Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part II

This post is the second installment that is best read in series about how karma creates chemistry and how we can open our lives up to a new horizon, literally a new kind of life by clearing the karmic threads and “debts” which we owe to ourselves as drops in the vast ocean that is consciousness…

 

So I was thinking about how I was able to clear up the karma from this “soul twin” that I had in the beginning of my awakening. I was thinking, too, about  how effortless it was to dissolve the connection that had caused me so much angst as well as bliss.  Mind you, in the beginning, there was this expansive love that I felt as well as this fiery quality that was part of the rush of prana that is kundalini.  This was not an effort at making myself a recluse, but rather that I felt, knew, that this was not all there was.  Most everyone I observed in the “twin” community seemed fairly situated in what I was rapidly feeling was the mythos of the twin flame and comfortable with this view as the twin as “The One.” It was natural, afterall, I had been there, too.  But things were changing for me and I was no longer content with what I saw as a delightful fairy tale, a beautiful story, certainly, but not one that reflected reality.  Yes, I felt the depths of soul love inside of me and I shared this with another, but I also felt the earthly self, both where I was and where she was.  We were oh-so human.

How to deal with this dichotomy, I thought? It seemed to me that this disjuncture was the proof that there was something more at work.  What the twin community was doing, it seemed to me at the time, was the same thing we do when we are putting a puzzle together.  You know those puzzle pieces that LOOK like they fit, but don’t?  I mean those pieces that look exactly like they should fit, but the shape is off so very slightly that you are kind of stumped in that moment?  Yeah, like that.  Now I was watching as some of us were just jamming that puzzle piece into place and saying “good enough!” and going on with it.  I just wasn’t one of those people.  I am a big believer in letting a mystery BE a mystery, yes, certainly, but there is also a time when you ought to use your mind some to roll this thing around, especially when the “mystery” isn’t fitting into any of the discussed paradigms set forth thus far.

I thought about this and wondered what a later soul connection might have involved, and this time around, for soul connection #2 it was similar, but different.  It also involved a miss-identification of responsibility for a host of issues that caused me a lot of hurt and pain with this person, to be quite honest.  I was snagged by this person with her dishonesty, which was very much like my wife before my awakening began.  In fact, I considered at the time that this #2 connection might have been a way to work through what my ex-wife and I had not worked through. They were so similar in some important ways.  Sounds dysfunctional, doesn’t it?  Well, actually, it has turned out that since the two of these people were sooo similar that it has helped a LOT in working through the remaining karmic snags for BOTH.  Despite the fact that something in the back of my head was telling me that what I was being drawn into and WHY I was being drawn into it might well be bad for me.  Different stories, yet so very similar.

The Universe Becomes Your Mirror

In an interesting twist, I have been having a lot of problems popping up with my ex-wife as I have been headed towards the end-game of this soul connection, trouble that she has been initiating all on her own.  This has always been telling to me because whenever I was working through some karmic material it was as though they could feel it and would pop up out of the blue.  The timing on this has always been bizarre, at least in the beginning.  Lately, I just see this kind of behavior as proof for how we are bound by common material and that we can indeed all feel it whether it is conscious or not.

I chose to remain neutral with my ex-wife, though, in this last series of interactions, choosing not to engage her by pointing out the error in her way of behaving (which has always been over-the-top mean and hurtful).  This tack or approach has proven to shake things up in me just enough to help release some significant karmic material in both cases, ex-wife and connection #2.  In this case, the release was sooo simple. God, just to think about how much hand-wringing and worry and concern there had been about approaching this day there had been!  So much self-doubt, so much loathing of myself for being tied to these hard people! The release happened with #2  I when I was able to see an admission that one of them had emotional problems.  All I ever really needed was that moment of honesty from them, that “come to Jesus moment” that never really happened, and probably wouldn’t happen.  This had kept me active and turning on this karmic merry-go-round.  And this moment was not one that involved me talking to either of them, which was actually really nice.  Poof.  On my own, I got the one small thing that I needed that flipped the switch on all of this.  And now?  All of that hard stuff is just gone. I feel different.  I look different.  I now realize that the thoughts that I once had that I often dismissed as just a fairy tale way of being were in fact the depths of who I am, the beauty that was waiting for me on the other side of that garden gate.  One side was thunder clouds and uncertainty and the other side was bright and hopeful without a need to convince myself that anything was anything except what it was. Now, whether dark or light, I just don’t see the dividing line but feel the bliss of simply being.

I will also add that along with this hard behavior taking place as I reached the home stretch in all of this, that I was approached about two months ago out of the blue by a guy I know only peripherally, asking me if I could help him with his business.  As I was working with him and his employees, I felt deep into the energy of the group and found this troubling but interesting swarm of energy there.  I just worked for weeks and felt into it as I went about my day.

I found that there were all of these similar energies that all went back to the male wound.  For the first two to three weeks I only felt the energy.  I really had nothing to go on beyond what I was feeling. But by the third week, people were suddenly opening up and telling me exactly what I wondered about on an energy level.  All of this felt so familiar to me, but I had no hard physical history to pin it to. Without saying a word or asking any questions, except in my mind, they each began to tell me just what I needed to know.

This time, instead of working this like a problem, I accepted it without feeling a need to fix anything.  The interesting thing that happened was that I went from repulsed and upset the first few weeks, to feeling a strange affinity for these men.  I understood where they had been because I had been in similar places, too. I think we all have in one way or another.  It was as though life was giving me this opportunity to step deep into this chasm that was the inner life of these men in order to ponder my own wound, what is called “samscara.” But the brand or nature of their wound was so similar in so many ways to my own. This was tricky…..be in the world, but don’t be of it.  Step into the abyss but remain untouched…..no….not quite….surrender and accept all of it, see it, feel it, know it and don’t feel a stitch of resistance.  Yes, that is much more accurate.

It was at the moment that I began to accept them that the changes began to take place with my ex chiming in with her junk, all in perfect timing.  The distance between these men and their admissions about their past happened within 24 hours of my ex texting me and trying to “yank my chain.”  I remained stolid and calm.  It all passed with some hurt on my side, but no reaction, which was the big difference.  In the past, I knew that she took some pleasure from getting a reaction out of me.  As long as I reacted in pain, it confirmed to her that I was just as messed up as she was.  It was her way of keeping me in the boat.  But wait, no, it was me allowing myself to be controlled, effected, and enmeshed.  And THAT was the difference.  I had control now. Hurt me all you want, or try to; it just no longer works.  The first few times, yes, it still hurts…but the behavior and the energy is actually changing, and this was part of how I just stepped out of that old restrictive suit of clothes that made the man who he was.

After this took place, about a week later, another layer was unfurled and this time there came the beginning of a series of releases. I was able to feel the energetic side of the block releasing from my right lower range of the meridian when I got out of the work van at our work site several days ago.  This was between root and sacral chakras and was not felt IN the chakra like so many releases in the past.  This one was stubborn, bug in, and I felt the root block more as points within the meridian line on the male or solar side of yang energy (based on the Chinese medicine system). Then I was able to read about an admission from this soul connection and it all resulted in this perfectly timed matrix of effects that felt like a landslide or cascade of inner releases that brings me to where I am now. Poof. Gone.

