My Reset-How Painbody Accelerated My Healing

In 2008 I began a correspondence with a gifted healer who shared an understanding of energy and it’s benefits for us as human beings. I was recovering from an injury that had also served to help accelerate awakening, forcing me to remain still as my body healed.

It was against this backdrop that Ali and I discussed awakening and the many ways we can all learn to use this force in us to heal. She had already used her gift to let me know about a healer and teacher in my area who would help me significantly in accelerating my healing process. While she didn’t know the name of the person, she provided a description that her guidance was providing. I found out about this person the next day when a family friend invited me to come to a healing session with a person who sounded just like the person Ali had described the day before (from the other side of the continent). This led to an accelerated period of releasing stored emotion that is lodged in the energy body and appears to have a relationship to the body tissues as well.
A few months into this work as Ali and I were talking she begins to explain that her guides are telling her to do something. They don’t explain, they just tell her to trust them and to do as they instruct. I was to get off the phone, breathe deep and keep my mind calm. I had no idea what was about to happen.
So I complied. I was standing in the kitchen when I felt what I can only describe as a buoyant state of lightness and relief. I felt relieved of what I was aware as a certain degree of Painbody. Painbody is the energetic equivalent of the emotional energy that we have each stuffed down inside ourselves. This energy, since it was never fully felt, is stored and remains like a tape or program that can play over and over whenever events like the one that originally triggered it, triggers it anew…over and over. This condition lasts until the stored material is dispensed with once and for all through what are often deep states of meditation and willingness to just let it go once and for all.
The buoyancy was nice and I wondered what was happening. Then, after about a minute of this feeling, I felt what I knew was my old painbody….. except that as it returned to me, it felt as though I was being hit by a train. All of the Painbody that had left me came screeching back all around me. It was one of the most startling experiences I had up until that point in time.
What the heck happened, I wondered…
The way I was feeling Painbody was different now. In those minutes after it returned, I thought I was going to crumple from the pain. What I would realize in the aftermath of this event was that Ali had “adopted” my energy body signature and it looked like I had adopted hers. Where I felt relief, she described feeling like she was going to throw up. Her skin felt clammy, the pain was intolerable. She wondered how I made it through each day.
The truth was, I had grown numb to my own accumulation of inner pain, and this “switch” brought me back to a normal level of sensitivity. I was now feeling more acutely than I had before.
I felt my own energy body in a new way after this. I had daily pain, pain that I felt much more clearly and vividly. For as bad as all of this seemed at the time, it was a saving grace for me. If I had not had what amounted to a “reset” of my energetic sense of the presence of my own Painbody, I might not have had as much of a motivator to clear it all up. But clear it up I did. What choice did I have, right? Wincing through a pain in my heart, I got motivated to do more work.
I have spent years on this journey attending to every bit of this stored material and I have become aware of how we continue to store more of it even as we slough off decades of old ghosts from our past. 
In truth, by having my senses upgraded as they were in that day back in 2008, I was able to feel everything I needed to in order to heal. I think of it as a form of spiritual honesty expressed through feeling. It has helped me to detect the smallest of impediments and allowed me to focus on them for healing and release. All of this took place in just such a way as it needed to because if we both had known what we were in store for, I’m not sure either one of us would have agreed to it. It may have been the perfect therapy for me if I was to really see and feel ALL of it.
It’s been nine years since then, and I have been busy at work. Since then I have eliminated nearly all of the Painbody, layer by layer, energy center by energy center. I am thankful for having this level of sensitivity because I doubt I would have been able to feel where all the material was stored away inside of me. As I write this, I feel a triple twinge in my right hip that, as it turns out, corresponds to three acupuncture points along one meridian. Like a small traffic jam, I have been working the last three years on clearing the blocks there, like digging through rock strata a layer at a time. Each release bring greater flow, a clearer mind/body/heart and a change in feeling. 
I know that this hip block corresponds to the most recent feeling of loss I felt during what became a fractious divorce with my ex many years ago and led to the alienation of one of my children from me. It’s not been easy to learn how to forgive my ex for behaving in such a petty mean-spirited way. But even as I say this, I know that I entangled myself in my ex’s broken story and can’t be surprised that I might have become a casualty of it. 
The next step in healing asks the most from me. Unless I do that, it’s enough to attract, like moths to the flame, other people who are broken in exactly the same way. It already has, and there’s nothing worse than having to face the same level of emotional dishonesty in people who are unable to own how they hurt those around them.
It seems that in order to forgive, to do it with my whole being and not just with my head or voice, requires the most of what I am. It seems this is required for something as hard to heal as something like that.
Whatever our stories, the journey from a suffering road to one of pure bliss remains as the road we each will walk. I’m very fortunate to have gotten “reset” when I did. I don’t know if it’s for everyone, but Ali’s guides were right.
So I would say, our ability to feel may have no end. How numbed have you gotten in your life? Awakened? Very excellent; are you really feeling as deeply and as honestly as you could? Do you feel like you are on pause, waiting and waiting for that next release to go ahead and complete itself? Go into breath and sink into yourself in quiet contemplation and ask your heart if there is more to be known, if there is a deeper story to be felt within your capacity to sense and feel deeper yet. The answer might surprise you, and it could free you, too.
Until next time…

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Greek VS Aramaic Bible Versions -The First Impediment

Recently I shared with you a project I undertook as the result of a realization I had during the course of my early awakening related to early Christian texts and how it was that I saw a big elephant in the room that had managed not to make its way to the canonical Gospels. 

