I have been increasingly busy lately with a relaunch of my business, a “redux” that takes into consideration the tools we now have for doing business remotely. The internet represents a giant shift in how we communicate, connect, do business, and live our lives. Not good or bad (not yet anyhow), and those who can learn to harness it will find their way down this new path.
These last two years have been marked with my designing entirely new work in my creative medium, hot glass. The old wasn’t tossed, just added to. In the process I shared the new work on Facebook, and watched as my base grew. This period represented some of the most productive periods in my life creatively since founding my studio in September of 1997. Literally scores upon scores of new works were brought forward. There is still more to bring forward. Goodness sakes.
While Awakening appeared to tear me down, it also released a lot that was not necessary. So much change, some extremely rapid, some slower. But what made it impossible for me to create in my medium at one stage became the very thing that vaulted me forward. I am left praying that the universe offers up all the right people in divine timing for the next chapter of growth upcoming, because I will need just the right kind of people who can be a part of the studio to help it move forward.
For a time I considered that the intelligence within this energy had no care as to my welfare, but I found that I was wrong. It just wants me clear and aligned, the rest are details. Turns out I may have been sabotaging myself without fully realizing it.
As a result of all this work, which has transformed my studio practice, I have been running to keep up with the pace. I just haven’t had time to write much unfortunately, so you haven’t heard much from me.
In the last few months, a very interesting thing happened. I was about to cancel my subscription to Gaia after subscribing to this online channel for a few years. As a result, I was trying out videos I might not have tried otherwise. One was called Soul Power with Carolyn Myss.
In it she described a series of archetypes in personalities. All are universal and regardless of culture, and each responds in exactly the same way for everyone when working through the shadow side of them to begin embodying them in a positive polarity. She began describing one archetype that I knew made up a part of my own inner landscape. When she made the prescription for how to release the shadow aspect, I found myself very quickly reaching into her words and being able to put her words into an inner action in a radical act of forgiveness for what my ex-wife had done to me and my children during our divorce a few years after awakening had come. It was like the flip of a switch on a large part of this issue. I will also explain that none of the bad things would have happened to me had I simply made better choices in a spouse. To do that, I would have either been healed already, ir not reacting to the elements that subconsciously triggered me. I will also state here that I certainly had warning signs from my subconscious through dreams and quite bizarre signs (one just before stepping out to get married), so there is that.
I found also that a relationship I had after my divorce which ended up involving someone who acted in spookily similar ways towards me as my ex resulted in a release of that person from a small but persistent hook in my karmic life. I could actually feel the hook release. I could then feel my energy reach a calmer state, with a feeling of more balance and solidity which followed. My energy later began peaking back into those highs of rarefied pranic-induced states. But calm now, no longer turbulent.
The voice spoke:
When you accepted or believed in your own limitations, you naturally attracted others with complimentary limitations which then served as a foil to your own self-imposed limitations dictated by those beliefs. When you let those limiting beliefs go, you gave up the hook along with the sinker that weighed you down. Naturally, forgiveness was the fulcrum that shifted this within you.
I could feel my own essential energy flood back with the admonition to not look back. “Flee the burning building, just leave. The whole world is a burning world, with everyone trying to keep their beliefs carefully in place as they cannot see the flames all around them. Their immolation will be their own lesson, just as it was once your own. Just go…” And I did just that. A feeling of relief followed. I had this feeling that with that weight gone that I was now more than ever myself, free from entanglements, freer than I had been before, at least. That voice said sonething about how I had handed my own energetic essence to those peole for misuse. I misused it myself, too. I came away with the distinct sense that they will now be missing something they thought was theirs. A sucking sound, a rebalancing happens, and a new more real path will open to them without my energy to feed on. I’m not sure if that is how it will really play out because I also want to remain optimistic for the best outcome for everyone.
It reminded me of an experience I had after getting out of college. I had gone through a relationship with someone who experienced a deep trauma partway through our relationship while she was away during the summer on a trip to Europe.
This trauma put a heavy burden on our relationship. It made me feel as though I was living with a stanger in many ways because of the effects this event had on her. We wound up going our different ways after school, and about six months later, I had a dream in which I dreamed that something, a cord perhaps, broke free from her. I found myself strapped into the cockpit of the space shuttle as it shot up into space after this cord broke free. It was a sense as though I had been lending my energy out to her. Had I? Had I called this onto myself? Was it just me lending my energy out in order to remain attached? Or was this something that happened because of both of us?
The feeling I had then helped to illustrate how our energy can become enmeshed in others and remain that way, acting as a drag on our systems all the while. I’m in a very different place than I was then, so the experiences were different and yet they also shared clear similarities with one another.
Many things got easier in the wake of this most recent release. Still other issues rose to the surface to be looked at, but this is a great improvement. The path of clearing continues and with each one I can see more clearly and less through a glass painted with belief.
It’s interesting how quickly things change, though. Behavior changes, habits change. Some remain, but they aren’t the ones that are causing grief or upset. It will all get done. And each time, a clearer channel of perception, a better ability to see things as they are. I remain humble and watchful for that which remains.
Part of this issue I released appears to have been related to abundance. Gearing up for a studio event, there seemed to be one hurdle and challenge after another. It made me second guess myself. Was this the universe or my higher self telling me I needed to get on with my healing work for others, to write that book that has been nagging at me? No, it wasn’t a message, it was my own energy getting in the way all along. The release came, and despite all of the technical glitches with the roll-out of a complicated new site, people began piling on shooting my profile upwards almost all on their own. No, it was working. Instead of losing customers over glitches, I began gaining them. People called in to have orders shipped who could not attend in person, or who couldn’t order online because of some odd glitch in the site that remains to be figured out.The tables were turning.