Energetically, I feel different and my thoughts are different, too.  I am no longer obsessed with loss and lack churning inside of me.  Poof.  This buoyancy has resulted in my feeling like I can reach something that I didn’t feel….worthy of.  Can you believe that? With this hard energy weighing me down, I just didn’t feel like I could reach it easily.  Everything had this cast over it that had an edge of the negative. With a root-related block this type of thing relates to issues of nurture and abundance.  If the block is big enough, it can result in problem taking care of ones self or creating abundance.  I knew that my block was partial because of how events happened in my life.  I had always used creative visualization for the important things in my life: school, job, career, and children.  They all came as I had asked.

In my life I have always been able to manifest pretty big things in my life, but they almost always have some kind of hitch in them, sort of like the wish the genie grants you that you always wind up regretting.  Now, though, I know that we no longer have to regret the wish because the wish is now forged in the clarity of the soul’s purpose free from these troubling alliances having to do with loss and lack and hurt and pain and all the rest. This corresponds to the root now being clearer. I should now see a new level of clarity to what is brought into my life through our ability to co-create our lives.  I also find that any problems that come along just don’t flatten me like they had before.

Today as I opened a new book I bought for myself as this change was underway, it revealed a quote by the Buddha that spoke about how releasing the karmic bonds that hold us down to the earth…..free us so we can fly like eagles who can leave this world or be untethered by the concerns that weighed us down.

I have been hoping for this moment for years.  Years. Me an my dear friend Ali  have been talking about this idea which she brought up in our early discussions back in 2008 about how karma creates chemistry.  I wondered at first how anyone would believe such a thing as this?  At first, it didn’t make sense to me.  What I felt in connection felt natural, not fabricated, and this karma=connection sounded a lot like that. There was something about it that didn’t make sense….but now what I know is that the reason why it did not make complete sense at the time was because I was seeing through  distorted lenses, that my way of sensing and seeing the world was itself….bent. I was myself captured by karma and you cannot fix an old problem using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place (thank you, Albert E.) And this is something that you will need to know about yourself if you find that this also makes little sense to you. I wont ask you to believe me, just file it away and then get on with your “work” and when the day comes when it happens to you, let’s talk.

When I  explained how karma created chemistry to my second soul connection, she did not believe what I was saying.  I hadn’t either.  It just didn’t seem right, based on how the energy felt. It felt like a “foreverness” that you just don’t want to ever let go of.  There are lots of people similarly hooked in the twin phenomenon that keeps them engaged but not healing the blocks.  But do you know why this FEELS like a forever thing?  Do you really?

The Reward Cycle

Dopamine.  I know it sounds simplistic, but it is really that simple.  Our reward centers physically are designed to give us that peasant reward for just about ANYTHING that our mind/brain believes is a good thing.  Sex is one of these things, but there are loads of others. Prana creates bliss and as it is identified, the mind sends a signal to the body to produce dopamine among other things to reward us for something that is actually very good for us.  The idea of connection with another person whom we love generates this rich chemical landscape that keeps us coming back, though, and the connection itself is most often karmic.  This means that on the one side you are feeling prana flow, which is good, but the karma is in there, too, which is a kind of soup of both shadow and light, so you get a bit of both.    If you have a lot of negative karma surrounding an issue, then the chemical train gets colored with that karma and you have the potential for bliss along with the chaotic emotions that are still suppressed within the psyche. This is the double-edged sword of life.  You have the dark and the light.  Learning how to navigate through all of this is what yields victory in clarifying and cleansing the self. There is this very insightful saying in the Gospel of Philip that says in essence that God is a dyer of souls. When God dyes a soul, it goes in one color and comes out white.  This is to say that the dying work that God does is to clear us of all color.  This is not to say that we are colorless. We do not lose our character or personality, but that we lose that which made it hard for us to see the divine within.

Dopamine also does something else where pain and trauma are concerned.  When it is created in the body, it helps to eleviate the pain so that it does not burn deep grooves in our minds.  It helps us to move on.  This is one reason why kundalini works on emotional blockages so well; the body is pumping out a LOT of dopamine (and there is evidence for this state at various stages of the awakening process that I wont go into here but I write a lot about it on the blog).  This is also why people who have PTSD or other types of trauma-based issues will often turn to opiates to soothe the pain.  In fact today as I sat waiting to pick my child up from an appointment, I listened on the radio about a woman who had begun using heroin as a way of dealing with her pain.  She spoke of how it soothed her, made her feel like she could cope.  Sadly, by doing this, she was actually shutting down her body’s own native ability to produce the compounds necessary to make her feel the way she needed in order to heal. Dopamine does this, it is the body’s own natively produced opiate and I can tell you that once I identified what it was I was experiencing that was making me feel so peaceful and smoothed out and wonderful and dreamy, I was able to see how a strong “dump” of dopamine into my system also corresponded with releases.  To put it simply; you just don’t CARE about the pain anymore.  When you do this, your brain and body can simply release the old hurt like that: poof!  The mind stop supporting the old programming and the brain and body are now charged and ready to take in a different story.  The result?  You feel instantly transformed. You are literally reconnecting the brain and the body in new ways, creating new pathways for though to flow.  At an energetic level, the change is felt in a myriad of ways as well.

The dopamine cycle works for a host of reasons, from building a strong family unit for the rearing of children, to the benefit that being with another gives to us as a couple as well as the cohesiveness of a community. There are other compounds involved like oxytocin (which is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter—think on that one for a minute!) a little adrenaline, estrogen, and testosterone.  Once our mind/brain has identified something as important enough, it sets up a reward system for it.  And we can become addicted to it in just the same way we become addicted to the very behaviors that keep us enmeshed in certain karmic merry-go-rounds.  But is this bad?  The curious thing is that some people, in order to get the dopamine blast into their systems will use some behavior that will trigger it.  The important part is whether you are using something else to make it happen, or are you choosing to just feel differently, which is itself the spiritual compliment OF dopamine.  You see the difference?  If its, say, sex, that creates the dopamine reward trigger, then you can become a sex addict.  The sign is that sex is an empty experience for you at some point because after all, you aren’t in it for the experience that sex can give, not really.  You are after the high of the dopamine. As a result, sex addicts wind up having a feeling of emptiness in the wake of sex. It is a terrible place to be.  They need to move the dopamine cycle, the reward cycle, so that it is not divided from the self by any degrees of separation. The trick, people, is to learn how to trigger dopamine production in your body so that you get a nice flow going all the time at a low healthy level so you mirror the physical state of peace.  We have forgotten how to do this, or that the body will respond in a fraction of a second to a desire to feel bliss by pumping out dopamine. We are a generation of pill poppers.  This does not solve the problem, it only masks it.  What is curious is that it appears that when your body is producing dopamine for no other reason than to feel good (not just for a reward cycle) the body does not appear to become addicted to it.