My first big question as I made this realization was “why?” The answer has pulled in a number of reasons, not just one, which is one reason why I have been moved to undertake this project. It is a fascinating story, and it helps to bring early Christian thought back to where it needs to be, in my estimation, which is a complete system not only for being, but for becoming more than we thought possible. 

The first, and perhaps most important layer or impediment to deeper realization of what Christ was teaching is the barrier of language and culture. The original teachings were conveyed in Aramaic while the Gospels that we now know were written in Greek. To understand how different the languages are, it helps to study both, which I am doing. The problem as it exists is that Aramaic is a language that is highly contextual and it does not have all the same words that Greek has. Greek, on the other hand is less context driven and is more precise in some ways, but it’s precision comes at a cost when translating the Aramaic Jesus spoke. 

To understand what I mean, I will provide you with an example. Greek often will identify concepts in great detail, resulting in a sense, for example, that the heart, mind, soul, higher self, and heaven, are separate things. In Aramaic, the sense of division is not so precise and since that is so, how ideas are conveyed are done so in a different way. Instead of the kingdom being in you, the term also means that it is among you, a delineation that it does not create while the Greek can, or does. Further, the concept of God in Greek is a masculine usage while the Aramaic includes aspects of both male and female. You might wonder how this impacts our understanding of the Greek compared to how we might understand the Aramaic. The answer is “plenty.”

In the Greek we have Jesus saying, “I am one with the father.” However, in early documents such as the Nag Hammadi, he is clearly referring to a masculine AND feminine deity when he says “father and mother.” 
While these are strange ideas to most within Christianity, when tracing the message back before the Greek into Aramaic, the use of the feminine in Aramaic actually is consistent with a deity as described originally.

Maybe you are wondering what difference any of this makes. Regardless of the tradition, anyone, and I mean EVERYONE who seeks to describe something that is part of the “higher” realms in spirit, the way that it is done is never to describe it directly. Take your pick: Jesus, Buddha, or anyone else. It has to be described by way of metaphor or parable because there really is no frame of reference except our experience here in the physical. The problem is that all of these weighty things are not physical, so how do we even explain them?

What I mean is that nothing is completely literal in anyone’s descriptions. When Jesus describes the kingdom, there is one word he always uses which is the key to what I mean here. Do you know what this word is? It’s in every parable. This word is “like.” He says, “The kingdom is like….” He doesn’t say that the kingdom is a mustard seed, or a treasure buried in a field. He does this because there is no way to use physical words to describe a nonphysical and multidimensional experience. The same is true for anyone trying to describe spiritual experience. Why any of this matters is that when you change the meaning of a word, you can change the meaning and thus the understanding of important aspects of the teachings as told originally. In many ways the teaching is already handicapped by virtue of its inability to adequately describe what’s in the next world. All of this goes over people’s heads as they envision angels with trumpets perched on fluffy white clouds in a heaven that must certainly be up in the sky.  The kingdom comes, but it comes within and among you. Now think about how the people of the time were expecting a leader to come that would be the king of the Jews. They thought it was coming as a material thing, but Jesus was describing an inner event. 

To help to explain this issue with language a little more it’s good to know more about the language as used. Did you know that Jesus didn’t use the term “hell” in the Bible? “Preposterous! It plainly says so in the Bible!” my friends have said when we discuss this issue. Actually, it says hell in the Bible, but in the koine Greek, he uses the word Gahena. Gahena was a place just outside the city walls and was home to a trash heap. Instead of a place in the afterlife, he was describing something that exists here and now. This Gahena people find themselves in has important ramifications for the teaching, which is that hell is here and now. This Gahena is spiritual poverty of a sort that is right here and right now. If you took the “hell” of the Bible, I bet you were thinking of a place you go when you die if you were bad enough.

To understand how words, even just a few, can change the meaning of a passage in the Bible,  let’s look at a passage in Luke where Jesus is, we assume, talking to Peter after the crucifixion. In the passage, Jesus asks Peter if he loves him. In fact, Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. Now most Christians explain the purpose of Jesus repeating himself as a reminder to Peter of how he denied knowing Jesus three times when the Romans came for him. 

Except that isn’t what happened at all.

In the Greek Jesus asks Peter if he loves him using three different words for love, all with very different implications. He asks Peter if he loves him “agape” which is divine love. He also uses the term for familial or brotherly love. Lastly, he uses the word “eros.” In each case, Peter answers in the affirmative. Here Jesus is asking Peter if he loves him erotically, like a lover. The breadth of this love is no small love and this is no ordinary person, this Jesus. Normally, we just shrink back in either shame, denial, or disgust, but this passage demands to be understood if we are ever to know the love that is the Christ. Without that understanding, we don’t get the depth of the man nor his teachings. Without this understanding, we are left unable to reach what the Christ is. We fall instead for “Jesus Light” instead of “Jesus the deep.” As my friends would say, we were handed these books by the early church and surely it is the unerring word of God, so there’s nothing more to learn. The truth is, this isn’t true. Hard as it may be to admit to, recent discoveries have led scholars to a radical rethinking of Christology and what was and wasn’t told.

