that is able to do this, will do so.

As for the research and all of the official citations, I am saving that for my book.

So keep it balanced folks, and all the best of luck in all your work!

5-brain-design-by-cogs-and-gears-setsiri-silapasuwanchai
Fasting has long been considered an effective way of clarifying mind body and spirit. It has been used by every culture on the planet. When viewed through the lens of Somatics, a discipline that teaches about the dynamic relationship between body and mind and how what you do to the body can impact the mind, it begins to be clear how fasting can be an important compliment to spiritual work. Is it as simple as clearing the body in order to clear the mind? If you ask the many religious practitioners from every persuasion, the answer most often is “yes.”

New Science On An Ancient Subject

Recent discoveries in the brain/body connection are supporting what the ancients have known for thousands of years. With neurons scattered through the human digestive tract equalling the number of neurons in the brain of a cat, it has led researchers to ask why does the stomach have these neurons and what connection do they have to the brain?

The simple answer is that our cognition goes beyond just our brain, including the body. As the body is purged, so too can the mind/brain be purged. The radical implication is that body and mind are linked and cross-connected in amazing ways, lending weight to the ancient maxim, “the body thinks.” When most of the neurons outside the brain are in the gut, how we treat it has an impact on how we are in a holistic sense.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-18779997

Fasting Particulars

A fast can be short or long. It can involve no food at all, or it can include light foods intended to help cleanse the intestinal track. There are all kinds of fasts depending on your needs.

A fast will produce changes after a three to four day fast from food. The body will go through important changes, changes that many consider to be the body cleansing itself at a deeper level than just of material in the bowel; it is observed that the body begins to throw off toxins by the third to fourth day of a regular no-solid food fast. The breath smell will change, and body odor can change during this time. Depending on the level of cleansing desired, your fast will be adjusted accordingly. One important consideration that you will take into consideration will be your own health; can you handle a fast well?

The advantages beyond physical cleansing will also be a clearing of the mind and energy field. This can lead to insights, increased psychic sensitivity and awareness beyond the physical…
the inner senses are often intensified when used with breath work, inward-seeking, and focus on various key energy centers of the body. In most traditions, fasting is treated like a sacrament, regardless of your religious affiliation. Fasting helps clear body, mind, and soul if allowed to run its course in the right way.

Fasting can sometimes be just what the doctor ordered in dealing with moving energy and reaching into a new place within feeling and awareness.  Fasting was considered one of the must-have’s in spiritual work, and you can see this reflected in the sites that are dedicated to this ancient practice from a variety of cultures and religious affiliations from Hindu, Muslim, Native American, Aboriginal, and Christian, just to name a few.

 

I have found great merit in using fasting as a way to clear my system, having done it voluntarily in the early part of my awakening experience to involuntarily at a time when my body simply told me it did not want ANY food.  At all.  I will save that story for another time and provide you with a link to a site that is all about fasting.  Just about anything and everything you could ever want to know about fasting is herein contained.  This link came up as I was doing some additional research into the symptoms and challenges that sometimes come with awakening as it impacts the stomach and intestinal track.  I have largely revised the older post about flu symptoms as a result, which is a post that is back by about two from this one.

http://www.allaboutfasting.com/types-of-fasting.html

Best of luck in your work, and if in doubt, check with your health care provider if you are unsure if a fast is right for you!

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