Love’s Ordeal: The Dark Night of the Soul

Jessica Davidson does such a good job of getting to the root of the Dark Night that I offer up a reblog of her piece on the subject and encourage you to check out her other writing on the subject of awakening and the soul.

Jessica Davidson

A Dark Night of the Soul always arrives uninvited, yet it could be the best thing to ever happen. It’s a sacred initiation into the underbelly of the soul that will make you feel cursed and blessed at the same time. Dark Nights of the Soul are all the rage these days. Our civilisation is self-destructing and we seem powerless to stop it. Some say we have brought ourselves to this dangerous precipice through our collective blindness, arrogance and selfishness, and that may be true. But we may also be on the brink of a breakthrough.

I don’t want to get into a forensic examination of our nihilistic culture. It does no good to pick at your wounds. I want to find a way through the darkness to the light at the end of the tunnel – if it exists.

The best we can say of these dark times is that…

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Binaural Beats -Self Improvement Through Technology?

Gratitude for your being here reading the work. My hope is that you will find what you seek.

NOTE:  I have used binaural beats from time to time in my meditation work.  I was able to observe how this technology worked when a friend loaned me a Hemisync CD that he had bought his from the Monroe Institute (which is located in Faber, Virginia). I was already having the forward edge of awakening at this time, just not a full rising of the energy, and the CD most certainly helped with awakening symptoms.  I noticed that I began getting all kinds of very unusual light phenomenon happening that was tied to my third eye, which had been recently activated as a result of listening to this CD (I can’t say you will get the same light effects from a Hemisync CD because I was kind of in different waters at that point, so there is that).  Be that as it may, I found that I felt different when I listened to these sounds which had out of phase vibrations as part of their technique to help to cause the two hemispheres to “line up” in its circuitry vibrations. The Hemisync CD was designed to get the two normally different hemispheres, which both put out different frequencies of energy (as seen on an EEG) to begin putting out more similar frequencies, to essentially “sync” together.  The idea was that this could lead to a brain that was entrained or “synced” to itself for better learning, awareness, and a host of meditation work.  While Robert Monroe pioneered the work in the West, there is ample evidence to show that the Germans were aware of this effect and had used it for a host of rather nefarious reasons (to get people to buy Nazi propaganda).  It is important to understand that a hemisync or a binaural beats audio track can only entrain your brain to a certain frequency.  It does not make you do anything you would not otherwise want to do.  It does not brain wash you, it provides a frequency effect to foster different brain states depending on the frequencies and how they are used in the audio file. it is a very effective way to stimulate your brain to fall into a given brain wave frequency range for doing certain kinds of self improvement work, meditation, learning, etc. Yes, you could listen to a higher frequency binaural beat that is pitched to help support or stimulate high levels of alertness as you study for that difficult exam, for example. You could also use the slower frequencies for absorbing information more deeply, which has its own benefits as well.  So to better understand how this all works, it is helpful to dive into the technology a little more.

An Intro To Binaural Beats

The concept behind Binaural beats is that the brain can be entrained by certain frequencies in sounds that wind up having specific effects on us.  It has been known for centuries that certain rhythms were better for inducing trance-like states.  Aboriginal cultures have used drumming (beats) of very specific frequencies for reaching accelerated states of mind.  A medicine man I spoke with once explained the reason behind the type of beats they use when they are gathered together; he says the pulse is akin to the heartbeat and this beat helps people to be calm and more meditative and thoughtful.

Harmonic effects in choral music within the Christian church can have similar kinds of effects.  The large echo-chambers of European churches help to create a dream-time effect, and the chanting of Tibetan monks can seem to put you on what feels another world.  Binaural beats take this understanding one step further by recognizing that the two hemispheres of the brain actually tend to operate at slightly different frequencies, and when sound is introduced into the ears that are out of phase with one another in just the right way, the two hemisphers can be entrained to work together and not be out of phase as is usually the case.  Binaural beats actually causes the brain to supply a frequency of sound energy to make up for the sounds that are supplied that are out of phase (one ear is hearing a frequency that is a few hertz faster or slower than the other ear) as a result of the out of phase sound. Here a source explains how the effect is produced:

If the left ear is presented with a steady tone of 500Hz and the right ear a steady tone of 510Hz, these two tones combine in the brain. The difference, 10Hz, is perceived by the brain and is a very effective stimulus for brainwave entrainment. This 10Hz is formed entirely by the brain. When using stereo headphones, the left and right sounds do not mix together until in your brain. The frequency difference, when perceived by the brain this way, is called a binaural beat.

SOURCE: http://www.bwgen.com/theory.htm

With binaural beats, the thing to realize is that it only offers a sound environment to support or help induce a general state of mind.  You yourself have to be willing to be swept away on the rhythms in order for them to work well. It is in effect, a launching pad, a meditation tool that is is utilizing an understanding of how the brain works so that it can speed your entry into target brain states quickly.

It is important to point out that binaural beats work when using headphones in order to properly isolate the two different phases or frequencies.  Being able to isolate them in this way is key to using them effectively.  Listening to stereo speakers will not provide you with the right separation since the beats from the left channel will bleed into your right ear, canceling a lot of the effect that takes place in the brain itself. In many ways, what is happening is exactly what is happening when you watch a 3-D movie.  By having one eye see one view and the other eye see a slightly different or offset view and feeding these two different images into the different hemispheres of the brain, the brain creates a tapestry out of these two images that results in the effect or sensation of depth.  In the case of binaural beats, instead of depth being produced, it is a vibration that is being created that supports a given brain wave frequency and leads to a general state of mind.

 

In the links I am providing, I am including beats for deep and slow brain wave patterns.  These are best used for learning and for deep meditative states. Since I am all about getting down to that lower substratum for deep substantive removal of old conditioned emotions that trip up most people, I tend to feel these slower beats are most effective for this type of self-improvement work.