Sometimes the glitches in our karma can go on for lifetimes.  The trick here, the whole point of all of this inner work, is to choose the beneficial positive karma over the negative ones.  If you watch people who are obsessively upset, you will see that they are actually enjoying being upset.  They spend so much time engaged in explaining why they hurt and why.  Most often, they are pointing to some source outside of themselves as the culprit, when all along the culprit is  within. Through a simple turn in awareness, the true culprit is seen for what it is.  Doing this work accomplishes this.  And the result?

For me, when this last wrinkle unfurled in me and the hooks dropped away, I felt….a series of new feelings that felt authentic and good.  My energy felt buoyant.  So simple, so clean and so clear.  I didn’t feel this clenching tightness that could also be associated with sexual tension in an intimate relationship.  When I say tension, this was a tension that felt a little over the top and was a kind of warning signal even as I was unable to change it until I healed the karma at its deepest level. The really interesting thing was how supercharged my sexual energy felt in the wake of this.  I was actually concerned that it would all just go away.  As kundalini/prana cleanses the body/self, the energy is less chaotic or intense.  I worried that I might lose this intensity.  I identified that the intensity made me feel vital and alive….I just didn’t like the hardness.  It finally felt like a flowing powerful form of energy that was unencumbered by these tight or tense spots that I knew were there but was powerless to do anything about (until they were healed).  Like some silent reminder, they let me know in each moment that they were there, these tight spots, these blocks. But in the end, it was much-ado about nothing.

The “Reset”

There was a point in my awakening when I had what I call a “reset” of my energy field about a year and a half into my awakening.  This “reset” helped me to more clearly relate to the blocked energy that still remained in me. How this was done was completely unexpected by both me and my healer.  She was told by her guides to simply follow their guidance and take on my energy for a moment.  I was on the phone, doing this at a distance, and didn’t know that this was happening.  She told me to hang up and just breathe deep and wait.  I felt a sudden lightness to my being that was very nice.  Peaceful.  But after about one minute, I felt my old energy come back down around me.  The only way I can describe it was that in taking on my energy, by entering into my energetic capsule, she was able to lend or imbue or surrogate a much needed form of awareness that I was able to inherit as a result of this exchange.

What took its place was….not easy. At all.  I think if I had known what was about to happen, I would not have gone along with it.  What it felt like was a screeching clamor of metal like the sound of a freight train wrecking all around me.  It was accompanied by a deep and abiding physical pain that remained with me throughout my awakening until I released the remaining material. Okay, so that sounds really bad.  But actually, it wasn’t.  This was NOT physical pain.  What it was, was referred pain.  This was soul pain, a pain I had been blocking from my awareness….even in the midst of awakening.  Yes, I was aware of this pain, I had felt it, but I had simply dialed the volume down.  My healer dialed the volume back up so that I could hear what was happening.  I was, simply, much more aware of what was happening to me. And this sped me along on an accelerated path because the pain I felt in my heart was really hard.  But when the pain was released, as the blockages were released that following year, what followed in its wake, was a wonderful feeling that I keep with me to this day.

This level of awareness based on this “reset” has been of huge benefit to me because it has enabled me to see or feel into my energy body that much more deeply so that I can detect even the smaller things in a much more vivid way.  It will, in time, make me that much better of a healer should I choose to go that route.  It was this awareness that created a sense of pain in one of my meridians that helped me to pinpoint the exact area a year ago so I could show my Kahuna healer where to concentrate on in order to begin releasing material there through energy medicine and deep tissue massage.

And?  Poof!  Gone was all of the obsessing over this person I felt connected to but who I knew had been hurting me and would continue to do so because of her entitlement to being trapped in the meme of victim.  I had been told that I just needed to forgive this person…..but in the end, it wasn’t forgiveness that did it.  What did it for me was in being able to see things so clearly….something that I KNEW but that I seemed to hear from them as being the truth.  That was my hitch; I seemed to need to know that they knew.  I know that seems weird, but for my brand of karma, that was just what the doctor ordered.  Quietly, I was able to simply slip the bonds and soar.  Now, how it does it for you, what YOUR trigger is, I can’t say.  For me, though, it was like someone finally saying, “I know that what I was doing was messed up….I know…..and I am sorry about it…” That was all I needed to know, that yes, they knew that what they were doing was off. And now?  I feel no draw to this kind of thing at all.  It is as though I have transcended a murky layer in the ocean and am now in a much clearer place.

Having said all of this, my own energetic awareness shows me that there is still more murk in the root chakra, but it does not seem to be so entangled with others and this blame game that I have gotten tangled in.  I for one am glad to be free from it.  Come what may, at the least THIS part has been cleared, something I have been working on clearing for years.

How It Works

Until such an event takes place where you can resolve the “hitch” or the “hook” of the karmic connection, you remain on the merry-go-round caught in a recursive set of behaviors due to a suppressed set of emotions that are begging to be healed.  This can be done by a simple moment of honesty.  In this one important wrinkle, I was waiting on the honesty of another in order to feel the sense of release I hoped for for so long.  And for me, in my case, it released a whole series of difficult to live with feelings.  Now, free from all of this, I can FEEL myself unencumbered by the weight of another and their feelings of incompletion.  I simply had to know once and for all that this was not mine….but had been making it mine in this codependent cycle that was my karma.  Now with this new clarity of self and heart and soul, I ask myself: what am I going to do now? It will be interesting to see what manifests in the days that come.  With the karma gone, so too is the old chemistry that was caught in the dark goddess.  I am ready for the one who dwells in the light.  And the ONLY reason why I am going to the trouble of opening up like this is because each of us can reach this same place in our own time.  It is possible!  Whoot!

There are numerous methods that can be useful to you in assisting prana in doing its work re-magnetizing you to your larger authentic self.  I have done all of this work without traditional methods like yoga.  While I esteem yoga greatly, I know that it is but one of many methods that can be used.  Ultimately, the goal is doing what makes you flow and open up to the energy.  Breath work helps a lot, including alternating nostril breathing, something I created for myself that I call “Active meditation” which involves working on moving energy in my body and dropping into a deep state where I can feel the buoyancy of my lovely energy that connects me to the universe and reveals to me how the presence of the All is hidden in the atoms and cells of my body.  Centering attention on centers where you feel resistance helps to clear flow, as does movement, ANY movement from dance to things like Chi Gung, deep tissue massage, energy work, reiki, and more.  If you are dealing with awakening, drop into your deeper self and ask yourself what you most need to know.  Try it; then await the answer.  I will bet that you will wind up with resources coming out of your ears….people handing you books, people showing up to act as mirrors, teachers, guides, any number of things can manifest themselves. So trust in the power that is yours and that is also part of the universe.  You are, after all, a part of it and it is part of you!

नमस्ते

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Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part 1

When I had my awakening, I awoke aware that I was feeling someone in my head, in my space….it was hard to pin down at first….but some part of me that woke up KNEW this was so, even as my rational mind was struggling just to keep up with the newness that was taking place.  All of it was novel, interesting, sometimes even scary or anxiety-producing.  I lived with the idea that I had a soul twin because, simply, there was no other theory out there that explained it so….well.

