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!
Waking The Infinite 