 

I have found that the way to work with these is to allow yourself to drift as though you are going to sleep, without going to sleep. You want to learn how to skirt the edge of sleep without going into it since this is where the deepest and most effective tapping of the subconscious is achieved.  It also is where you can do the most substantive work, too, at least theoretically, provided you are ready to process old emotion and free yourself from it forever. It is here at this deep level that many of these emotions can be tapped into and properly processed.  Don’t worry; an old trauma might seem scary at first to face, but I have had hundreds, thousands of these releases, and each one really was a non-event.  You are left wondering why you let it bounce around in you for so long.  These unprocessed emotions can lead you to being attracted to people and events that are not in your highest.  I had a friend who used to call me up in the middle of the night wondering why she was always attracted to “Mr. Wrong” and while I didn’t have an easy answer for her back then, I know its directly tied to these unprocessed emotions most people don’t even realize they have.  Its hard to explain to someone who has never done this work just how healing it is, so you must trust me on this and discover for yourself by doing the work and engaging in this type of process (which I write about voluminously on my blog).

 

This is in effect what many who have meditated over the ages have sought to do in their inner work, which is tapping these deep states associated with sleep and dreaming.  It is here that the subconscious can be tapped into and the conditioning that causes so many people difficulties in their lives which can then be melted away in a more or less conscious way. This is what so may in the spiritual community call shadow work.  It is simply being able to face the emotional material that has been shoved down and that keeps emerging into awareness as the result of certain triggers (which are all based on memory: a sound that reminds you of something traumatic in your past, etc.) and by sticking with the feeling, the emotion is properly processed and can actually be released.  This work is important because the skeletons are never so bad as we fear they are and it frees up the consciousness so that it can more clearly perceive the energetic realms that are the other side of our physical sensory experience.  This is, in a phrase, about growing up and breaking free from negative patterning and conditioning, some of which has been instilled in childhood while others touch on other lifetimes.  Doing this work opens the self up so that it is no longer a prisoner of its own cognition. By dealing with your skeletons, you are simply more free, and that is a beautiful thing indeed.

 

This audio I have used for what turned out to be a very useful meditation with some significant shadow work.  Was it just a coincidence?  You will have to decide.  I found that while the sounds were a little much in some ways (a little spooky), but it also moved me quickly into a state where I had something akin to a waking dream where I was able to become aware of material that I had not previously gotten to. It included being brought into what was very much like a white-light experience with an illustration of how it is that heaven can be all around us and we simply don’t see it for what it is, because there are layers of material we either choose to look through, or we don’t tune out enough to be able to perceive these realms within us continuously. I include it here for your consideration, and of course you will need to find beats that you relate best to in your own inner work.  The beats I am including are intended to bring about a deep state with Theta wave activity, which is very much in the dreaming range of brain activity.  These are good I think for going deep while remaining very lucid.  Also, there are many other videos/audio pieces on youtube with different ranges that you can check out to find what works best for you.

The folks who run the channel that made this beats version also have other beats pitched to different frequencies for different ranges of consciousness/brain wave activity, so whichever range you are interested in helping to activate, they likely have your range. I have used this audio, but it has had less of a direct effect for me. The lower the number, the deeper the brain state.  If you want to do work that requires a high level of alertness, look for higher numbered beats that are followed by the “hz” which indicates the sound frequency being used.

 

There are many different binaural beats on youtube.  It looks like some of them may not have real binaural beats in them but will have more in the way of music and intonations of sound to achieve certain effects.  The two examples I have provided have these beats at a fairly low frequency, which can help to entrain you closer to what is known as theta brain wave states.

The concern that is voiced over and over is what if they have subliminal messages in them, how do I know that what I am getting is the real deal.  I can’t speak to audio files having subliminal messages in them, but I can say that binaural beats do not make you think anything you do not want to think.  They simply help to induce a certain state of mind and you do the rest.  The work I have done using this technology has all been very positive, and I hope that they might be of some use to you in your own work.  Like anything, it takes some time and patience to achieve results, but binaural beats is a tool that can get you there much faster than the old ways of doing things, especially if you have trouble really being able to calm your mind down enough to do this kind of work.

 

As I was writing this entry, I came across a documentary produced by Gaiam as part of the Open Minds series, as well as another under the Buzzsaw series that both delve into how our own government has used technology like this to control the mind.  However, it is important to understand that there is no market for the kind of bets that our government might create for creating disgust, instead of elation, or upset over deep meditation. And it is not like you wont know if you use them.  The research I have done makes it clear to me that while there have been efforts have been made on the part of our government to do just this, we don’t see these type of effects in the binaural beats used for self-improvement.

 

You can order Hemisync CD’s from the Monroe Institute and through licensed representatives for the Monroe Institute as well. In addition, the Monroe Institute provides training on a range of subjects including learning, meditation, and out of body experiences (Robert Monroe wrote several ground breaking books on the subject).

https://www.monroeinstitute.org/catalog/hemi-sync%C2%AE

 

Kundalini Coping Tip

It’s very easy to get down on yourself during awakening, especially as it relates to those who are engaged in emotional release of conditioning. But even as you are, in the words of Peter Gabriel, “digging in the dirt” it does not mean you have to wallow in it.
It is entirely possible to learn how to take out the trash without messing yourself up in the process. This is not refusing to acknowledge what is there, it’s that the pranic force does not make it necessary to ever have to open that dirty trash bag. Toss it, exit the burning building, get out for fucks sake.

There. I said it. Indelicate though it may be, the truth here is that there is no honor in being a martyr to your past and you can grow up, step up, and exit the past and simply be done. You can wallow or you can keep on ascending, your pick. 
The presence of prana is the game changer, you see. Prior to this, what most people have is their rational minds and physical senses. If you allow prana to help you break through the veil of that awareness into the subconscious to find an expanding awareness of both intuition and feeling (not to be confused with emotion). It becomes possible to simply be done once a suppressed emotion has finally been recognized and processed so it can be gone forever (if need be).
There is a big difference between authentic cleansing and simply holding on to your trash while acting like you really are getting rid of it just as your hands clutch onto it for dear life. Or just shoving it down again.

