Release Work

Every awakening comes with your own past. Awakening is a substantive effort on the forgotten part of your being to overcome that past.

This is very much tied to our neurophysiology. Without going into an egg-headed discourse into all of it I can simply say that through these two brains we all have, we begin using them in a new way. This can be mediated by the power of awakening. Everything is swept up in this: mind, brain, body, emotion, and soul.

You don’t have to know anything about awakening in order to reach it….but some knowledge can be helpful to identify why some things are happening as they are. Sometimes root causes are seen in a new light as it relates to our neurophysiology. Sadly, little research is being done in the field as it relates to liberation or “enlightenment” from a neurophysiological perspective. You can see I don’t much like that word, but I use it because it points in a direction.

I have said before that if you do not have a teacher or guru, you can be put in a position where you have to rely on yourself. By doing this, you dig deep for the resources that are there. I found that I could speak to the energy and it would respond. At one point in my awakening experience I had the energy say to me that I needed to go to the liquor store and buy something strong and drink only enough to get tipsy. Now what I can tell you is that NO teacher anywhere would have told me to do this and NO teacher has probably EVER prescribed drinking as a way of doing a release, and yet this is just what the “voice” said for me to do. I am not a drinker, so this was new to me.

The next day I did as I was told and got tipsy as prescribed. The next morning upon waking, I stood up out of bed and had something fall away, right off the bat (this was out of the LV meridian line near the hip). I had no idea what it was that released, but it did, just like that. There was this spreading flow and awareness of a calmer more still energy taking its place. This is the advantage of listening to the inner voice and teacher within, and I insist that you will begin hearing it when you are open to it and when you turn inwardly enough asking yourself the question and waiting for a reply (which could come in a variety of ways depending on your turn of mind or constitution).

NO, I am not suggesting that you try and drink your blocks away. It only worked that one time and the intelligence in the energy knew exactly what it was doing when it told me to do that. My describing this incident is to show that we have a superintelligence within us, but you must learn to rely on it in order for it to work (and you risk being taken in by someone’s perhaps ill-conceived notions for how to go about doing things if you buy into another authority who may or may not have as good discernment or observatory skills as you do).

Yes, I am suggesting that IF you rely on yourself, you can do things that no teacher would ever think of suggesting. You of course have to decide if you are game for it and if it asks you to hurl yourself off a mountain, I would say that you should rethink doing that!

That said, though, having other perspectives can be helpful in the case where someone has gone through something similar as you have, or someone who has a similar turn of mind as you and had to navigate certain self-imposed hurdles before you. For as woo-woo as it seems, when the need is there to know something that your own mind will resist unless it is presented to you by someone else who you see as an “authority” then that person will invariably arrive in perfect timing. Those are the gifts of the universe. They can happen as often as is needed and the way to this is not by way of some rational process. It is not accidental, but it always appears to be that way. It feels like it cannot be controlled or milked by the rational mind. That is true. Your hand must be open to this universe because it (the universe) has a habit of stepping in if you provide the means for it to do so. The fewer conditions you place on it, the more the possibilities grow.

Ask what is in your highest. Be humble in this and you will get just what you need for that time. But this wont necessarily be monolithic in nature but perhaps only for that one moment in order to get you over an important hurdle.

Random people can unwittingly play the role necessary for you at the time. It could be someone standing in a coffee shop, or an old friend who offers something up in conversation that you have never mentioned before but bears on an important issue you are dealing with at the time. While we see these as coincidences, they gain greater significance when they are located in close proximity in time to the thought (not action) that originated in your mind such as, “I need to figure out a new way of breaking through into bliss when the energy is making me feel agitated…” only to step into a shop where someone has a book that is entitled, “Breakthrough To Bliss” and you were just thinking about this need two minutes prior to seeing the book, for instance.

What seems to happen is there is a need on your part but NO expectation of an outcome. Your need APPEARS to be working with the universe in helping to create this magnificent, purely coincidental, event that helps to answer an important question that probably couldn’t be answered any other way at that time.