Cracks began to show up in that fairy-tale world when I heard the really hard and mean things this twin of mine would say sometimes.  I began to question, and as I questioned, more things popped up that showed me that something was amiss.  The concept of the twin soul was a fairy-tale.  Like angels on clouds and happily ever afters and gurus who are perfect (note: there is no such thing-these are things we would like to be true but are not). The experience was cosmic and I WAS feeling this person at the soul level deeply.  Yes.  Wonderful, yes.  But human still, yes.

In perfect timing, as I was beginning to question the mythos of the Twin Soul and the Twin Flame along came a person who had gone through all of this herself and we began this dialog.  It was one of the most insightful of any kind of dialog I have had with another person.  She spoke my language, and she helped to fill in some spots that I was clamoring around in the dark for.  One of the things that she talked about was how karma creates chemistry.  At first, this was so non-intuitive that while I took it all in, I honestly had some trouble with it.  After all, the energy that was a part of the connection felt so….natural. It just felt like it was so deep within me, right?

But the same is true for karma.  Whoops.

I have been at the cleansing process that is a part of awakening since early 2007 (early February) and I have slowly come to a realization through many many releases that some of the biggest troubles have been in the more base chakras.  Each release in the meridians or chakras (or both) has always been accompanied by changes in how I felt and how I reacted to things that might have upset me before.  I have been hard at “work” getting my field cleared because of how much better it has made me feel, how richer and more…..buoyant….my energy has felt following a clearing.  Despite how some have said that the root is cleared first, I have to take issue with this and call such tales utter nonsense. No, kundalini clears the easiest to the hardest.  It is like water, following the path of least resistance.  If it had tackled my poor solar plexus, sacral, or root chakras first, I would still be here today telling you how kundalini is still trying to bust down that one hardened armored wall!  Instead, I have hundreds, thousands of victories both big and small that has made the last three years easier.

The last three years has been a time period where MOST of my energy field was cleared with mostly sacral/root blocks remaining.  it has been challenging and sometimes utterly frustrating to see how big the block was, but I can say that over the last year especially, I have spent every single day surrendering to the flow of prana in the hopes that it would flow into those hard places and break up the material.  My meditations have shown me that it was a densely packed series of layers.  Some of the work that I have done has included utilizing a reiki practitioner as well as a  massage therapist who specializes in the Kahuna method, which honors the balance of the masculine and feminine current in our bodies.  I was able to break a lot of material free from those sessions.  I even reported a year or two ago how one reiki practitioner could not detect ANY blockages in my root and patted me on the back and admonished me about not trying to create a problem where no problem existed.  This was a person who was the head of a massage school and is well known in our community for her therapy work.  And this is mentioned as a cautionary tale that for those of you who are going extra deep into yourselves that there may be some who could help you that don’t….or can’t…perhaps because they themselves cannot feel that deep or detect what exists at such a cleared level.

I mean, think about it….most everyone on the planet is blocked from head to toe in some way or another.  I know this may sound severe, but as I awoke, my ability to sense energy was increased about three to four-fold.  Before then, I had been reading auras since I was 18 and I am now 50.  So lots of experience with this end of awareness…..and I can say that those who slumber are simply not aware all that much.  And it is probably good that they are not aware for the time being.  Only when you are ready to tackle such a backlog of material as we all have here on the planet can you really have any hope of getting it done.  otherwise it simply seems to be too big of a mountain.  I know that it has been a mountain for me, and I also know people who have been at this for decades who are still wearing away the stone, so to speak. I am not saying this to be negative, I am saying it because I observe that it is true.

So the “proof” part….

I was reflecting how I was able to magically release the soul connection I had when I first awakened.  God bless her, but she had issues that made dealing with her hard, and being connected to this, once I became aware of the hardness (I was not aware of the hardness in the beginning you see), it got more difficult.  But what “did it” was a couple of years ago when I initiated a correspondence with her in the hopes of clearing up whatever was left was the moment when she wrote to me, “Parker, I am really HAPPY in my life now…..I woke up and had someone like you to help me through it, to share and make sense of it…..and I now feel things I had not felt before but knew was possible….I really love my life!” Poof!  In that moment, it was like this thing gave way in me and I realized I was holding something up I just didn’t need to hold up anymore.  Then thre came this awareness in the clarified moment that I had known her in some official capacity as an advisor.  It FELT like she was a leader of some kind….and somehow I had let her down in some way.  THIS led to a hitch karmically that led to our connection later while in the super-charged environs of an awakening (a double-whammy!).  Then, as I began breathing more deeply and more slowly, I dropped down into it deeper and I was shown that no, I had not let her down.  It wasn’t event THAT clear-cut.  I had FELT like I had let her down.  Her problem was HER problem, but I had taken it to mean that I had failed her.

The interesting thing is that this was exactly what happened in another relationship…I was hooked, literally hooked into this fear of failing another person and letting it eat me up energetically and karmically.  It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it is HOW we choose to FEEL about an event that is the hook of karma.  And this is one reason why I have so much trouble with the concept of karma.  It is called “action” and I have recently considered maybe they were including inner action, because otherwise the definition as given by the Buddha seems…shallow….and prone to turning into being a punishment or something of the like.  People do this, though.  They are upset that something didn’t turn out the way they would like and they say “Karma is gonna get you!!!”  All the while, though, the deeper truth is that karma isn’t a punishment.  It is based on how far we have chosen, yes chosen, to turn away from our inner divine natures.  THAT nature is….perfect.  it does not NEED to be anything except perfectly itself.  And yet, we allow ourselves to get pulled in all these directions that are not in our highest.  Like me, just wanting people to be happy and failing at it because…..well…I am not the Lord of people’s happiness.  They are.  This was so bad in a prior relationship that my ex told my children that I had failed them at a time when I was sticking to my guns when the economy was in a rut.  Truth be told, when you tell children this kind of thing, YOU are the one “failing.”  But this was the consequence of living in this way.  The person who acted as the put-upon victim became the victimizer.  Terrible.  So it was in my interest to untangle this mess as soon as possible, right?

To learn more about how this all turned out, I have broken this post into two chapters, with the second one immediately following this one.  So now for chapter two….

 

 

when does karma become an excuse?

So prescient for me….as this issue rolls around in my heart and mind this morning. I have found that while we do need to know about it, the part of us that is able to heal it is not the part of us that is enmeshed in our 3-d world and mind. Our minds are filled with so many things, so much cognitive dissonance, that if we rely on that part of ourselves, we often get lost. But so true, we use karma to our own ends and seek to define it based on who we are rather than on what it actually is. Anais Nin once said “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

There is a trigger for releasing negative karma, and when enough of it is released, it tends to create a kind of cascade effect (for me, anyway) where the experience of the lightening of the load creates an awareness of how much better things can be for us….and it fuels a kind of grace-filled willingness to see the rest of what remains in order to clean it up. It also has the result of bearing greater awareness. The result of this “work” (surrender) can be remarkable because when a cord is healed or released, it opens others who were part of that cord to be healed too. Sounds like magic, but if you know about Ho’oponopo and Dr. Hew Len’s interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL972JihAmg you can see how a simple act if cleaning it up in yourself can benefit others.