This is why in many old traditions the teachers tell their students to smile as they meditate. I was explaining to my daughter yesterday that there are ways of triggering confidence, happiness, and even joy by learning how to fool your conditioned mind out of feeling negatively. It’s a radical idea: fake it until you make it. 

Buddha said that all change happens right now. You just begin. So change your thoughts. Now. Yes, you might return to sadness or loathing, or a dozen negative states, but you begin by bringing your mind to a new place and hold it there as long as you can. Then, over days and weeks, this becomes a habit. You remain in the new state longer and longer. You hold that feeling and eventually action becomes character, and character, in the words of Gautama Buddha, becomes destiny.Some miss that the only plan is what you intend and help manifest.

There will inevitably come a time when what’s left of your inner junk gets driven to the surface. It can no longer survive in the new you. Like bubbles rising from the depths, they are forced upwards and like bubbles surfacing, spread into the ether as though they were never there. They were nothing more than patterns you loved to hate that imprisoned you in a negative self-talk. Kick them to the curb. If it means repenting and changing your ways now, do so. Fake it until you make it. Time itself will see to it that change comes. And it will.
Is this an inauthentic way to heal or grow? I ask you; is it fake to allow yourself to be as happy as you can muster? This happiness will show you where you still need work. It will. So let it be, and the process will take care of itself and you. Joy will create the contrast you need to see the shadow. There are indeed millions of ways to address awakening that are already authentic and beneficial and can work very well. They have for me.
In Indonesia they teach meditation with a smile. In time, you will find more of the smile to be genuine. Their way might just be quicker and involve less misery. You are constantly reminded of the power of the positive in each moment.
It’s hard enough facing shadow. There is always a reason to be happy and thankful for just being alive here at this pivotal time.

So yes, there will be a time when you know the smile may not be real. But you aren’t doing this to be fake, you are doing this to change, to steer your boat into a new direction.

The Sea Of Sorrow-A Lesson In Sadness

About six years ago I was going through a highly accelerated process in awakening. I had asked for change and I got it. I went through this ego death, a rearranging of the self that moves ego to the back of the bus. During this time I began to encounter a vast stretch of my spiritual ocean I referred to as the “Sea of Sorrow.” Intuitively, I thought my job was to process this sorrow. So I did. Like a man in a boat, I tried to cry out all of the sorrow I felt rising up around me. This went on for over several months. I cried every day, trying to tap deeply into this vast sea.
I realized that this sea that I was feeling could not possibly be mine alone. There just wasn’t that much sadness in my past. I realized once I  stepped back that this belonged to all of us, this vast sea of sorrow. When you awaken, the consciousness you awaken to is that of collective consciousness and how everything is connected. I realized there was no way to process all of it. So I stopped. It had become habitual by then. I weaned myself off over a matter of a few days and steered my own boat out of that sea. I left. I didn’t return. I left and found myself on much calmer waters. My mind changed, clearing. That great sadness became a memory. And there will come a time when fewer years are added to this sea by virtue of fewer people who choose to shed their tears. They choose joy instead of sorrow. And in time, that sea will itself sublime into the ether. It will become a distant memory and anyone who dares return will only find a dry valley where once there were tears. It will have lost all of its magnetic charge on us because it no longer means anything to us.

Do you see how it can be for you?
You choose.

So it’s possible to choose bliss and when you feel this bliss constantly like I do, that bliss alone heals. It heals all the hard places in you. If you think you can heal this neurosis by wrestling with it, by fixing or fiddling with it, you are mistaken. This neurosis is circular and is madness. It feeds on itself and seeks others to raise the same banner as it sadly does, with vigor and passion. There is no rationalizing with it. So? You quit it. You walk away. You become a quitter. 
You quickly begin to forget what it was like to feel like shit and remember instead how perfect bliss is. And one by one you are healed of one conditioned neurosis after another.

Tantra, the core tantra, is about bliss and how it literally can heal you. When you surrender completely and deeply enough, that bliss will penetrate to your cellular DNA  and work out the blocks that are there. This is what kundalini does all on its own as it is. The bliss, as you let it in, heals as deep as you dare to go. This, the soul of tantra, heals your shame, your guilt, and brings you to a place where you just have no more fucks to give. 
There. I said it again. 
You just slip deep into bliss and as you do, it’s as though cell by cell, the magnetic quality of bliss rewires your brain, nervous system, and body. You find yourself wondering just what you were so concerned about moments earlier. This is the beginning of repatterning your brain so you no longer “go there.”
This is the power of tantra, the orgasmic bliss that is the healer. You can feel it with or without sex. And not everyone is ready to harness it for sex. It can be enough just to heal the psyche. It isn’t about sex, you see. It is acknowledging what you are, your incredible capacity to hold this riotously sensual feeling inside until you explode over and over. 
Like Osiris, prana helps you to get put back together a better way.
No, you do not need to roll around in your own garbage just to get it out. You can be happy. You can take each moment microsecond by microsecond, building a powerful wave that is joyous instead of sad.

It’s up to you. I ask, which would you prefer?

~Nemaste!
UPDATE: this morning I experienced an example of something mentioned in this post. I have noticed that over the last few years when I awaken in the morning I experience this odd jolt of transition that I never experienced before having experienced awakening (kundalini). I have noted several people so far who have mentioned this same experience who themselves have gone through awakening (all on their own-no prompting from me) so I am getting the sense it’s fairly normal once you reach a certain stage in the experience.
This is a feeling of dread almost. It’s not the greatest feeling. This morning, though, as I rose from dream I had a smile on my face, thinking about what I had written here, and was keen to see how it might work. I am happy to report that it worked very well indeed. Give it a try. 