Now the real mind-bender to consider in an example such as this is by following cause and effect. In a case like this, time travel must surely be involved OR you are reaching out subconsciously feeling that there is the book ahead of you, which triggers your asking the question about bliss. If time travel is involved, in which your thoughts reach out to the nearest possible target that prompts the person to later consider taking that very book with them where you will then see the book, then it is equally mind-bending.

Whatever the case may be, something impossible is happening according to materialistic science. It feels like magic, a synchronicity, but it helps I think to reveal how consciousness and matter are innextricably bound or connected.

I know I digress, but it helps to make the point that the universe can conspire to assist you in a myriad of ways if you let go of the mindset that you need to be in control. I have found the more I have left it up to the universe, the more this phenomenon happens. It also appears to me to be consistent with the shift into the right brain, which is very different in its focus and approach, which is to be receptive, to allow, instead of the narrowly focused left brain (and its form of ego) that is trying to control everything and insisting on precise outcomes. It seems that the left actually breaks the “waveform” of phenomenon that allows for these events to happen in the first place. I say this after years of observation, and it appears after hundreds of such events like this, that there is a connection. I could be wrong, and if I am, I would like to know others’ observations and ideas.

The rational mind has little involvement in this process. The left brain is the catalog of past experience. Drawing from it is mechanical and limited, and if your present situation mirrors precisely some prior experience, you are in luck. More often than not, the present moment will offer up something entirely new that might look like something from the past but will bear an important new lesson that simply cannot be understood using that catalog of prior experience. In truth, it is this past experience that clouds our judgment often, biases us, and sends us off in wrong directions.

The left brain is only a tightly focused servant because the power of seeing the NOW belongs to the right brain. Unlike the left, the right does not focus on particulars and instead sees everything in context, as wholes, as relationships, and helps us to get through the big thorny issues by helping to place what we think is important into a better more accurate perspective. We think of this part of the brain as the feminine side of ourselves, but neither brain has a true gender since both men and women have them. That doesn’t stop cultures all across the Earth from gendering these two modes of awareness, though. I did the same in the beginning when I was trying to get a grip on what kundalini was doing.

It is easy not to take the right brain seriously because of our history of the “default mode” of most human consciousness which has shown a habit of being locked in a kind of cognitive prison for so long, which is to say that the race as a whole has been left brain dominant for a very long time. I know how this might sound, but having been an artist my whole life I considered of all people I was more right brained than anyone else I knew except maybe for other creatives like me. But once awakening came, I saw that I was nowhere near as right brained as I could be. I had also lived with this inherited left brain dominance growing up which is the default mode for most people here. Language is developed in most people in the left brain. So are process-based tasks. Any discipline that has certain steps in a certain order are most certainly being mediated and kept the by the left brain.

This isn’t to say that the right brain has no say, but recent research has shown that the left brain acts as a brake against the right. We constantly “shush” our right brains and thus become largely unfamiliar with its power and capabilities.

Waking up involves a shift in how the brain is being used, and I think that I have found evidence for how the body is involved in the process. It has to do with the significant number of neurons that reside in the gut, the heart, liver, and kidneys (in descending order of concentration). It is an observed quality of awakening to feel stored emotion to come out of the body. I think the simple answer is that the brain may in fact relegate difficult and unprocessed emotion to the body to hold onto so it doesn’t overwhelm the brain itself. Consider it a kind of annex, or maybe a graveyard full of triggers. The work of many awakenings is in clearing out that “inventory.” The power of kundalini naturally gets to work clearing out the mess to the degree that the person doesn’t resist those efforts. I have seen people who have awakened who went at all of this in their usual “mental” fashion (left brain controlling the show, using the rational mind as if this was ever a way of resolving an existential crisis) and it never works well. Using the old default mode also only appears to forestall progress.