The interesting thing I have found in common with my own process of clearing karma and the process that Len uses is that in each single instance, it always involved an act of forgiveness. Each time that I would approach some karmic tangle, I would begin by thinking I would need to forgive the person who was involved in it. In truth, when grace came, it showed me that this was not about the other person but about how I was reacting to what was around me, and this always resulted in this simple but deep unconditional forgiveness of myself, which was the trigger that has released hundreds of these things from small to big over the years. This lack of alignment with the divine within resulted in my thinking, feeling, and reacting to things around me that was less than my highest. The release always resulted in the tangle being released forever….never to return. This has shown me that as we do this, the self begins to knit itself back into the higher levels of awareness and we are less and less trapped in this cognitive dissonance, this 3-D way of looking out into the world and more into ourselves as the “first cause” that is this thing we talk about as being karma. Sadly, we use it to point outside of ourselves (and often twist it into our own misaligned notion of what we want it to be or think it is) when we need, I think, to look more deeply and inquire about ourselves first. This kind of forgiveness is an act of love. When we can feel this kind of love within first (forgiveness being an act of love), it reflects all through our life in a radically different way. I know; quite the ramble…but the content of this post was already rolling around inside of me before I read it and instead of making such a long reply, I decided it was better to simply reblog this thoughtful post and add my 5 cents here.

Conquering Anger

The hardest thing that we face as a species is our habitual tendency to want to shove our emotions down. We are told in many ways that hard harsh emotions are not good.  The solution has been to simply push them away.  This winds up being a much bigger problem than the emotion in the first place!  Psychologists all know about the idea that an emotion that is suppressed only comes back far worse later. This can lead each of us into neurosis-disease of the mind and emotions.  The answer is simple and takes a shift in how you relate to your emotions.

Anger is a natural emotion, and one of the hardest for us to deal with constructively.  It is also one of the most intense of our emotions because it is so driven by energy.  Anger uses a lot of energy and when it is pushed down, you are pushing a lot of feeling down into your subconscious self where it only festers and gets worse over time.  This can come back as emotional problems like anxiety and depression, or even disease over time. Suppressed anger can change your physiology in ways that you do not notice, small changes, but given enough time, can result in very real physical problems.  Adrenaline and cortisol are two very powerful chemicals in the body that relate both to fear and anger. They can deplete the body of a whole range of very important nutrients.  When this is allowed to go on for a long time, decades, the result is something that can emerge later in life as a chronic problem.  It is important, then, to learn how to deal with anger constructively and not push it down.

When you get angry, let yourself feel the emotion.  When you feel anger, remind yourself that the emotion is not you, it is a phenomenon like the wind blowing through you.  Let it be like the wind and think of it flowing through you.  What you do not want to do is to direct your anger at a person, because this can be hurtful to others.  You also do not want to fall into the trap of defining yourself in relationship to your emotions because this means that you ARE anger.  You aren’t.  Anger is an emotion that you feel.  We call emotions because they are in-motion. So let it BE that for you. When you are angry, practice being clear with yourself that this is your reaction to outward events.  It is not who you are. By associating so closely with anger, you allow yourself to be defined by it.  When you do this, you are no longer the master, but the slave.  Slaves will then complain about just how terrible the world is to them.  I ask you: is this a good way to live?  There is indeed a much better way to be.

Do not treat your anger as an entitlement.  You are not angry because someone made you angry. No one makes you.  You make you. You are angry because of your reaction to what someone else has done. Be clear about this one important point no matter how much you might want to make it the other person’s problem.  It isn’t the other person’s problem.  It is yours.  Own it.  The world may be a terrible place with mean hard people, but without you, there would be no reaction to it.  You are simply reacting.  Own your reactions.  When you are more mature and developed, you will grow enough to see that the world is the way it is for reasons that, if understood, would change how you see any “problem” in it.

By taking offense to something outside of you, you are trying to make your reaction someone else’s problem.  It isn’t.  The person who was short with you earlier and cut you off in mid-sentence may have had a drama playing out in their lives which you are not privy to.  They might have been hurting inside from something that is happening in their lives, they might have been terribly late for their next appointment. it could be anything.  Try not to let things become so personal.  When you identify so strongly with “I” you have trouble.  Most often, it isn’t so personal as you tend to make it.  When you can do this, you will find that your reactions to others is greatly decreased by owning your feelings and letting things go. The other side to this is that you wind up taking a banner against what angers you and you will very soon be using your anger to hurt many people, and you will wonder what is wrong with everyone around you.  After all, your identification with your anger has blinded and blocked you.

Allow anger to flow but do not direct it at people.  If you do, you will hurt them and then the effort of letting anger flow will have created more problems than they have solved. By letting anger flow, it will move through you and will not become subsumed within.  Do not capture or trap anger or else it will come back in larger uglier forms later. Anger can build up like an account that you pay into each day.  Later, the account will be so full that you will be paralyzed by the sheer mass of your anger and you will feel helpless to the power that you feel it has over you.  Anger will lead to emotional blocks in your body and awareness that can have very troubling effects, from hampering your relationships to harming your physical health.  You will also be very difficult to be around.

Children know very well how to deal with anger.  One minute, they are red in the face, their eyes are filled with rage, and the next minute, they are completely different, wanting to grab your hand and get into your lap, smiling all the while.  They are done with it, you see, and they do not think any more about what had just happened.  This is how we should deal with anger, too. So let it flow.

By following these simple set of ways of dealing with anger you can allow anger to move through you without hurting other people, and you will not be harmed either.  Let anger be a storm for you, a storm that will naturally pass as all storms do.  When you do, the sky of your inner environment will be fresh and clean after this emotion has been allowed to blow through you. Most of the problems related to how we deal with anger are themselves the very root of our problems, so do not let business as usual capture you.  Like every storm that comes, it will leave you feeling clearer and ready to feel happy again.

Turning Tradition On Its Head

In Indian Yogic tradition, the seven rungs of the ladder to cosmic consciousness involve preparation.  You can spend lifetimes climbing these ladders.  Many do.  The belief among nearly every person brought up in this tradition is that you cannot achieve the cosmic without years of preparation.  You just can’t. It is also one reason why I have witnessed people telling me on my blogs from India that what I am talking about cannot be kundalini.  Oh.  And you need to get diksha from a teacher.

A teacher.  Wait…the guru is in you, am I right?

What is happening to most westerners who have been experiencing a broad wave of awakenings is that this old notion is just not so.   Does this mean that the old rules are no longer applicable?  No.  In fact, the “rules” never really applied to us in this regard.  You CAN get there without preparing.  Most Swami’s and yogi’s are fond of saying that when you awaken, you are not attaining anything.  You are only reaching what has always been there.  I agree.  It is the authentic state which nearly every person on the planet has been holding back the flood waters of.  Yes.  But preparation is not a prerequisite.  Preparation is a very good idea, though.