This Has Not Been An Ordinary Life

Growing up, I spent a lot of my life trying to live under the radar as it concerns the true life I have lived. I’d like to say its been mundane, but it hasn’t been. I think I just wanted to fit in, to be understood, but knew also that something great dwells in all of us and I grew up seeing it. 

But I did try to hide what I was. 
I felt I wouldn’t be accepted if the world knew. I struggled with it as a child, just wanting love and acceptance while spending time looking between the world’s as I witnessed souls coming and going into and out of our physical world. It’s not the things children ever seemed to talk about. Church itself lacked any real acknowledgement of the magic our souls possess, save for an idea that we survive death in order to be judged for one life or another.

I was driven to art growing up, driven inevitably because it was, as John Cocteau described it,  not a pastime, but a priesthood. It was a priesthood without the dogma. I liked that because something in me said that whatever this thing was that I was seeking was larger than mere religion with all of its views and beliefs. 

How do I tell you that what I knew then was knowable without a shred of belief? If it was real, why would we need belief? I had already seen that we were more than just this. 
Science, for all its benefits in how to see and judge rationally, had itself become just as much a dogma as Christianity had. Unless you had been inducted into the Order, you were not considered fit to be a proper researcher. My skin crawled just thinking about it. I knew that none of this was anything anyone would, or could understand…let alone the heaping doses of conditioning the entire human system heaped upon itself in order to BE something. I couldn’t speak my truth because my truth was little more than a laughable heresy.

This desire to be accepted continued into my adult life as I found myself believing that I had to capitulate when it came to a mate, a wife, a partner. There was no one else like me. A few had come close, but not anyone who was safe to be with. So I still got someone who really didn’t know nor even care about this world that I had carefully hidden in a pocket within my heart. My own wife would make fun of the times I pulled out what I knew. And to be true…and to be honest, it hurt. It hurt knowing there wasn’t a person on this planet who got it enough to simply honor it, even if they didn’t understand or relate to it. 

It wasn’t surprising in hindsight that I would trigger awakening by pulling out that immensity from that pocket inside of me,  my own great secret. It was no surprise then  that when I pulled it out, holding it in my hand that Summers day in 2006 asking it, “What are you? What do you mean?” that I would get my questions answered. 
It was perhaps the contrast that I felt in its great life and presence and the lack of it in others that led me to feel fear in the beginning when it’s immensity began to move through me. It was something I feared being revealed because I had been destroyed for having it before. I feared it’s being revealed because it was not something I was doing but was being done to me, and that dear humans sounds like delusional madness. 

In some distant life, there was a ghost of me who was not at peace because he had died for having it. 
I learned not to depend on those whom I loved to understand my new condition. I was quite prepared already for how my then-wife who would criticize and even demonize me for it. 

My secret revealed to me in dream how it would go down, and at the time I didn’t realize that the dream was prophetic. I’m not saying poor me, I am recognizing I never did the right thing to begin with. My own fear caused me to be dishonest about the single most central thing in my life: me. So I can hardly be sad that someone would do to me what she did. I had slid under the radar. And yet,  it wasn’t that she didn’t know. She saw evidence of how I could read an energy in a room or pick up on things I had no way of knowing, that subtle understated sense of knowing. But she too didn’t want to be thought of as a loony person by virtue of having married someone like me. And perhaps her own fear rivalled my own that caused her to be so ruthless and unkind. Everyone has a struggle within that they are battling every single day. Our need to be accepted trump’s our own inner truth, and this always leads to neither truth nor acceptance.

The hurt I invited into my life, which spawned fresh new trauma created experiences with people who were just as dishonest with me as I had been about myself. It has been hard knowing just how deep the deception and the lies go in them. A voice inside of me asks, “But do you have to be dishonest about who you are?” It asks this just as I feel it’s presence motion to a door that represents my entry into a new phase of my life…a phase where I destroy the magnetic pull of the dishonest actor in my life by simply healing it in me. I feel or realize in that moment what the guides have said from the time they assembled into my life, that the change is only as hard as we each make it. Whatever seems hard to change is the thing we really don’t want to change. Our trials and sorrows are just so much more important than the simplicity of freedom. But with freedom, what then? Truth is, we are addicted to our tribulations and they stay with us until we grow sick and tired of them. Infinite beings bellyaching just as I have just done as we stand before the gateway to freedom!

You know how people are drawn to the wrong kind of people all because their subconscious is still magnetized in the direction of whatever it is that trips them up in life?  Those attractants keep going until the change is made deep within us. Such an inability keeps us seemingly unable not to attract all the right influences. At its root lies not a fear of what others have done to us, but what we have done to ourselves. It is perhaps why so few step onto this path because it can reveal that it’s really about no one else but you. 

So no more hiding out or pretending. No more hiding my light. No more bullshitting myself, and honestly, no more bullshit from those who lie either.

I know we each form an elegant tapestry of effects in our world when we each are brave enough to follow our souls purpose here.
I’ve never been one for New Year resolutions, but I have always been one for resolve when it’s done in an authentic way. Writing has been a way for me to be myself, but it’s going to be more inclusive now in my life. I’m tired of the lie…and I am now tired of the lies told in my name. It’s a dirty old merry go round and it’s going to stop.

I have been, though, amazingly blessed in my life with the things that didn’t get caught in the net of my own inner hiding from the world. I am set now to leverage this blessing and transmute it to help me build the life I was meant to live.

Nothing can stand in your way when you have aligned to this truth…

I haven’t lived an ordinary life. I began seeking ardently at about age nine. I had already had so many things happen that it bred in me a knowing that there was more. I grew up seeing energy and my dream time allowed me adventure after adventure into the realm that let me be free the most. I dreamed of future events, every president that would be elected, and large world events before they happened. I ferried those who had died into the next life. I was trained alongside another from our world to do this work. I have discovered how delusional our beliefs about the world can make us, and I have seen the very source of what karma is. I have seen a lot of false prophets, but I also know most of them are simply lacking in awareness and that those with the least of it are what we call monsters. 