Opening up to The Mystery and being humble before the force of this energy in your body and consciousness can have tremendous benefits. This is for the simple reason that you are no longer using reason in the way you have used it before. Be comfortable with not knowing, and learn to trust that this force has a handle on even the hardest knots in the pit of your soul. The answer isn’t in wrestling with it but in offering it up, loosening your grip on whatever it is. Being willing to see that old stored emotion once more for the final time can be of some use in this work, but always without grasping for it, or trying to hold onto it because you have grown comfortable with that little prison box that this emotion represented to you for so long. This approach also helps to engage your intuitive capabilities. I can tell you that the harder the issue, the more important it is to acknowledge it without getting macabre in your curiosity for knowing exactly where it came from. Was it when I was two and was traumatized by a stranger? Was it from that time I nearly drowned in the river? Who cares. Be a passerby. Don’t rubberneck as it goes on by. Don’t try and grab it back.

The yogi and yogini prepared for awakening, for kundalini, by practicing yoga. The benefit that it offered was a way to help clear the body of these “knots” or samscara’s (soul scars) prior to kundalini rising. Further, with this release work being done for decades sometimes, it meant that when kundalini did rise, it did so in a more peaceful way. I remember reading in a book about kundalini that the force of prana is itself smooth like a still lake. But why is kundalini so intense?

For most today, kundalini has been happening to people with little to no practice and certainly with no clearing work being done, or awareness of the benefits of clearing work. Many Westerners simply come to the phenomenon with great intensity because kundalini amplifies consciousness and there is a backlog of very intense things inside of them. If you have stored emotion there, then those emotions will be amplified and it will make it seems as though kundalini is this incredibly intense thing. I had my doubts when I read that about kundalini. Calm like a lake? Really??

As I worked through the backlog of stored emotion (and I certainly made an industry of it in my life, a daily awareness of what the energy was now amplifying and showing me was there), over years of work I found that yes, things were calming down (release by release). I even worried that the energy might not be as potent as before and might not work as well in clearing out the junk that remained. It took me a while to get over the idea that prana was some intense fiery thing. It is in the beginning, but to the degree that a person has that backlog of junk. I also suspect that people who have these calm awakenings that they have done a lot of work in their past, even before this lifetime.

There is a risk that Westerners who have a backlog of stored emotion to think that kundalini is this wildly intense thing when in fact it is the energy shining through and animating all of the stored emotion that needs attention. And yet, for Westerners, how else are they going to clear this material except with kundalini there motivating them and making them more aware?

If I walked up to the average person and told them that they were a storehouse of repressed emotion, they would either get upset, defensive, or think I was some kind of crazy. Maybe all three. But this condition is where we are with regards to humans right now. Just look at how much raw emotion there is in people today. Everyone almost to a person will want to say that it is because of something outside of themselves that is causing it to happen. We know that this is just not so, however. Buddha (Gautama) once said, in essence, no one MAKES you feel anything that you yourself have not chosen to feel already. The answer is found within. Untangle that trigger and you will find peace. It will be gone if you do it right, and it will represent a void within that can now be filled with Presence, awareness, and peace.

Progress to this goal can be upended when the person yearns for the intensity of kundalini and how it makes them feel. Work can cease or slow down because the self is afraid of losing that quality. But what will you lose? You will lose your inner chaos, the fear, uncertainty, and deep yearning for something that you are not yet anchored in. You will yearn to find the matching chaos (intensity of experience) in others, in experiences, and material things. You will look for it in all of the places except where it matters most, which is in your own consciousness. We do this because we have a half-blind sense that there is something that we hate or dislike about ourselves, but what it is we just aren’t completely sure. The risk is in losing all of this and finding peace.

Some people are so inured to this inner loathing or emotional dis-ease and chaos that they cleave to an energy that is still burning intensely because of the remaining junk it is shining through. The self gets used to this and craves that intensity while not realizing just how incredible being clear within can lead to yet another new doorway opening within consciousness to what we might call the Super Self. Before clearing is done, we dip into this world (of the Super self) but are only tourists in that land. We come back “here” to our squalid little prison of mind in order to feel some semblance of normal. But it isn’t normal. It is only normalized. Habit.