The fact that so many have awakened without a discipline or belief or structure to support them helps to turn old notions on their head.  It also provides me with a view of awakening that comes at the experience from a completely different vantage point.  Without preparation, the self if pitched into a very intense experience where a lot of work needs to be done fairly quickly in order to assist in the reorientation of the self so that large sums of prana can flow through the self and body unimpeded.  Without this, the self tends to crumple, contract, freak, become anxiety-ridden, fearful, or even psychotic.  It is like taking a step outside of your home one morning and finding that there is nothing there and that in order to get to anything, you have to take a giant leap forward in order to land on solid ground.

It means you hurry up and do the work that you need to do.  But it also means that you come at all of this from a very different direction.  The traditions are turned on their head.  This means that with the accelerant of pranic flow present that what you do is also much more effective if you apply yourself to your own intuition and seek ardently.  The higher self is available to you if you just realize that you CAN tap into it.  Awareness is key.  The moment you slip into the old concept of ego, you lose a bit of its power, its majesty that can shoot you to the moon.  Feet on the ground, soul soaring high and free.  There is abundance in both modes of being.  It is not either/or but both. Events will change and life will become your great teacher in ways that show you that every single moment has been a lesson for you.  Good golly, how can I even begin to describe the lessons that pop up in the moment for me in each day?  Life is now rich with these now that I am looking for them, aware that they are there.  And this has the effect of transforming how you see everything.  It sounds grandiose, but its actually quite simple. It is a new way of seeing that is the result of the self thinking to itself that it is mundane and singular and not connected to the All. When you feel the connection to the universe in a nondual way, it is a revolutionary experience because it changes your world view so radically, but also very quietly.  Only here do I crow about it.  I crow about it because of just how amazing it has rendered the old tones and hues of my life.

What I observed in what triggered my awakening is something that I think is of vital importance for us when we speak about awakening.  The Hindu tradition masks this to a certain degree with all of the methods and years of preparation.  And it is this: when you remove what divides you, awakening comes.  I noted this as central to my awakening experience.  When I went to look for some corroborative evidence out there on the internet that others had had my same experience (I didn’t know this had a name like “awakening” or “kundalini”), I found ancient Christian texts that had not made it into the orthodox teachings and were considered heretical.  These documents, it turns out, are part of the origin of Christian thought and instead of being heresy as those in the church have tried to maintain, are now being revealed to be part of the very origin of central teachings of Jesus.  Things get complicated with this, but trust me….I have done extensive research into this area and this is supported by significant research in the last century by historians and linguists.

Awakening without preparation is not impossible.  You just have to contend with a lot of very intense things, many of which are the product of things shrouded in the old belief systems you have had in place previous to it taking place until you can see things differently and BE different.  YOU are the change you want to see in the world.

I know that with all the info out there with systems and methods that it might sound simplistic for me to say that ALL of this is about allowing the flow of prana, but really, that is JUST what ALL of this is.  Along with pranic flow comes the breaking down of your old beliefs along with certain parts of your personality that have been tied to ideas or beliefs that were limiting in nature.  A LOT flows out from prana moving in high volume in the body including the Dark Night of the Soul, siddhis, and a whole range of awakening phenomenon.  But it is just this simple.  Like a mustard seed, you see. It grows large, unbelievably large as it develops.

This can be done.  It is how I did it.  I know, that in a way, I was preparing for years, I just never did yoga or adhere to a belief system or any of that. Is it really effective to go about it this way?  I know that for myself, there was a level of perspective that came with awakening that I don’t think I would have been able to embody had it not been for the whirlwind cleansing that took place during awakening.  I was stuck in my life. I was afraid to make any more because of how the people were in that life.  Awakening helped to shake me out of complacency and showed me my life in brilliant contrasts.  I don’t think I could have gotten to where I am now without it.  It was the missing ingredient I had been seeking my whole life.  In fact, my “seeking” simply came to a complete halt once awakening came. I felt this odd sense of, “…..I am here.  I have done it.” When I thought I had lived an examined life the higher self showed just how pinched and small my perspective had been.  Like a fool, I woke up and realized that yes, this thing is a whole other realm of understanding the self.  And in order for it to keep doing its work, you cannot delude yourself but remain open like a child to the possibilities that what you know today, while vastly different from before awakening, is itself just another point along the road.  the road, meanwhile, goes on for light years….. right?  Each moment can thus become a humbling moment if you let it.  Precious, special, and the only one like it.  So much around it expands into larger dimension making everything here seem inconsequential…..and yet I find that no; every sparrow falls and it is known.  This thing, the divine, interpenetrates everything. And so?  Everything waxes sheer marvel.  There is no such thing as inconsequential.

Waking up is a call to hurry up and do the “work” which is surrendering to the spirit that is what connects you to the divine, the higher self, and to what you are within.  Simple.  Everything else is details.  No I know; what position to sit in?  Whatever is most comfortable to you.  Really.  Diet?  Your inner self will tell you.  Your body will tell you.  Mantra?  “Surrender.”  You don’t need a method.  You only need yourself and a willingness to see it in a new way.  I know this because I have done it.  So can you.

नमस्ते

How We See

We like to think that what our senses tell us is the whole story about our world. The problem with this idea is that the senses feed into this machine called a brain, and the brain is this pattern recognition machine.  And these patterns are subject to what our beliefs are.  The upshot?  We see what we believe.  
Have you ever heard of the term “Cognitive Dissonance”?  It is something psychologists were all over, from Freud, Jung, and Reich.  It basically means that if you hold a belief in something, you will ignore all evidence that this might overturn the belief.  
You literally will ignore the events in your life that could serve to transform your life by allowing you to see the way things are.  
We live in our own world.  We do.  It is this hologram as some people call it.  But it is one that WE have made.  Most folks don’t like this idea, so they make it someone else’s doing.  But it is ours.  And, like an immovable stone, it waits for us on the day when we wake up to this reality. But having an awakening is not even enough to move it.  I know people still tangled up in their own awakening process just like I was. There is no magic moment when you become enlightened.  It is itself a process and is dependent on how you choose to apply yourself to it. And then?  Then the honesty sets in if you are serious about real change because that cognitive dissonance is most often about a whole host of false or limiting beliefs that make you less than you actually are.

A number of years ago, in the pitched experience of awakening, my marriage dissolved.  It was the most merciful thing that could have happened, actually.  Waking up, I came to realize just how poorly matched I had been with my wife.  It was one of those moments when I just turned around one day and wondered, “What on earth were we thinking?”  But THAT is the result of being able to see things as they are, not HOW we are, or at least a part of how they are.  It wasn’t even about making the other person into the bad guy.  It was just a bad match, and the “match” was more about what needed to be healed in both of us than anything else.  This had shifted significantly in me to the point where it created this divide, a sudden difficulty in being able to relate to this person.  It is, I will point out, something that can happen when you move through awakening and heal old issues.  I had trouble even relating to myself and what I had tried to be for so long.  It was not hard for me to see why I had done what I had done.  It was all laid out in front of me.  I was willing to forgive it and let it go.  But that would be too easy, right?  Oh so human….