I have visited a world I longed to return to, feeling marooned here in this world until I finally embraced the wonder that it is to be human. And still, I sometimes long for that great place with pink sands and deep immense oceans…even though I suspect that it is a world long since scoured of life by now…

I know of still more events that will come to pass, and that the biggest of them was foretold in a vision I had in an earlier life as a native American. It was the earliest of my recollections from my past. I have seen that our own stories are not merely plodding life after plodding life, but that it’s part of chapters that are necessary because of the short lives we humans live. Those chapters form a rich tapestry that is not woven by accident, but through design. The traumas and unfortunate events in our lives were made to help each of us face a fundamental truth about who we are deep down, and we keep returning until we are able to face that it was about no one else except us. 

Many get upset when I say this, wondering what divine design there is in having such a difficult life….but the human spirit is yearning all the while to break open its own self-imposed falsehoods in order to touch the liberating light that is much within them that is seeded through every other thing that is. We feel uneasy in the presence of words like “falsehood” but you should get used to it because you will likely have to deal with it in your own life if your awakening is to mean much of anything. 

I suppose the only difference is I am aware of it and my impulse is to head right into its Maelstrom eagerly because I know that “it” is the only real thing there is, the rest are details and the mask of lies we wear because of our fear. All of this could be different. It could, and maybe it will. But regardless, this is and seems to have always been a burning world. Don’t labor over trying to quench the fire. Just exit the great lie. Exit and know a great peace. The door is within you. You decide. It is still a burning world, but you don’t have to be consumed by it.

You could think I’m just in a rough tussle with myself, but in truth I’m just feeling impatient. I’m impatient with myself and my excuses. I’m impatient over my tender side-stepping just for the sake of others whose own need to play the victim has worn thin. It’s worn thin in me, too. I have not been happier though, a tender brilliant joy that rises up seeking the light like the lotus as it rises from the muck. So if you think I’m here today to offer you some great pearl of wisdom, truth be told, any pearl I find is my own, and it won’t ever gleam so brightly as it does right now in my own eyes. I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what life I lived to anyone except me. It won’t matter to anyone about your own story either, but that’s not why you or I are here. We are each gifted with waking the infinite and we each have to come to peace with the reality that it’s just that simple. No one ever saved this burning world by rushing into the flames to save people. They have all quietly sat out in the cool meadows of their own inner paradise and smiled because this peace is just that sweet.
No, if there is anything I can tell you, it’s to be ruthless with yourself. Be ruthless in the truth of who you are, realizing also that as the years pass and the veil gets pulled slowly back, you might change and might need to be patient with yourself when that time comes. It’s a burning world and you no longer need to pretend that you are a victim of anything except your own free choice. And even that can be turned over and the doorway opened…just saying it could make it happen.

Nemaste 

The River Of Life -A Quick Study In Reincarnation & Contact

Beneath the world of experience most are accustomed to, lies a deeper substratum of great knowing. It is a vast untapped river of life that can shed a great deal of light on why things are the way they are in your life now. Lying in this river are all of the lives you have ever lived and the many dramas that have unfolded in them. 

Tapping into past lives is not hard to do, but it seems hard because our focus has been so narrowly held within the physical senses to the exclusion of most everything else.
I was honored to have been witness to a past life regression recently that happened at the end of a dinner party at the house of a friend. By using simple relaxation techniques I was able to see how my friend was able to help our curious and willing guest to tap into details about her past. I was able to see also how we can thwart ourselves by thinking that the details as they come could not be true, that maybe we are just making them up. I think that we think this way because the details are not in normal memory and might seem somehow arbitrary because of how easily the images come to us. We aren’t always taught to trust our feelings or heed what inwardly focused consciousness is telling us.

In the case of the regression I was a part of, I was able to see how clearing up a problem from a past life helped to change how the subject felt when she returned to normal consciousness. She described feeling 100 pounds lighter. In the case of the woman, a part of herself had gotten stuck between lives, not realizing that she had died. It took her going back to her past self to help that past aspect to move on. The result of this “soul retrieval”on the woman in her present life was immediate.

Sometimes we can do this kind of work, freeing ourselves from decades of feeling stuck inside. Other times we can see how recursive our patterns can be from one life to the next. They can also help us to face a problem that has been lifetimes in the making.

It occurred to me today that one reason why past life recall is important for us is because of the short lives we live as humans. I know how strange this will sound, but the length of our lives compared to other intelligent life forms in the universe (other non terrestrial biological entities) is very short. We are like the dogs of the universe. Instead of living for hundreds of years, we are lucky if we live just under a century, a mere fraction of the time many beings have. And once we do transition, we come back into bodies built by a world from the ground up that is incredibly narrow in its focus to the degree that it seems that all prior memory is hidden behind some veil or other. I am here telling you that you can access your past lives and they can shed light on the patterns that you need most to dissolve for your authentic self to shine forth. These patterns are the weeds that obscure the realm of light that is within you.

It is for this reason why I sense that it is actually important for human beings to develop recall of past lives in order to dredge the experience we have from other lifetimes in order to provide us with the insight needed to be wiser and more understanding beings facing a changing future that will very soon involve face to face contact with non-terrestrial sentient beings. And while this is not THE reason for doing this, such contact is emblematic of a race that is caught in the grip of great change. I ask you; will you listen to the insane voices on the t.v., all of whom are owned by corporations that only want you to consume and make them even wealthier, or will you listen to the perennial voice within which carries the only compass that has ever mattered in any of the lives you have lived? Only then can you be free to face the larger truth of what you are and what inhabits our universe as others not unlike ourselves, but awakened to the fullness of who they are. Anything less renders you a dangerous unpredictable being in their eyes. But many wait eagerly to welcome new races to this new level of knowing and realization.