I have watched as teachers in the field of Western Awakening have “grabbed back” their old traumas in order to fold them back into their experience and teaching in order to keep that ratty old blanket near them.

They do an amazing job rationalizing how their grabbing back is actually high-minded and part of the new paradigm. I keep seeing this with one awakening influencer whose way of weaving her own dysfunction or neurosis back into what appears as an enlightened piece of thinking is quite brilliant.

It’s done in a way that makes a sort of sense if you share the same blind spots as she does. It’s well crafted. It also acts as a sand bar in the healing process because her work depends on another person who is broken who defeats the partbers’ efforts at trying to escape the old patterns. The reason you can’t escape the fallen world, or have hitches in that process is because of another person who is holding you back because that person is operating from the wrong density of consciousness! It makes a kind of sense IF you fall for the idea that you are somehow powerless in some way, which is the wound that binds and blinds the people who are drawn to this kind of work.

What they don’t see is that they alone are responsible for where they are and are not dependent on another person. When divine union relues on another to get to a certain place, it is no longer divine union. That’s because it isn’t based on prior notions we have created but depends on a much simpler requirement which is simply BEING THERE. My being there is up to me, up to how I navigate through my consciousness to arrive in the state of innermost union. It is very simple. Another person can be inspired by my state, and can even be entrained by my own consciousness in order to “get” where I am, but it is always an inside job.

I bring this up because I have even done something similar in the past myself. It always sought to justify why I was still hanging on to some hard harsh emotion often centered around my being wronged or hurt by someone. It always created a blindspot in my awareness and kept me from seeing the whole picture. There is no substitute for doing the work.

For me, I would have never known how to divest myself of old stored trauma’s and little glitches hither and yon were it not for awakening. That said, yogi’s have been preparing as part of their preparations for a long time, and you don’t need awakening to do it. You can start today. Luckily, there is a branch of therapy now that is called somatics which recognizes that the body has a role to play in storing memories. As I have mentioned earlier, I think there is a physiological basis for this with the rich accumulation of neurons throughout the body.

It may be that the body becomes the annex or graveyard for the unresolved issues that the brain would prefer not to be burdened with. It may have a basis in our survival as a species.

The good thing is that there are so many forms of somatic work from yoga, chi gung (or gong), ecstatic dance, acupuncture, reiki, Trauma Release Exercise (TRE), cranio sacral therapy and massage that focuses on the meridians and facia as a way of releasing stored energy in the body. There are also variant that practitioners have developed that use clusters of these somatic therapies and even ones that may represent new modalities that also work.

I had several therapy sessions with a Kahuna healer that worked miracles for me, and I have had a massage therapist who understood stored emotion who did some digging into areas where I was having discomfort to help release them. In the field of substances, ayahuasca has gained significant use for aiding in releasing stored junk, as has a similar substance from the buffo alivarius (sp?) frog from South America. Hypnosis can work very well also for some people when the therapist is open to helping with relieving stored emotion. I think the trick is in finding which one works best for you.

What I have found is that when I really get into my body I become much more aware of the feelings of resistance that are present and then, by not being overly left-brained about it, I use intuition in finding ways of moving that open that area up. Instead of moving in a way that is locked up and stiff, the body begins to flow in new patterns. Sometimes being open to doing things differently can make all the difference. After a while, you can begin to feel those blocked areas open up and there is this greater flow of prana or energy that is hard to detect at first, but can result in a building sense of bliss. It’s interesting how guarded we are against allowing ourselves to feel good. Is that some Puritan sensibility rattling around in our heads and hearts?

There is a reason why breath work is so useful in relaxing the body: it is the one “in” to the autonomous nervous system that is easiest for people to tap into by using their breath in a way that signals to the brain that the body is in a relaxed state. It works so well that you can be in a high stress state and use breathing in the right way and you will in a matter of moments feel much better. Is it any wonder this is used in meditation work so much?