In 1945 the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered, which once translated, represented a radical rethinking of Christianity. Linguist studies have shown that what Orthodoxy called heresy was in fact the earliest teachings, not the Orthodox ones. This of course is scandalous, but points to orthodoxy as an offshoot or interpretation of the original teachings. It also helps to explain why, upon reading these codices, I found that the words written spoke perfectly of my own experience in my awakening. I am not a scholar of the Bible, but an expert in this area is and he claims the codices are describing awakening, or, as the Hindus call it; kundalini. No slouch these texts; they take you right to the garden gate, pulls out the key, and bids you enter. The difference is the cannon doesn’t do that at all. It’s inspiring, but it doesn’t show you what awakening is, which these books do. 
It was this contrast between the books as translated along with my own discovery of the Nag Hammadi that set me on the journey to understanding why a “heresy” just so happened to be describing my deep mystic union with God-dess  perfectly, and poetically. It wasn’t just a matter of style, it was content too.

For these reasons, words are important if we are to hope to capture the depths of what Jesus was teaching. Perhaps more fundamentally, the language used is incredibly important if we are to hope to capture the range of subtlety that is present in these teachings, which gets lost or mangled once we are presented with the translations into Greek.

There is much more to all of this, and in time I will be getting through it. I will show that the Jesus of the Orthodox tradition was stripped of important teachings that would have given new weight and expanded meaning to the reality in which this man dwelled. Now, more than at any time in history, we have more evidence and many more resources than we have ever had.  The result is that there is more to know, and these will be like keys to a gate that we have all been longingly looking at but not fully understanding the implications of. We were meant to open the lock!
Until then, the work continues.

Clearing The Foot Chakra For Better Health And Well-being

Did you know that you have energy centers all through your body that are best known as chakras? Most often we know just about the seven major chakras in the torso. Paying attention to the other lesser-known centers can actually elevate your sense and awareness of energy in new ways.
Right now I am doing a lot of work on a set of chakras located along a meridian that runs from my foot all the way up close to my heart, and thought I would share some of the insights I have been gaining as I have been moving along in my practice.
The foot is an important part of our energy system since it is where energy exits and enters first and last through our bodies. While some systems explain that prana or chi only exits the foot, studies of energy amongst those with high prana flow show that people detect it flowing in and out at that location, much in the way that the crown chakra is seen to transmit life force into the higher dimensional aspects of our awareness.
The two chakras in the foot are the Patala and Mahatala. The Patala is more centrally located towards the balls of the feet while the Mahatala is into toward the back of the arch. When you are quiet and calm, try seeing if you can feel where they are. Sometimes you can get a feeling of buoyancy and lightness when a chakra is active and balanced. Just by doing the chakra clearing exercise I’m going to relate to you is often enough to spark this awareness.
The single best way to tell if you have blocked energy in your feet is that it can cause you to have a difficult time feeling or knowing who you are, or what your purpose is. Blocked energy in the foot can lead to a difficulty in being able to make decisions or to feel decisive. You might also begin projects but not complete them.

 

A Simple Method

To help unblock the foot stand with bare feed and focus on your feet while imagining that there is a whirling vortex of energy now moving in them. Do this until you can imagine it well, and just keep focused on your feel feeling new energy moving into and out of them.

Bring The Energy Up
Next, to get the most out of this exercise, you will want to imagine the energy rising up through your feet and up your legs and up into your torso. This will help to not just get the energy moving through your feet, but will give the rest of your body a treat to the lightness of being while building a simple sense of grounding all at the same time.
To help in moving the energy, it’s important to move your body. The single best way besides breathing deep to move energy is to feel your body move. Begin this by twisting around at the waist, turning your torso first one way and the next, with arms flowing out by your sides, slowly bringing your arms up as you open them to the sky. This movement is done fluidly and in a carefree manner; don’t be too serious!
When you do this, you should feel clearer and lighter. You might also feel a renewed sense of energy flowing up your legs, into your hips and then up into your torso towards your heart. You can sometimes even feel a shimmering effect of the energy that you didn’t feel before. These and more are a few of the results of clearing up blocked or stagnant energy in the feet.

Q:I can feel the energy moving in my feet, but it all slows down once it goes up my leg. How do I keep the energy moving further up?
A: You can open one center and wind up feeling some blocks further up the line. The best thing to do is to use the same visualization that you used for your feet, focused on those other points of blocked energy. Additionally, if that does not work for you, a gentle massage of the points on the chart (but on YOUR body!) can help move the energy.  Also, having a masseuse or other body worker who understands energy can be a good bet for helping move the energy.  An acupuncturist also could be of help as well.

As a side note, many people will correctly be able to identify key positions for blocked energy all on their own. For example, I have had to points close to my knees that have given me trouble for years energetically and these correspond perfectly to a specific acupuncture point. Someone else was able to identify energetic effects in the foot that also corresponded to a key acupuncture point that is there.