One thing that past life recall can do is it can broaden our horizons by showing us how we have each been both male and female. It will help us to see that we have been rich and poor, and that, finally, all of life here in the human arena is far more similar to everyone else than we might have ever imagined. It would then be a much easier leap into a world that includes nonhuman beings who feel, surprise, not so different from us humans on the inside. 
Concepts such as class and racial divides would also soften and fall away as people so awakened would realize that we are all following our path. This sometimes means living simple quiet lives farming or living close to Gaia and family, while other lives might require very different ingredients. All of these things help to bring to the higher self the pieces that help bring about completion. We would also know that no matter our station in life, each of us is born of noble blood which is the great light that moves through everything, and of which we are a part.
I think that these details could stand us in good stead in the two decades hence which will reveal an acceleration toward Contact. The other side to this is that many of us here have lived as nonterrestrial life forms in other regions of the cosmos before. Here we are now being involved in one of the biggest steps human kind will make, which is making open contact with civilizations that will help us to further evolve much more quickly.
All of this is taking time, so the process has been one that will be in the preparation stage for about 100 years. Along with this has been the issue of awakening which many advanced civilizations possess naturally. We are being coaxed gently in this direction. This step will also show us that not all advanced intelligences work for our benefit but have in fact used and are being used by certain elements within governments here for their own gain.

It isn’t that we are waking up FOR Contact, but that humans must evolve if we are to survive this next developmental advancement.
The change will come when each of us changes and seeds the culture with that change. Our leaders will not do it because they have become a front for a gigantic secret that has been kept since our military, or secret elements within it, began backward engineering advanced technology that would revolutionize our energy industry overnight and make it possible to travel the stars. 

But that wonderful outcome has yet to pass, so WE must be the change in the hopes that we murder secrecy by weeding it out of all of our lives.
 As the tide within us rises, others will likewise change. Already this change is being felt. Who will be likely to keep the secret going? 

Already this era has shown a surge in whistleblowers on the topic of Contact and Disclosure as well as issues involving the conduct of governments in “secret” and “covert” programs within intelligence and military. With an administration who has clearly lied about the source of the hacked emails during the U.S. election coming from Russia (despite no evidence for it forthcoming as well as Assange explaining that the leaks did not come from Russian government actors). 

People are waking up to the reality that news media lies and our leaders also lie. It is up to us to continue driving the shadow into light, you see….

We will meet beings whose lives span many hundreds of years, a length that allows for a different kind of evolutionary spiral to take place. Great thinkers in civilizations such as these work not for thirty years on, say, mathematical theorems, but are able to remain focused for hundreds of years. And while their candle might not burn as brightly, it sustains something we do not, as yet, have. 

Even now the way to alter DNA in order to lengthen our lifespans is being addressed, something that could lead to exponential changes taking place in our future, which would not be all that different from those civilizations out there that cracked their own codes and were able to lengthen their own lives. The trick is in keeping what makes us human when the change comes. I am not a proponent of transhumanism. I do think that when we can see the big picture, we will know better about how one change in a gene can have ripple effects on others, thus enabling us to hopefully make better choices for ourselves.

I know how funny it might seem to be tying reincarnation with contact. It isn’t that knowing your past lives is so crucial to human development now because the patterns you see today are the same patterns that have played out for thousands of years as we each have gone from lifetime to lifetime. It’s more that we have reached a point where what happened in the past (and what will happen in the future) are becoming relevant for revealing to us a fuller view, a bigger picture at a time when big picture thinking will be needed in the leap we are faced with today. 

It isn’t just reincarnation that will do it. All forms of inclusive big picture thinking that include our place in the Order of life here and the cosmos will be just as important. This is, though, one tool in our toolbox for navigating this time that will see great change. The more we know about ourselves, the more we will also know about the larger cosmos that is beckoning.
There are a number of ways to tap into past lives. One common method is through regression hypnosis. This method was accidentally discovered when a hypnotist regressed a patient past their childhood and into a previous life. Since it’s discovery in the 1800’s, regression therapy has been used as a tool for understanding the self and the soul.

There are many regression therapists who practice out there. One woman describes how she does her regressions over Skype. She explains that the memories aren’t as deeply buried as many might think, which makes conducting her sessions with clients possible. While traditional regression therapy as a form of hypnosis is popular, this is by no means the only way to get at these memories. My friend Ali who regressed our dinner party guest explained she doesnt even us traditional hypnosis in her work (she developed this method herself).

Hypnosis in many ways is a Westernized form of meditation when you get right down to it, so in meditation it is possible to learn how to free associate to allow images lift to the surface.

I was able to see how my friend Ali was able to field questions from my daughter a few years ago about reincarnation, and my daughter wound up being able, in ordinary consciousness,  to identify a life as a botanist who worked with her father or uncle in classifying plant species. She was able to recall how she had been bitten by a poisonous spider and later died in that life.

As a gifted psychic, Ali was able to confirm that the hunches my daughter had were very much on the mark. But sometimes it just seems too easy, which is why we often second guess ourselves.T his is something you should guard against. The place that lifts these memories up is a playful and imaginative one. Don’t worry; imagination is necessary so it can slip in the details you know, but just don’t realize that you know. This is different from how Westerners have been taught to think about all of this: it all must be very hard and this it can’t be a simple matter! But it is. Try free association. You might be surprised the wealth of details it supplies.

Dreams are also another important avenue where past life memory comes through. The only challenge is that unless you are recalling a memory as it happened, you might be dealing with reincarnational material without realizing it was something from the past (or future). 

Our minds are so creative in dreaming that reincarnational data might show up as a flaming zebra running in front of us, a strange image on the one hand, but not so strange when the image is looked at more closely for the association’s it has within memory. By packing in so much emotional material in a symbolic way, the means of understanding it most often is a blend of intuition, feeling, and a dash of rational analysis. Because reincarnational material feels so similar to where we are now, it often passes for the content in our lives today even as it touches on so many others. 