The interesting thing about doing the work ahead of awakening is that it can sometimes clear the way for awakening to happen. I credit an interaction with someone who effectively acted as a confessor for me where I was able to dissolve a long standing frustration and guilt I had about something that had happened earlier in my life that left me frustrated in trying to understand what it was all about and left me feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. When its you against the universe it can be very easy to dissolve those old hard feelings. When that happened, I felt eighty pounds lighter and within three days I was having my first bout of non-dual awareness. That cracked the cosmic egg for me and people began coming out of the woodwork to supply me with just the right tools to aid in my next steps. It all happened like clockwork. They say that when the student awakens the teacher appears. In my case it was a long chain of experiences and events that had something to teach me and each one got substantively deeper into the weeds until I found myself in entirely new territory. It’s enough to make you believe in a higher power (probably because that is indeed the case).

I will say that in some ways I felt like I was the last to “get the memo” and I had the sense that something was up, I just wasn’t in on what it was for a while. It was as though every move I made was perfect for the moment and it may have been that if I had known more about what was happening I might have engaged my left rational brain and ego and caused the process to stop. It was very much like feeling as though there was a deeper wave coming in from consciousness that I found was created in a space within that I had no control over (and that was the point). The right brain is not a “doer” but has all the power to comprehend but perhaps not to act outwardly. Instead, it receives and what it gets is from the higher realms of consciousness. This isn’t something that you can parse rationally, but this other (right brain) mode of thought seems to know exactly what needed to be done as it needed to be done. It can leave a rational minded person feeling out of sorts. Get used to it. Be ready for the mystery and don’t try to control it is my advice. Once the tipping point happens, you will need its wisdom to get through it. Its a bit like having a cook in the kitchen that manages to get it done much faster than you could ever dream possible. You spend a lot of time just watching and observing, learning to be content not to stir the broth or to make sure the sauce is being seasoned correctly (it is). Eventually, you will find that the cook is actually you, and this might take some time to work through.

Doing the work before awakening will help prepare the ground for later. The idea that awakening is some novel state is itself wrong I think. It isn’t for the chosen few or people who are somehow special. I think it is how we are meant to develop, but it is a shift and a big change at first. It can be disruptive to your life at first, but in time you will come to see that what was lost in the shift simply didn’t serve you.

This work can lead to being less reactive and that can lead to lasting peace, whether it is done before or after awakening. However, the choice of being happy will always be yours to choose. If you think the process will somehow make you happy on the other end, that just isn’t so. Like you choose what thoughts you think, so too do you choose your emotions. When you do release work, you are no longer a slave to the stored emotion that was once there so whatever got released is now no longer sending out waves of hard to control emotion that pops up for some unknown reason. This work results in not dwelling on the things you once dwelled on and the old triggers are simply gone. This is done piecemeal, so be patient. It is like chiseling away at a mountain side. This can take years, but if you stick to it, the day will come when you turn around and see that you have just moved a mountain of things.

When you can learn to see that no one makes you feel any way at all is where you can much more clearly see who owns what. Yes, there are people acting out of ignorance and a lack of awareness all the time. The world is full of this, and everyone has their day when they lose their shit. Billions of people having a bad day once a month is enough to make crazy stuff happen all the time, so be patient with people. Most often compassion and understanding is stronger than a judgment. Simply demanding that the world conform to your vision of what it must be is unrealistic. Instead, people have this inner compass in them and they just need help feeling it. You don’t need to draw a road map for them because all of this is mediated by feeling and the courage to delve within. It’s hard when you are being preached at to do this. Sometimes a good example is more powerful an agent of change than anything else. If everyone tended to their own backyards we would be in a much better place. You can’t get a flower to blossom by demanding that it do so. Watering it and caring for it will do more than anything else, and the same is true for people.