The event resulted in my nearly selling out of work. And here I was fretting over having made too much. I could have made twice as much. Leason learned. Sometimes we really do need to suspend belief if we are to see things as they are. I had it all wrong. I had to get out of my own way.
While incredibly busy, I find my thoughts are more systematic. I feel less scattered and I am able to plough through what needs doing more easily. I can’t say things are completely healed, but it is an improvement. There is less second guessing, although the volume of the emotional work was itself a remaining tail of the old way from around the time this healing took place, which was also near the time that this studio event was planned. What’s more: I feel blessed with this time and these creative gifts that I get to share with my community to help others realize their own capacity for being inspired, be it learning glassblowing in classes or buying something from the gallery as a treasured gift.
People sent me photos of their piece sitting on their dining room tables or the one lady who showed me her glass collection just to drive home how she really was an enthusiast when it came to glass. That was better than any sale I could have ever made. It was like their inner child felt brave enough to peek out to show itself. The heart glows in moments like those.
Our nature is essentially creative. All around us we see its positive and negative effects (because even waging war is itself a creative activity at its root-as much as it pains me to say). It oozes out of everything we do, and yet so many of us throttle it back. When released, we glow.
People say that kundalini is sexual energy. What they miss is at its root, prana is wildly creative. It does not have the limits placed on it as those we impose on ourselves. We do not realize how limited we are, all the result of our having shut down our inner creative flow. So if prana is focused through our sex, it feels sexual, but it also flows through all other channels and corners of our being, and that is what I want to point out to you here. Its only because of how shut down sexually that we are that the enegy feels like its coming to get us in a sexual way. If you remain open and stop clutching at it, that intense sexual awareness softens and changes character. It becomes buoyant, less troubled, less clutching, and gripping. You realize this can be used for anything and you are only experiencing the tip of the tiger of prana. Instead of grabbing, open your arms. Open your heart, open your mind, and open your body together all at once. I will bet where the energy feels intense is where healing remains.
I mention kundalini as creative because it is that nature that has the power to heal, to show us a new way. A new life awaits and most likely it is achieved gradually as each stuck emotion and its history is felt fully and then released from the deeper parts of ourselves. Call it shadow work, call it whatever you like. It can bring change.
I don’t know what tomorrow looks like and I recall I have over a hundred draft posts I could publish, one a week for almost the next two years if I needed to. I know that if things keep getting better, I will be able to use the relative calm of January and February to sit down and thrash out this book on early Christianity. Maybe if I can get every piece of research sorted out it might be easier than I fret over its being.
I have learned a lot about the early church and how different Christianity really was from what it is today. A secret lies at its core, though, and its time that this secret is released. I feel like I am faced with completing these things, that it is time to just get on with it. This book, that voice says, is one big life purpose. That is daunting, so I hesitate. It tells me the way forward is how I always move forward: ignore what I think others might think and do it how I feel in my heart it needs to be done. In a way, the book isn’t for anyone except me, one of my final testimonies of my journey through countless incarnations. If I make it into some stage production, I freeze up. If I write it like I am writing it to myself, everything about it changes. It seems to just flow.
I hope you will read the newest interviews, all in the menu’s at the top of the page. I think they help to show how awakening is experienced through our glorious (not illusory) individuality. I am so glad the people who took part did so. We are not all identical Buddha’s. We each are experiencing this phenomenon through the inviolate validity of our own souls in motion and in time.
Finally, I leave you with this inspiring video that puts a fine enough point on all of this. Namasté.
We’ve probably all been there. The same old piece of advice, the same old home truth, presented in slightly different packaging, but essentially the same old stuff. “Yeah, yeah” you say wearily. “I know all that…… er, shall we have a cup of tea?” (in Britain having a cup of tea remains the next step in many situations).
You’ve come across this truth, this advice, forty nine times, and it’s been like water off a duck’s back. Then you read it for the fiftieth time, and something unexpected happens. Your entire world begins to crumble.
Such was my experience on revisiting this piece a little while ago. “Flee the burning building. Just leave.” Thus spake your essential energy, and for the first time, really, these words properly spoke to me. You see, my head has long known the necessity of fleeing; but my heart and my body have demurred. I have kept a few toes dangling in that burning place; as if there are voices within me telling me that the burning building is where the action is, it is reality. Leaving the inferno completely means leaving behind reality. While in truth the converse is true.
So this is my work just now: learning to put on those running shoes and going, as if my life depends on it (and it does….).
I suppose the other little message from this is not to be reluctant to communicate something which has been told before, maybe many times before. It could just be the right time and the right place for someone.
I trust any comment from you to arouse a world of consideration, and so it is with your latest, Ian.
It has been hard for me. I can’t assume a heroic stance on any of this. I am dragged ignobly by some sense of fatigue, not righteousness. While it is in me, this impulse to change, it can seem a little schizophrenic. Some part of us does not want to let go. Im not sure its bad. I think, though, the nature of this place has been like school. Eventually we decide that we have graduated. Sometimes, he hold on because there is no clear-cut graduation that cements awareness that its time to move on.
I don’t know what to do about those whom I love who live in cognitive and belief-bound prisons that keep them in that burning world. They all believe that they hate me because I am no longer playing the game.
The voice laughs and says if I doubt the power of the human spirit to save itself. No, I don’t…but I don’t trust what my awakening did will be what wait for the others. The message seems to be when you trust that their spirit will find it, it is a strengthening influence of the subtle kind. I have work to do in that regard. It is only a bit of generosity on my behalf.
I suppose there is little else to do but to be present, but exit the part of ourselves and the world that is burning. It is my prayer.
Sometimes the answer IS tea. Thank you for your thoughtful words.