 

When prana flows it follows the paths of the meridians. The illustration (above) shows one meridian that goes from the foot up into the torso.

Q: How long should I do this exercise?

A: Take all the time you need to feel like it’s beginning to work for you. As a general rule, anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes should suffice. Your mileage may vary.
One thing you can also do is to gently massage your foot before or after. In fact, gentle but firm pressure is a great way to help move stuck energy.
The most direct flow of energy from the legs comes up the outer part of the torso. It can impact all the major energy centers as it goes: root, sacral, and solar plexus chakras. This is a wonderful way to feel lighter in a way you might not always feel otherwise.
Technically, there is more than one chakra in the foot. One is located near the back sole of the foot near the arch and the other is located closer to where the front of the foot is in its center nearer the balls of the feet. By focusing on the foot you might feel both of these becoming more active. But by focusing on moving energy in the foot, all other centers will benefit. Again, gently massaging the points or centers can help them to release.  Also, strong pressure on the point even though it might be uncomfortable, can be a method that can work (similar to what is behind acupressure methods).
You can repeat this exercise anytime that you want and you can repeat it as many times as you want, too!

 

Read More:

This article goes into depth about the leg and foot chakras.

Rumi

The Lord Is In Me

​by Kabir

English version by Andrew Harvey
(Originally Hindi)

The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you,
As life is hidden in every seed.
So rubble your pride, my friend,
And look for Him within you.

When I sit in the heart of His world
A million suns blaze with light,
A burning blue sea spreads across the sky,
Life’s turmoil falls quiet,
All the stains of suffering wash away.

Listen to the unstruck bells and drums!
Love is here; plunge into its rapture!
Rains pour down without water;
Rivers are streams of light.

How could I ever express
How blessed I feel
To revel in such vast ecstasy
In my own body?

This is the music
Of soul and soul meeting.
Of the forgetting of all grief.
This is the music
That transcends all coming and going

Early Christianity And The Wild One

 

I started a project yesterday that has been nagging at me for years that involves my encounter with early Christian texts and what I have found was an effort to change the teachings of Jesus in order to appeal to a specific group of believers.  While I’d love nothing more than to have a real cloak and dagger story for the sake of excitement, what we have as historical documents is scant.  But the fix was in even during the life of Jesus in terms of who would tell the story of this man’s teachings and what that story was going to look like.  
I know I am going against 1600 years of ingrained belief and programming, but it is a story that deserves to be told.  Jesus was deep into the forces of awakening and taught about them, but either those in power wanted to hide them away, or they simply could not understand what a certain strand of his teachings even meant.  Having said this, those who had these deeper teachings were hunted relentlessly in an effort to not allow these most important of his teachings to see the light of day.  Whether by design or by ignorance, this was the result.  And this, I now know, is a fact.

 

For me, the story begins when I was young and had trouble with the church and its teachings.  For me, my trouble wasn’t as vague as some people’s problems with the church often tend to be.  In my experience, I had this very strange and unexplainable sense that the church had hidden something of great importance from the public. It is this hidden element within Christianity that made all the difference in knowing God intimately, directly. The only problem was I didn’t know why I had this sense growing up.  But like so many people I knew who were church goers or grew up in a family who went to church, something just didn’t add up. 
The story gets interesting when I began looking at early Christian documents that had not been a part of the canon of the church. I did this after a friend  saw a piece of my writing and suggested I look at a certain book because, as he explained, what I had written bore similarities to this early book.  
I was at this time going through a six month period that was for me, the time that I was waking up.  For me, it was a gradual process with a number of steps.  Clearly, I knew something was up and that I was somehow being prepared for something.  What it was, I didn’t really have a clue.  
When I first read those passages in a book that stretched back into antiquity two thousand years, I felt a familiar stirring inside of me and wanted to know more.  It would take going through a full awakening, though, for me to be able to pick out the passages that were clearly talking about awakening.  Scholars, though, described these passages as “strange teachings” and this showed clearly to me that even they didn’t understand what Jesus was getting at.  How could it be, I wondered, that I could see these for what they were and no one else could?  
In writings by a follower of Jesus, a church developed in the second century called the Valentinian church or school. They explained that only those who had attained the light would be able to understand the teachings.  Otherwise, they would seem like strange incomprehensible teachings.  Could it be, I wondered?  How could someone without a deep background in scholarly study of the Bible like me identify what they were talking about was related directly to awakening?  
Because of how the church and our world has evolved, we tend to look to learned authorities for confirmation about what is true or not true.  But these authorities are part of a system of being and thought that is part of the problem, which is of course the same problem that the early church had to begin with when they suppressed the teachings to begin with.

 

At the center of this story is a Wild spirit that if known, brings about revelation, self knowing, secret knowledge, and healing.  This is the story that should have been told.Now that the beginning work has been done, the rest is going to be more scholarly work with research and historical accounts.  Dry stuff for me, but the story is so compelling and so interesting that I think that it will turn into an interesting read once I am done with it.  Finger crossed!
This is ultimately a work of devotion in the hopes that it can help bring a paradigm shift in thinking by placing something wonderful and wild back in a central role in an understanding of the forces of awakening that are  redemptive in nature.