Westerners are now more aware of all of these tools than ever before and it will take time for people to use them and to find their way. There is though an inexorable force that is pulling at each one of us and that force is a light that is pure love, an example for how we each can eventually become if we stay true to our efforts and our desire. And while many will say desire is the root of all suffering I can’t say that I agree. I think expectations that are rooted in the old “catalog” of past experiences, which will almost always be unrealistic in the present moment are the chief reason why we suffer (with a lower case “s”). Desire can be coupled with expectations that may be entirely out of whack with what is and in that case, you suffer again. Desire though can draw you along a path for decades with no results in sight, but will help you reach your goal. It is even possible for desire to be just that, pure desire, and when it is alloyed with the right kind of mind can be a potent vehicle for change. Ask the tantrics about this, where the way is not around an issue but to go right into the thick of it and use bliss to cleanse the whole place of its error. You can’t feel bliss when cleaving to the rational. Only in surrender does bliss come in a way that it remains as a constant companion. Before, after, or during…it seems all paths are possible, so don’t sweat the small stuff (it’s all small stuff).

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A New Project

Life is full of surprises.

Copyright, all rights reserved

I have been working methodically on a manuscript about early Christianity. It’s a slog in order to have all of the right sources. My project presents the thesis that in earliest Christianity there was a very different understanding concerning some foundational concepts that would inform the religion for centuries. It’s a story of one group that pitted itself against another and sought to wipe away its influence for all time. But like the sun, moon, and the truth, what was hidden was later revealed when documents began to surface from early on in the movement that told a very different story. It is one of the greatest stories never told about a religion that exerted tremendous influence for centuries.

It’s here that someone from the distant past emerged, a seeker herself, and artist like me, who was keen to collaborate with me. What has emerged has been a new project on a facet of awakening most commonly known as twin souls or twin flames. This is an aspect of awakenings today that link people who have karma in common.

I have been critical of the concept, though, and it was a surprise finding myself considering a project like this. The result has been a flood of information that provides a new perspective on the phenomenon that I have been bringing through. Because of my familiarity with the subject already and the history of awakening, I found I have been able to bring what I think may be a new perspective on the phenomenon.

The agreement was that the project had to be small. I didn’t have the time to devote to a 200 page manuscript. As a result, a book of 120 pages emerged very quickly. The collaboration begins with me writing and my coauthor providing illustrations and proofreading the manuscript.

The illustrations in some cases reveals the artist’s own discoveries of her brush with a new energy in consciousness, which shows up in her work, which I think helps to bring added meaning and comprehension to the project. Being able to have the work illustrated is a plus, something that makes the project unique, I think. There will be some intersections with the book I am working on related to early Christianity, which is awakening and how kundalini was actually being taught. Other cultures and traditions that have teachings or writings on awakening also tends to include the phenomenon of union both on the individual level as well as between two people, which is a second wrinkle in the awakening phenomenon. The book shows that the history on twins as they are called today is scant in the way some would like them represented, but a more abundant field of understanding awaits when you can shift your focus. To this end, I show instances through time when high vibrational relationships emerge. The phenomenon has been hiding in plain sight, but is not obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It helps if you know how and where to look. A little sleuthing can make for interesting reading.

A lot has been done in a short time, and with our moving into the Fall, I am facing the busiest time of the year for my studio business in glassmaking, so work on the book will go into a less intense phase now which will be a refinement period where I will have friends help review the work for editing. It managed to get slipped in just in the nick of time!

In the meantime, I will be publishing excerpts from the book as the editing work proceeds. This has moved along so quickly we don’t even have a title yet! I am including preliminary illustrations from the artist, which will help give you a sense of the character of the artwork and the flavor of one important aspect of our story telling.

Thanks for stopping by!

Ghosts

We invited our ghosts in with a gesture now long forgotten. They have been haunting us ever since. We love our ghosts for how they ride us, making us feel like weaker versions of ourselves, defeated. We are such curious creatures for how much we love what we dislike. We protest against such truths, but there it is.

A gnawing sense that all is not right in a marriage, we tell ourselves that it could be worse, or how we swallow so much and brush aside what offends our hearts until we turn ’round to find ourselves dunn-hearted, isolated, and alone in our theater of ghosts. Jobs we love to hate, politicians, the line at the store, the broken clock, computer, or way home…we love to hate it all. Why?