Our dinner guest was stuck and didn’t realize it; she came into this lufe that way so she didn’t know things could be any different. It wasn’t that her stuck life played havoc in her life. Not at all. But deeper down, something was somehow….on hold maybe. 

As I write this I know another person whose soul is hung in the nether world between the physical and spiritual. I see how this person has had this as a pattern that has resulted in a deeply imbedded inability to surrender and to move forward. These glitches hold up our own spiritual development and keeps us from being able to embrace the higher self with a broader picture view of what we are.When we can get through the thicket of this material, we will be much more competent candidates for Contact.

This was supposed to be quick so I will end it here but also encourage you to lean into your past in the hopes of changing what you want to change now.
Nemasté

Something Brought You

What is it

you think?

Is it a truth beyond thought

that cracks open the guile

and reaches into your Great Immensity?

 
There is a great something more, though…an intelligence guiding, coordinating…
So that
As you slip into the flow of your bliss
The multiverse swells around you

Conspiring

Caressing

And birthing

Your purpose,

Now divinely inspired

And now carried…

Something brought you here

to the place you are

now.

What this is

is a collection

of all actions

birthed from your feeling

and all feeling is how the universe

speaks

and responds.

 

At the base of this

is how your life is unfolding

and the change

is within your grasp

Inside your gasp…

in each moment

rendered by wonder and awe

into divine direction.

 

We each come to this

and there is plenty of time.

The universe has no start or stop time

but countless opportunities

for ressurection

renewal

and hope.

 

There is no punishment

save what your own feeling does

to you.

To you

and because of you

you are here.

 

What will this moment bring?

What will your feelings do to you?

Will they raise you up

or cast you down?

It is your choice,

and yours alone.

 

For thousands of years

we travel this path

from unknowing

to realization

and it is a sacred path

birthed out of profane,

the lotus that must first

rise up out of the mud

to bring its sweet beauty

by blooming.

 

You will open,

you will be stilled

on that great day.

We all have this great meeting

that follows us like a seed

it just waits for us

when we are ready to tend it

and it bursts into life

as it spreads itself

into its new life.

 

You cannot make deals with where you are.

You are here because of what you alone have done.

How you have reacted,

responded,

and finally acted.

But the action is almost always last

and the core of karma rises

from out of  this.

 

So look closely

and look honestly.

Honestly alone will be the force

that will deliver you.

No other,

not teacher

or great seer

shaman

or guru

will do it.

They can only remind you

maybe nudge your mirror-neurons

to feel as they feel

to perhaps begin to know

a little of what the world is,

to reflect on the dramas of the world…
…We all just want to belong…
This will take all of you

The dark

and the light

sacred

and profane

your poorly constructed righteousness

your breathless sex

your big ball of wonder

humor

and ignorance. 
It gladly takes it all

because God knows no shame

nor guilt

as it sees behind the eyes of everything

smiling
because you are here.

Do You?

Do you think that this was going to be easy

this love I bear in you?

Everything else

is like a mad scramble

like the screams of monkey’s in the trees

-it is how the mind is.

 

Sink into forgetfulness

and into the bliss

a warm buoyant presence

rises up all around

it makes others so ripe.

 

So you chase after me

day after day.

I know how hard it can be sometimes

this vagabond life you lead

having given up so much

for nothing else but this one thing

that rings through everything.

Like a vast thread

with no beginning or end,

constantly being thread through a needle

-desire drives it forth.

 

But just as you chase after me,

I turn ’round and chase after you;

mirror and reflection find their union

in a sweet simple embrace

of equal measure of fire and coolness

that breeds the incorruptible beauty

that we all know

but cannot adequately express.

 

I am waiting for you

there

here

under the vast sky of your morning

as you squint into the new day

and I ride under your feet

like a magical carpet

delivering you

reveling in your touch

abiding here as always

with no answer

nor question

but this abiding taste

that lingers on your lips

and bears within the swing of your hips

and sway of your arm…

 

I am here to show you beauty

yes

but not before you dissolve the horror that stands before your face

and that dwells in your heart.

I am here to show you the greatest love there is

it is what I was destined to bear to you since

forever was a child…

but we must work to set it right

so that the beauty of this moment can be known

fully

without reservation

or regret

or doubt

or shame

or sadness…

 

I wrap myself ’round all of these

for you

and it is my mere presence that dissolves them

just as soon as you are ready to let them fall

and transform into the greatness that is in you to be.

 

I know it is hard for you.

I know the strain

the pain

the sadness

the empty void…

but one by one

like soldiers

I redeem them

with the sweetest kind of joy.

You grow from old to young

like a vast wheel turning backwards

until all the strain is wound out of it.

I am here with you until the end

which is only the beginning.

 

I am the force that revives

the one who opens you

and shows you

the flower within

and the great light

that those petals long to touch

arching upward and outward

a great kind of beauty is coaxed…

 

I am beyond names

and beyond all recognition,

the sweetest mystery

that all of you yearn to swim deep into

and become lost in

so that you might be found.

Soul Retrieval

This Thanksgiving I spent time making new friends and working on developing a Youtube series with my friend and gifted intuitive Alison on her island home off the coast of California.

One thing is for certain; you never know what will happen when Ali is in the mix.  I mean this in the best of ways. It all winds up feeling so perfect.  So real.  And so it was near the end of my visit that some friends came over for dinner and as the dinner seemed to be winding down, one of our guests made mention about how she didn’t know so much about the spiritual, not that she was afraid, she just felt like she didn’t have a third eye.  One of the guests mentioned how she had done a series of past life regressions with Ali and how wonderfully healing it had been.  Before you knew it, we were in the living room wrapping this lady up in blankets as Ali guided her down into the depths for an encounter with a past self. Easy, but it’s easy when you have someone who has the gifts Ali has to help guide and nudge when its necessary.