The Marks Of My Awakening II

NOTE: This is part two of a two-part work that details the marks that have emerged on my body throughout my awakening process.  I am finally including this information here in the hopes that if anyone else encounters them that they can rest assured that they are not losing their minds and that all is well.  If you are finding this and would like to read the first installment please click HERE and a new tab will open and you can come back to this installment once you have completed the first part.

Continued from the previous…

---

 

When I awoke and saw this burn on my hip, I was at a complete loss as to how to explain any of this.  How had I managed to burn myself and never even notice?  If I had burned myself, I reasoned, whatever had burned me would have burned through my clothing. I would have noticed this kind of burn.  It would have been a circular or semi-circular object.  I would have clothing that was burned through near the hip.  As I searched memory, I had not been in the kitchen or near anything that was hot enough to create a burn like this.  It just wasn’t adding up the morning I got up and saw the mark plain as day as I sat on the side of the bed before my feet hit the floor.   I knew there was no way I could have gotten burned just lying in bed asleep.  No sharp objects, no chemicals had come into contact with my body in the last week. And a burn?  I would have noticed it.  I would have felt it.  I would feel it throbbing, begging me to put something on it to ease the pain. This was a complete mystery!

 

Over the course of the next couple of days I shot the same mark several different times in a variety of different light just to make sure that I had captured it.  Had I been branded? A friend later suggested that maybe I had been branded, but perhaps branded by spirit. Had I been taken out and abducted?  Why a burn?  And why didn’t it hurt?  Why didn’t it behave like a burn?  It simply faded over a period of about three days with no marks, no scaling of the skin, no itching, no scarring at all.  There was no evidence of bruising or abrasion either. It was a complete mystery…at least as the time.

 

Below, see a close-up of the mark.

 

The Second Mark

The next photo is of a mark that manifested in 2012 after I experienced a powerful heart clearing.  This was the third such clearing that I was aware of, which suggested to me that this was the third kosha, level, or dimensional aspect to be impacted through the clearing process that kundalini helped to facilitate.  In the case of the mark at my heart chakra, it took a number of days before this mark emerged. Prior to that, I felt a powerful magnetic effect of energy surrounding my heart center that I can only describe as a beaming energy that was moving outward from my heart center.  It is worth noting that I had two years prior to this had an experience with an angelic being who reached into my heart center in a kind of psychic surgery where he pulled out what felt like a part of my insides.  All of this was energetic in nature, but felt very physical at the time.  While he had his hand in my heart center, I was on fire with an unbelievable pulse of love that radiated throughout my entire being at a pitch that I could scarcely believe was even possible.  It was this experience that initiated a series of powerful heart openings that continued over the following three years that resulted in a number of releases of old ancestral, physical, karmic, and emotional material from my field of awareness.  Once the release came that resulted in the mark in my heart center, my heart felt more different than it ever had.  It felt as though I had a beaming light shining from the center of my heart.

This mark began as a single circle and over a period of months as my heart center grew or expanded, a second lighter circle developed on top of the first.  This had the effect of two hoops or circles making a figure “8” on my chest.  I did not take photos of this new or expanding of the mark on my body.

I noticed that when I looked at it in the mirror over that year that the circle took one a look as though it was a circle with many smaller flames encircling it.  It reminded me a lot of the image of Shiva dancing and being surrounded by a circle of flame.  In fact, this mark was different from the first in that it was more like a series of marks making up a circle.  It also has the effect of being like a string of red burn-like marks strung together, which the picture above illustrates.  Again, this mark did not come about as a result of a fungal infection like ringworm or psoriasis and has been a mark that at various times reemerges when I am moving strong heart energy. I can in fact feel its presence all the time, but it gets stronger at different times. Besides the burn mark shown earlier, I have never had these strange burn marks that I could not account for.   If anything, the marks are more like the result of my body being slightly irritated by the energy across the skin, perhaps more like how electricity might burn the body more than anything. Could this be a reaction to strong pranic energy flowing through the heart chakra?  It’s interesting to me that it is so small; this ring feels like it corresponds to the central channel, the shushumna as it transits through the heart chakra because my heart chakra takes up nearly my entire chest now.  There is an emergence of the most brilliant part of the heart center that starts at the center of my chest and radiates outward.  This ring corresponds to this most intense center of energy (and might be a slight overloading of energy that irritates my skin?).

Enter a caption

What I do find interesting is that in my inner work I discovered a characteristic of prana while working with a Kahuna healer one day.  When I am having her work on me, I feel very relaxed and secure and I often drop into a deep trance state in the hopes of facilitating the energy she is moving in my body.  As I looked down into my meridian system I noticed something I had never seen before, which was that each energy line was surrounded by a series of other lines, like a bundle of fiber optic cables surrounding a central sheath.  The mark on my chest is very similar to how the channel looked when viewed in cross-section (I am able to use the inner eye to get all kinds of views of my body ethereally, including what is essentially a cross section view). But I don’t know if this is connected to this discovery I made with my healer or not, and will be something that I will be bringing up with healers in my area to see if we can develop this further to see if these bundles can be further looked at to work out ways to work with them for moving energy and for healing work. So much to ponder and consider!   All of this, no larger than the size of a dime.  This is one reason why I think that this mark corresponds to the central channel and not the entire chakra because in both the Indian and the Chinese methodologies, the channels are described as quite small.  The Ida and Pengali (which are nadi, or channels, for prana) are said to be as thin as the hair of a boar, for example.  Each of the spots or flames are themselves closer to that size while the central core or inner circle is more in line with the shushumna channel size.  I bring this all up because this might possibly be a way to study the anatomy of the energy body (until a scientist or engineer gets curious enough to build a device that can detect and read prana in the body!). So given this size of these channels, does this circular mark correspond to the diameter of the center channel, the shushumna?