My divorce helped to show me just how we choose to see.  It was hard, though, this look. It took a lot of willingness to REALLY look at it.  My wife, unable to just let go, held on to her own anger, a problem that had been there the day I had met her, I knew.  No finger pointing here, it was just how it was.  But like that person who is so unable to really look at themselves, it became everyone else’s fault. It showed me that even when someone is alienating their kids from the other parent, which she did,  that some people just can’t see themselves or what they are doing. But hang on! I was affected by this! I came riding in as the knight in shining armor to save the day, to make the world better and brighter! I was energized by her junk….and THAT is truth!
 It would have been a joke, a funny one, had there not been so much at stake.  I find it comical that someone would hold a grudge about something that was based on something that she wasn’t even entitled to, but this was her junk, and I had ridden right in thinking I could change it. Are you kidding me? Was I delusional, or what?!

By getting in this tangle, I was dealing with someone was was not above alienating my kids in order to hurt me when we were divorcing. I kind of anticipated it. What on earth had I done? What was it in me that led me to such a mess?
I really thought I could make it better. That’s it. Nutshell. But the thing in it for me? Being accepted. Getting approval. And I did this by being with someone who was utterly unable to do this! Wow, now THAT made a whole bunch of sense, am I right??? Excuse me while I hold my sides from laughing so much. 
It is nice to finally be able to laugh at myself. I mean the kind of laughter where you are watching yourself from the past like it’s a home movie that was deadly serious at the time but is now just….utterly hilarious!! Really? Oh my goodness!

 That was what it really came down to.  For me, it was my relationship with my kids that was at stake, and this was the hook for me.  It is a hard hook because it means you have to be super honest about who is doing what and why. It is so easy to get into finger pointing and the blame game. Only then do things clarify.  When it is a mess like what I went through, you have to be really honest and clear or else it is so murky a thing that no one knows what is happening because of what can be the actions of one person who is acting out.

If you know me, my children are my life.  They are.  I grew up wanting children.  When I was in high school I was dreaming of when I would have children, what we would do, how it might be.  So to have someone who had loved me do what she did during the divorce was doubly hard.  It was a betrayal harder than if she had an affair. At the time, knowing how she was abusing her power as a parent by telling my children things that just weren’t true, behind my back and in her own echo chamber, was like being murdered. My kids, me, all of us, just flattened, torn, and destroyed. I read up on this and found that this type of abuse has a name, and I saw every single symptom in my kids and I. The articles described my ex to a T. My jaw dropped. I had just spent 16 years of my life living with someone who made everything my fault.
And you know what? It serves me right!
The consequences of her actions were damaging to my kids.  Sadly, this kind of behavior happens so much during divorces….but it always throws you for a loop when it happens. An intelligent person with all of this education winds up being a kook, or a bully. It is just so strange that someone could hold onto such a deep sense of anger and hatred for so long.  Life is just too short to hold on to the thought that I was doing her wrong by Standing up for what I knew was her sense of entitlement to some things that belonged to my family.  In my case, I had always been very generous with my resources and they were available to my family for whatever was needed.  But deep down what I was also doing was seeking approval. That was my part. I wanted or needed to please people, and you know? I wound up attracting people who could not see the real gift, which was the love, not the family money or inheritance, or car or house, or whatever. 
Waking up, I knew that I could not continue this pattern. Otherwise it would just keep going like it had since I was a kid.  And the result was always the same; the people I was trying to please were never really pleased. They were perennially unhappy people. Something had to give. 
Over the years I have found that the biggest snag for people in my life is often over material things.  I have held to this realization that if I can’t be with someone on my own merits, then its probably about something material.  Here, when its about “stuff” then it isn’t really about love or compassion. My ex really equated material giving with love. It’s nice to give and receive, but not when it’s the main proof that love is there. Then love is a transaction. It feels like prostitution.

Divorce can be a liberating experience, and it was for me.  But it was also like a death.  In my case, I had a child who, caught in the echo chamber of my ex, he was unable to free himself from the words that were being thrown at him.  Instead of inquiring into what was being said, he just swallowed it.  So hard, all the way around.  One child chose to hear the other side and it was this willingness that saved my other child from the very corrosive behavior of a parent who wants nothing else but to make your kids hate you for something that happened between you and the other parent.  Pawns.  She was moving them around like emotional pawns.  
People told me, “Parker, your kids will grow up and they will realize what went down….kids are amazing bullshit detectors.”  I was not so sure, though.  So much was at stake.  I hadn’t signed up for this.  I had done what I knew was the fair thing.  I didn’t ask something of my ex that I knew was not right.  But free will is a funny thing.  And being able to really take that long deep look inside of yourself, equally difficult to do for some.  We all suffer from this in relative degrees.  The deeper you go, the more honest you have to be, it seems to me.

I once had someone who said that what I was doing was pulling out the violins and playing the “poor me” song.  Saying this struck me as the height of stupidity.  I use the word carefully.  I do.  Stupid in its truest sense is a lack of awareness or intelligence about issues which a person knows very little about.  And it is about as insensitive as someone trying to shame a victim of abuse….because that is just what it is. It turns out that this person had been my “twin” (she believed) and engaged in all of the same deceitful behavior as my ex. Why? Because I was not healed from the wounds inflicted by my ex…the things she did that I responded in pain over. My junk. My reaction. My thing to heal

I am a grown-up.  I can handle someone who is coming to me with their own misgivings and saying so and hashing it out.  But to drag children into it is just….terrible.  We want to protect our children from the things that they are not able to handle emotionally.  They grow from infants all the way into adulthood, and as parents, we are carefully feeding them more and more rope so they can go out into the world as they gradually grow and develop and mature.  So when someone says I am just complaining about events that I set into motion, they just don’t get it. They don’t.  I DID choose that person, and I take complete responsibility for that.  But when that person hurts my children?  You just don’t get it if you think this way.  Being a parent is a divine contract.  And yes, my children are their own person, but when caught in the echo chamber of hurt, how can anyone expect to flower?  To dream, to be, to become without this hurt creating unnecessary challenges for them for life?  A parent can do so much by simply providing a loving environment for that child to have the room, safe room, to discover themselves….even if that means that it is done alone.
Cognitive Dissonance also worked on my side, too, keeping me blind to the realities of these people, my identity as a wounded disemboweled male. Wow. That’s a bad combination.

It is a big wake up moment when you turn around and see this all happening. It is urgent that things change.  But we can only change ourselves.  The voice in my head was telling me “Trust in the power to change because it has the seeds that can help the world itself to change.”

We all choose our experience based on how we feel about ourselves….our beliefs, our notions, and those things that remain deeply shoved down within.  The task of waking up is cleaning that all up.  It is a cleansing.  And this is no less evident to me in my own experience because, after all, I was drawn to that which I had not yet healed and obviously had some unfinished business with.

I was listening to a guy I like from India talk about this.  He was speaking to this as part of the path to entering cosmic consciousness.  I like him partly because so much of what he says has been a part of my experience.  Swami Rama. There is no use in trying to convey just how profound these things are.  What they mean to me and how they have changed my life is…well….my experience.  To know it, you have to find it for yourself.  It is less a thought or idea or neat catch-phrase and more a deep well of being that you find within.  Already there.  Ready for discovery.  And to do this means that to go deeper, you have to clean all that mess up within.  It leaves you wondering how on earth you went on for so long in such slumber.