One thing that has become clear to me and that came up when we were watching a video that same weekend of an interview with a woman who has done countless regressions was that doing regression therapy is not that hard.  Our memories are all there, but resting deeper down inside of us, a place where we most often do not go so we rarely, if ever, encounter them on a conscious level.  With a little guided imagery and some deep relaxation, those memories begin to bubble up to the surface of awareness.

And so it was with our guest who lay quiet and still, breathing deeply and following Ali’s lead.  After only a few minutes, an image formed of a woman in a doorway.  This woman was the woman in a previous lifetime, and she stood continually at a door, neither here or there.  It turned out that she had a self who was stuck between lifetimes.  Ali guided the woman to begin to approach the woman, and as she did, she felt like she could not move.  She couldn’t move because both aspects of who she was as the woman in the door and as herself now we’re BOTH stuck, or seemed to be. Seems she only needed to decide not to be stuck in order to not be. Then, as she continued to try to approach the woman, she saw a spot begin to appear, which was a portal off to one side which had begun to open as she tried to help this woman, to find out why she was there in this room in a house.  Over a period of minutes the woman in the doorway moved into the tunnel and was taken into the light.  Immediately the woman felt great relief and began to see the funerary arrangements, the meal and the home of the woman she had been.  She sat up saying she felt 100 lbs lighter!

This encounter was one that helps a person to become “unstuck” both as the person they were as well as the person they are today in their current life since some aspects of that feeling of being stuck often haunts them in their present life.  Being able to do this work frees a person up and helps them to move on.  This process is called soul retrieval.  Some years ago Ali helped me with an aspect of this in one of our many talks together.  It turned out that there was a part of me that had become stuck when I was about ten years old.  The process was much the same in the after effects of feeling suddenly clearer and more integrated.  It was experiences like this along with the removal of emotional blocks through the cleansing effect of strong pranic flow (kundalini) that has had such a significant impact on my life as an agent of transformation.

The experience also showed me that I had a natural healing ability that I have always sought to sideline or put on hold because I felt that I needed to be as healed as possible before working with other people in a healing modality.  With my hands on our guest’s head, I felt energy flowing through me in such an easy way.  I identified that this was the same sort of energy that we use as healers for helping to bring about the changes that are healing moments.  My role was simply as support, but it was curious to me to see how as the woman began to describe that her past self had gone through the tunnel that the flow of energy through my hands had begun to wane moments before she described what was taking place as she looked on at the event unfolding before her.  It was one indicator to me that had a curious way of coming up over the course of the visit.  During a reading with a gifted healer that Ali gifted me with during my stay by a man in Arizona, this gift came up as part of the core of his suggestions to me for forging a new direction in my spiritual and professional life.  All of this, neatly woven into earlier events that had already taken place.
Soul retrieval is claiming what is yours, a part of you that may have seemed inaccessible before the process began. By returning you to yourself, it is like a short circuit in your cosmic wiring is fixed so that an easier and more complete flow takes place. When we retrieve those lost parts, we allow them also to heal whatever it was that had them feeling stuck. But since they are us, we attain something that they become. Past life regression let’s the self help unstick it’s other selves…and sometimes when we encounter angels in other lives, it is sometimes an aspect of ourselves moving outside the confines of time and space to help bring change.
Kundalini, or strong prana has had this effect for those who awaken. If you are going through this, you know how it stirs, helps you to feel those stuck places and as if by magic, heal them. There are many pathways or means of doing this type of integration work that leaves us feeling more whole. I think it can also aid you even when awakening is stirring you. Sometimes we can get stuck in awakening, I have seen it happen often enough, and past life work is most often where the “source” of those stuck places we feel in us now that often make so little sense (because they aren’t from this lifetime).

As I have been writing this post, I noticed that Ali is embracing her talent for helping people with past life regression work more and more (funny how that works!). She has done hundreds of these journies over the years, and her method came to her naturally in her intuitive work as a way to resolve patterns that were snagging her clients over the years. But recently she has begun to do more of this type of work, and it’s prompting me to go ahead and publish this now so that if you want to explore this aspect of yourself, you can get in early.

To learn more, contact Ali at avaloncmaiden@yahoo.com or speak with her at The Spa At Catalina at 310-510-9255 and let her know I sent you. 
Merry soulful journies!

Who Is The You That You Are?

 

Your bag is packed

it screams to be released

how long do you think your hands can continue to clutch

the lie that we all want to believe?

We let go

bliss slips around us

a delicious remembering

amidst a cloud of forgetting

the ancients dance in us

as the shame that we have shackled ourselves with

falls in splendid beauty

wonder

and awe.

 

We make others responsible

for what we  cannot bear

what has been ours

and whose roots dig deep within us

and masters us.

We lie to ourselves

and forget

taking the mirror

for reality

laying the guilt

on the shoulders of the innocent,

a dirty inculcation

into what is untrue.

 

We are that mirror

and we are all it shows us.

 

Who is brave enough to turn it ’round

to see it rightly

or finally?

 

Do you know who you are

behind the lies you tell,

the lies we all tell others

and ourselves,

the lies that we each believe?

There is such sorrow in these lies

we cannot help but tell ourselves

and others

as though we can slip one more day

through the keyhole crack

and continue wandering like thieves

free from persecution

for one more day…

free and shackled.

 

Losing your head,

your drive to think,

you feel

but how deeply can you feel–

can you fall deep within the truth

or do you make deals with it

to pretty it up

or bend it to your will

or do you bend to it

and let it take you

like a lover

who seeks to destroy

all you held dear

and all that ruined you

for lifetimes

so that you might find yourself wrecked

in a new and beautiful way?

Who is brave enough to take such a dare?

 

The great magic is upon you now

and your thoughts are lost

and your being is emergent.

Who is the you that you are?

Do you know?

 

Will you fall into forgetting

trusting that love will support you

and take you down

into nothing

so that you may be remade?

No one sees more clearly

when these veils are lifted from  within

because there is a deeper veiling…layer upon layer of it…

and the only veils

are those that we each have made.

Can you be the agent of your own undoing?