 

If you would like to learn about the nadi, which are many, and the larger system of energy that transmits prana throughout the body you can begin with a pretty good wiki article first.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadi_(yoga)

 

What I have noticed is that my chest continues to feel different.  It even seems to have had an effect on how my skin reacts to this energy.  Radiant, glowing almost, there is an abiding presence of all that I have worked to bring forward within myself.  The energy, though, seems to have a slight irritating effect, which is mild, but is ever-present.  Sometimes it can lead me to want to scratch or rub it, which can also make it sore very easily.  I have to remind myself not to touch it, but to be aware of it, to feel what this all represents and the change that it has brought into my life.

Marks Are Not A Given Nor A Necessity

I don’t think that you have to have ANY physical manifestations of awakening in your life to prove anything about your awakening experience.  In fact, the central phenomenon of awakening that is most important to my mind is the Presence that emerges and never goes away, which is itself, at least to me, a higher dimensional aspect of who and what we are potentially, and that this Presence can help to bring great change in our lives if we allow it to do its work.  This Presence can bring awareness if we can be humble and if we can be honest with ourselves.  Then, it burrows deeper into us, integrating and clearing as it goes.  Resist, and it too will cease its development, its movement ever-deeper.

I also consider the great likelihood that I may have been a mystic Christian in an earlier life and either knew of, or experienced, some aspect of stigmata before, and this may be part of why I am experiencing these marks as I have in this life. Or not.  I will give you a couple of examples of how past life experience can inform our experience in the here and now (hoping its not too far a jaunt off our beaten path of the marks of awakening).

Thirty years ago, in an effort to project consciousness out of my body, I was approached by a serpent with the face of a man where the face of the snake should have been. This serpent was coiled and was floating in the air.   This face looked decidedly Mayan.  In the projection, I was being told that I needed to project my consciousness into the form of the snake. I looked at it and thought how odd an image that was, because I knew about a Mayan God name Quetzalcoatl, but always imagined it to be a winged or feathered serpent, not a floating serpent with a man’s head.  I wondered why it was that I would experience this image, obviously connected to Quetzalcoatl, in the way I had.  There was a reason for it, I just didn’t know what it was, at least not right away.  Later in life, however, I would have a series of dreams that revealed to me that I had lived as a Mayan in the Yucatan Peninsula and probably had some experience with this same god.  In my studies in art school, I came across a nearly identical image of Quetzalcoatl I had not seen before in the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City that depicted him in just the same way I had seen him during my projection work.  I also read later about Quetzalcoatl and found out that the priests who worked with this being were said to be visited by this god and would be taken on spirit journeys. Curious, that, I thought.  It was exactly what I was being told to do when I was younger, yet I knew nothing about Quetzalcoatl.  Not at least in this lifetime (and not until I took a course in college later simply because my curiosity had been piqued). And in still another interesting turn, that lifetime spent in the jungles of Palenque would bear upon many things that would take place in a life in the future which is the life I am living now with the whole “end” of the Mayan calendar-round in 2012.  Life is not without its interesting coincidences, and seems to be woven into a dynamic fabric where one life informs another in useful and coherent ways.

In an odd twist, I also found out a year after my experience with the seraphim that visited me while reading up on Christian mystics that there was an account written about a seraph who visited one Christian mystic which was strikingly similar to my own experience.  The mystic was St Theresa of Avilla. Theresa wrote about her experiences, and the account was similar, right down to the side that the angels would come to her and how the seraphim had pulled her insides out of her while she was “on fire with a great love of God.” While Theresa offers no insight into why the angel did this to her, I suspect that this was nothing short of a kind of “operation” performed in the etheric with the matter of the meridians, prana, or chi as the substances or systems that were being worked on.  All of this sounds crazy of course, unless you have seen and felt these systems for yourself.

Ecstacy of Saint Theresa by Bernini, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

What I am saying is that I think that we may have a predilection toward certain experiences over others depending on our own turn of mind, reincarnation background, beliefs, and our constitution.  Some of us may need this “surgery” while others may not.  Some of us may “remember” the lost or ancient gods and goddesses as they seem to make a return to us in this age.  If I could count the number of people who I know who have had some significant experience with Isis, I would have a large room full of people who all know an important aspect of this woman who once walked the earth, who taught, and who was revered above mere saint and reached goddess status.  Lying deeper within us are these memories.  We are often just too busy or unaware that they exist.  Awakening can be enough to shake them loose in us and bring us face to face with these forces in the healing and resurrection that is this experience.