Most folks are not aware of the backlog of this material.  It stands in the way of realization of the self and what it is.  Yogis prepare for this by doing meditation and the seven steps within yoga systems.  I think it is a reasonable thing to do….important….but it does not guarantee results by becoming awake.  To awaken, this is simple.  So simple in fact that it eludes most of us.  Right under our noses, we simply have to settle down and allow ourselves enough time to inquire within.  Instead of looking outward, you just turn the focus within and begin to clean things up.  And sometimes this is enough to spark awakening.  Sometimes just being around someone who is awake is enough to remind you of what this state is.  But what happens so simply leads to a path or experience that leads you deeper and deeper into yourself in order to clean up all that stuff you didn’t get to before this happened.  For westerners who do not have a tradition of meditation or certain types of yoga (or even awareness of what awakening is), this often means that we come to it fresh from the junk pile and we most often get to work chiseling away the mass of our material.

To continue on this path means  a continuing honesty with the self.  We are notorious for hiding from ourselves.  We are.  And we do it out of fear.  But what if I told you that what lies on the other side of that mass of thick junk in you is joy and wonder and bliss?  Many years ago, struggling with my own awakening, a guide showed up and looked at me and said, “You would not be doing this if you knew what lay on the other side of this…”  He meant that I could not see how the problem was all of my own making and that to enter more deeply into who I was would lead naturally to a state of realization and bliss. This is the natural result, the wonder and awe of living in such a place as this. It is knowing who you are in this way that is new, novel, wonderful, and also hopeful because lying on the other side of all your troubles in working through the process is something so simple and great.

What I am working on is the realization that everyone is at their own level of knowing who they are.  Some, by comparison, seem utterly delusional….but isn’t this the human condition?  “My delusion is not as bad as your delusion” is how I and everyone else tends to think.  We spiral out of this, and as it gets better….as we look at those trailing behind and we think, “Sheesh! Wow, how messed up are they??” And yet, I too was there, those miles behind where I am.  The task is to develop a through and through level of acceptance that a soul chooses something for a reason, and sometimes the most messed up stuff winds up being important in their redemption.  Sometimes we just can’t see until we let things get so bad that it shakes us from our slumber.  And inside of that lies the seeds of a new life.  So for as hard as what I experienced in my divorce was, I trust that the souls that are my children came into this knowing that this was the situation and something in them needed it.  Afterall, the challenges I had as a child has led me to being far stronger than I would otherwise be.  There is more work to do.  For all of us, me included.  So I worry about me and trust as I used to before awakening that it will all work out.  I know that when I let go, something tends to take shape that could not take form before I was holding on to an outcome.  My sister was speaking to this as we talked about this on Mother’s Day.  She was saying how important it was to let go of our own hard stuff because it holds people into similar positions within themselves….and this naturally led to talk about a whole host of healing modalities.  You see, my family has been heavily involved in the mental health arena for years professionally.  My mother was a counselor and my sister did the same, running a business that is involved in being an intermediary for helping people get the services they need.  She has in recent years gone from a hard crusty person to someone far more nuanced and sensitive to the more subtle aspects of our own inner ability to heal ourselves.  We come from a thread of interest in how the psyche works and we each come at it from slightly different angles. It makes for some interesting discussions these days.

When you trust in the universe and get out of your own way, you open doors you may have not even known existed.  Knowing that we see things as we are, what does this tell you about yourself?  Can you allow the inner witness within you to turn around and begin to look honestly at yourself?  Its probably one of the most substantive types of inner work a person can do, I think. Onward and upward!

Mothers Day!

 

The Subtle Energy System & Leg Chakras

I wanted to share this article that has just gone up on my sister site Divine Alignment about leg chakras and developing a keener awareness of subtle energy.  Enjoy!

http://divinealignment.blogspot.com/2016/05/energy-awereness-leg-chakras.html

Noble Blood

It is always hard when we lose someone who means so much.
This is my tribute to an old friend who has made a great journey into a new life.

Great Friend
Noble heart
Sacred Brother
Gentle Soul-

You were born into  a world imperfect
You sought what was perfect
good
and sublime.

Know that our tears
as our dearest tribute to you
as we
like children
feel  left to the world of limits
while you are not.

You will understand then
how we will miss you
as you are born to worlds beyond imagining.

There is little else to say
your chapter has been made complete
as you go on to write still more
in that great book of yours.
We are left to read what was writ
in this world alone
by your hand
as we visit you as we have known you
and can only guess at the chapters yet to come.

I love you, my Sacred Brother.

The Interviews

Recently I began approaching people who I know who have experienced awakenings.  These days its not so hard; no trudging off to the Himalayas to find that rare person…

I approached my neighbor, when, one cool summers eve a few months prior, I realized, “Hey!  You are talking like a person who has had an awakening!”  “Oh,” my neighbor said, adding, “I have had this since I can remember…it has always been with me…”  The timing was interesting because in the months that followed, my neighbor moved out of his house, and was one of the reasons why he was out in his yard, digging up plants to take to his new location. If we hadn’t had that illuminating conversation in the grass at the end of the day, I might have never even known.  He would have just been this cool enigmatic artist-guy. I find it interesting how  close a number of key people have been geographically to me…a teacher who helped me release so many blocks who offered classes just a few blocks away…and a body worker with just the right combination of energy and deep tissue work who was just as close as my teacher….and then Derek.  And then, of course, there is Diane, who is the subject of one of my first interviews…

I approached Diane recently, who is an old family friend, who has had an interesting life experience with awakening.  In the case of Diane, I was able to interview her and captured her words on audio, which I am now transcribing between bouts of grading projects from school.  In a week or two I should have her interview completed and ready for posting.

My neighbor, Derek, is a different story, though.  I sent him some canned questions a few months ago meant to evoke a range of possibilities.  I wasn’t sure if I would be able to sit down with him and have a face to face.  It turns out that it looks like we will have some of his writing direct from him as well as a face to face.

Coincidentally,  I saw Derek recently in a totally random sort of way. He walked up to me and tapped me on the shoulder in a local coffee shop. I had been wondering what he was up to and if he was going to get back with me on the material he said he was writing in response to the questions.  He explained in our recent meeting that he was taking longer than expected to get his written material finished because my questions had led to an avalanche inside of him, he explained, and he didn’t want to send the material until he felt like he had completed it.  He said that for some reason, my questions led him into a process that resulted in some unexpected realizations.  And how cool is that?  “Just keep on writing, Derek,” I assured him, ” I am happy to get it when you feel like you are ready”  between the whoooshhh sounds of the espresso machine doing its thing.  Derek is off to Peru for a few weeks and promises he will be back…..and he knows where I live.

If you are interested in sharing your perspective in an interview,  please feel free to contact me at the address below.  I don’t pay, but I am always grateful.  Before posting I share the interview materials with any interviewee and if you have links to sites that you would like to share, these are always welcome.  You can contact me at info@staffordartglass.com.

So now it is back to grading and getting through the end of a very busy semester at school!

Until later…