For some time, I have resisted putting these images up because I suspected that there would naturally be those who would be skeptical.  However, I know I am not the only one, and I place these images not for the skeptics, but for those who may have had unusual or baffling physiological changes taking place within them that might seem alarming or strange to them. While all of this takes place in the context of a grand sort of unraveling and rebirth and a coming to know one’s self in a new or expanded way, we also remain physical creatures with our own frailties sometimes.  Everything is as it should be.  And things will continue to change along a path that is certain and for your own betterment.  Believe in yourself, your own inner voice, and the authority placed there by the divine!  The universe, while neutral, is set up to allow you to succeed if you just know how to be authentically in the world. Others might not understand it, or might not even get it.  And this is, in its own way, part of how things are.

Finally, and lastly, I would add that for some time I considered that this phenomenon might not be unlike some of the burn marks that are common amongst those who have experienced abduction phenomenon.  I hesitate to put it too front and center in all of this because of how loaded all of this is. Having a few things in my own past experience that have made me wonder about the nature of my et experiences in my earlier life, I often consider the very possibility that some of the et encounters are themselves not entirely physical and belong to a range of experiences not unlike those experienced in awakening.  That is, that they may be a form of out of body experience, or inner “synthetic” reality which the ancients knew and wrote about at some length. Now I know that for some people, these are traumatic experiences and it can be hard to hear someone suggest blithely and perhaps unknowingly that they might not somehow be entirely physically real in the normal sense.  But I ask you; what is real?  Do you actually know what is real?  It is curious to me that the early Christians (Jesus in his “secret” teachings to his disciples) knew about these beings and described them as a spiritual agency that behaved more like spiritual parasites than god-like beings (although they behave in both cases as if they are on this kind of level). While mainline Christianity barely mentions them, the newly discovered documents in the Nag Hammadi do, and it is there, in the Hypostasis of the Archons that so much can be discovered about them and how similar they are to our modern et experience in certain strands of the phenomenon.  What books like this describe is a phenomenon with beings that fit the modern et abduction scenario perfectly, and are too similar one to the other to dismiss out of hand.  I suspect that in these cases, we may have a presence that is psychic or spiritual in nature that could be so present and powerful enough to create effects in us in just the same way that hypnotists have been able to cause burn marks to emerge on their subject’s bodies.  It is also likely or possible that what we have seen is a kind of transiting between dimensions so that physical dna can be taken, while in other cases, their presence is more of an internal nature.  What is sure is that these beings behave more like shape-shifters than anything we normally know in our world.

I know that such a mention might seem far afield to you, but I suspect that all of these things may cross at a place where body and mind might have a lot to tell us about ourselves and the capacity for us to release or express hidden or submerged memory, emotion, or knowledge when a thought or feeling contains sufficient force to manifest in these ways.  And it is here that burn marks emerge along with a few minor other types of markings as well.  We may yet be only on the edge of understanding the full breadth of what all of this means or is about.

So the marks of my awakening are my own.  Others have experienced them, and still others may experience them in the days, months, and years to come.  I simply want you to know that all is well, it’s just your body expressing a truth or a knowing or awareness that it needs to get out for your conscious mind to see.  In the case of my first burn mark, this took place just prior to the full rise of kundalini.  However, I will remind my readers that my awakening was gentle and gradual (taken in phases or steps).  I had a six-month period where the full power of awakening was released in distinct stages through my own inner practice and hearing a voice inside of me that guided me.  I was brave enough to not think I was going crazy and I listened to that “voice” or inner prompting.  As a result, it led to what I think was a much gentler form of awakening that could help others to awaken more peacefully and with less worry or fear.  And still, even then, it was quite a wild ride because….well….kundalini.

Finally, in sum, I would like to add one small point that might be why the first mark emerged as it did.  Ten years after that mark emerged on my right hip, at a time when I had removed layer after layer of piled on junk from my consciousness, I found myself at a place where I felt like I had reached nearly the end of the material I had worked so diligently to remove after this decade of inner work.  As this vista came into view, I have noted that it is in this same location in my body that the single most difficult block has remained. I have learned a lot about what this represents in the esoteric systems that describe it.  This is the point, an acupuncturist once observed, that resided along a meridian line that was tied to the gall bladder.  Being solar in character, it could create specific digestive problems aligned with this hot or solar energy (which I have had throughout awakening related to bouts of nausea and even diarrhea in the first six months of the awakening process).  Here in the hip, so close to the root chakra, along the yang energy line, we have masculine energy stuck in a realm having to do with nurture and a sense of safety, and personal abundance.  Here, too, is very likely the emotion of both fear as well as anger, stopped up in a block, held in tension without a place yet for the psyche to know how to let it go, and which can be felt as an almost physical sensation which no physical doctor would be able to ever detect unless the block were to manifest as a physical condition such as illness.  So in the last few weeks I have received guidance on the inside that has told me what next I need to do to neutralize this last block.  This is ultimately bringing in the feminine yin to balance the masculine and neutralize the block and to heal this last rift which has been so stubborn.  I suspect that blocks can be this way; the easiest and least activated are likely to go first while the more dug in and most activated ones remain until the end.  But by the time that day comes and one block remains in a field that has been cleansed, having even the stubbornest of blocks does not feel like an impossible feat to remove.  I know that when I can bring up all the right feelings that I need to both acknowledge and move through, this block, like the hundreds before it, will also go into the ether as it is transmuted back into a clear and brilliant body that has been my life work here these past number of years.  And maybe the crescent holds some symbolic meaning for me. It might have been the image of the seers of old, or emblazoned on the heads of priestesses and priests in Atlantis, Egypt, or pre-Christian Europe. Perhaps once this cycle is complete, I might just find out.  Until then, it’s for me a sign of the times playing out on the intelligence of my body.

Until next time…

 

 

©Parker Stafford, all rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied or republished without consent of the author.

The Marks Of My Awakening I

 

Over the course of my awakening my body has had a habit of expressing itself as kundalini has unfolded.  I have up until this point not posted the pictures from these curious effects, although I wrote about them a few years ago. Since then, my reservations about publicly documenting this phenomen have subsided significantly. Instead of keeping them to myself, I am making them available not as novelty, but to aid both in a broader understanding of the phenomenon, as well as to assist those who may have been similarly affected. It might also serve to calm concerns about other symptoms of awakening, too, which is a very regular occurance since search terms are a part of the stats that I see here on WTI. I put this here for broadening awareness and understanding.

In my reading about the symptoms of awakening, having physical manifestations of awakening appear to be uncommon.  They are not unheard of, though.  U.G. Krishnamurti (that Krishnamurti…there were two of them sharing a similar experience but both were very different from each other), for example, described how during a certain phase of the awakening of kundalini  he had a series of physical effects that were witnessed by others.  There were swellings of the skin, his neck flared out in a hood-like effect people described as like a cobra.  In one case, he developed a breast on his yin and Shakti side of his body (left). (1)

A Shared Experience

On my other blog, Divine Alignment, which is on the blogspot platform, I wrote about my experience a few years ago and someone wrote to comment that she had had a similar experience that involved the same shaped mark as my own, which was a crescent shaped burn that appeared out of nowhere and then quickly faded once it was noticed.  What is interesting here to me is that her mark was close to her heart, she described it as being on her right shoulder.  When I think about the energetic polarities of the masculine and feminine, the root in the male is polarized positively (transmittive) while the male heart is negatively charged (receptive).  The energetic circuit for the woman is exactly the opposite.  I have often wondered if what she and I experienced was part of the same spectrum of experience, but that hers would naturally manifest at a transmittive center along the torso like mine, except in reverse.  In the case of the person who had searched the web and had found my post, she explained that she had been practicing a projection technique in order to have an OOBE.  While her experience was not couched in a kundalini experience, OOBE’s are themselves part of a range of human experience that can put a person in touch with divine energetics and the energy of consciousness.  Both of us appeared to be in the early stages of a spiritual process.

The first mark, which came just prior to the full rise of kundalini, appeared after I awoke one morning in the early Spring of 2007.  What was so curious about the burn mark was its position and the fact that I had not had any contact with anything hot that could have caused the burn.  This mark lasted for about three days and faded away.  It left no scar, and at no point did it ever hurt or behave as a normal burn would.  I realized that if I had gotten a burn like the mark on my skin, I would have been in pain for a few days and the scar would have scabbed over after several more days.  It simply made no sense, all things being equal.

I have thought about this phenomenon and what I am most certain of is that whenever there is strong psychological material that is rising to the surface of feeling or thought, the body can manifest a whole range of effects.  I was put in mind of what Christian saints would experience in ecstatic experiences which most often would happen while in a trance state while experiencing visions of Jesus or Mary, for example.  This phenomenon is known as stigmata.  While many stories about stigmata strike some as self-inflicted, there have been some cases of stigmata where witnesses saw the marks manifest before them.  As strange as all of this may seem, I think that it is not so unusual given the ability of the body to manifest thought very well.  Take for example how subjects placed in a deep hypnotic trance will, when told they are being touched by a red hot poker, will produce welts and blisters moments after they are touched lightly with a pencil and believe that the pencil is in fact just what they are being told it is.

The Marks

I have decided to make these images available in the event that anyone else out there has found themselves similarly affected.  And for those who have not gone through this, it can serve to illustrate the broad range of what can happen in awakening.  The following photo is of the burn mark on my right leg near my hip. There were several photos taken of this burn over a period of a few days.  It is worth pointing out that the burn had a center that was brighter than its surrounding, if you will notice, there is a lighter band surrounding a redder center.  When I get burned normally, the object tends to leave a fairly uniform burn of the skin across its surface. This burn is almost more in line with a radiant burn rather than contact with an object directly on the skin.  A closeup of the same burn follows.

Because of the length of this post, the remainder of the work is found here along with the rest of the photos of one of the other marks that developed later.  Read the rest of the story HERE.

(1) Krishnamurti U.G. Arms, Rodney, ed. The Mystique of Enlightenment.  Goa, India, Dinesh Vaghela Cemetile Corp. ©1982.

Life and Death

​When I die, I shall soar with angels, and when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.
-Rumi