It takes great love to not hate ourselves for this, but to summon that love that, when felt, extends to everything it touches, including ourselves is one of the kindest of things we can do not just for ourselves, but for the good that will come to those around us. We take those parts of ourselves, in love, like how a parent loves their child, in order to show ourselves the way to a better place, where the ghosts are free to live their truer lives – no longer unknowingly grasped within our hearts and bodies, no longer held to a less than perfect expectation that our underwhelm has trapped them in. In so doing we appeal to the greater lights of our becoming to incrementally find our way home – which is itself a constant process as we go. What once was profane is rendered sacred, what was empty is now full, and what was forgot is remembered.

It’s Worth It

I wish I could tell you about what I feel. There are no words to contain this. I do try, though. My being is a swirl of bliss if I let the reflexive thoughts stop. That bliss would make me blush, running red-faced from the room. Hours have been spent lying down, unmoving, caught in the grace and transcendent wonder as worlds would shift and move through me like some cosmic broadcast. We are all like radios, I thought. I would realize my capacity for realizing dimensional aspects of reality and the Source which I could not explain using words was the best way for grasping this new realm of experience. It was curious, too, how just a look could contain it all. This is perhaps why love is so powerful because at this level, it may be one of the few states that can contain and be aware of the multitudes inherent in reality. Feeling, I found, was how the universe lives and breathes (and responds to you) while the rational was designed to be limited because the feeling mind isn’t. Like man and wife, they compliment each other. I became a lover, but one who, in time, was content to be alone, the beloved alive in my heart.

I was shown that this love was not divided out but included all forms. Like every Christian mystic, I was found wed to God, or like yogis deep in a trance of samadhi, I made the realization that love is the way. People don’t know this but in Luke Jesus uses three different forms of love to ask Peter if he loves him. One of the forms of love was erotic love. This passage was mistranslated by scribes in order to obfuscate the true meaning. Most Christians just think Jesus is trying to point out that Peter denied him three times. That wasn’t what was happening at all. Jesus was describing a love or encompassing a love that included all loves into one. It was not divided like my love, it was all of it in one go. Somewhere the power of this teaching got lost and there is not more about it in any of the sources coming down to us. Whether Jew or Hindu, the experience is the same. It was so for me, as well.

A friend and I spoke for the first time recently about my experience and he asked what it was like. It was the first time I had ever tried to explain it to a person who hasn’t awakened. I tried as simple and direct an approach as I could, saying, “You know that moment when you can feel the point of no return in orgasm?” He nods. “I feel that as a spiritual and physical energy all the time.” My friend said what I thought he would, which was, “That’s gotta be frustrating!” I replied, “At first it was. We are taught that we have to throw this energy away. I learned that when that energy accumulated, a thresh hold was crossed where this energy began healing me, transforming me. I could have become desperate, and sometimes I am, but it’s like the energy is there offering a chance for transmuting it where this unspeakable mystery is found…”

I feel like I have been disabused of my old habit of feeling, which is to always think of bliss as just sexual. It’s funny how the sexual bliss is the door to another finer state. It’s quite something. Maybe I’m not like Gautama Buddha who was said to have found solace in being able to feel such bliss without a partner. I am singular and happy, but we are social creatures who I don’t think have found peace with having intimate relationships while being so “spiritual.” There’s always someone who thinks this is about being a guru or a teacher and then the old memes get dragged out and it becomes a show. Maybe we just aren’t ready for this to enter all aspects of our lives. Such capable levels of deep communion can be scary sometimes. I get it. I’m still sitting here catching up with how awe inspiring nature is. Talk about the ultimate technology of the gods..

It’s been worth it to have been through so much. I stuck with it, stone by stone, grain by grain. After a few years I turned around and found my mountain had moved. Everything seemed so big at the beginning. It was like living in a blizzard of energy. Instinctively I knew my job was to drive the energy higher in order to…..to what? I soon learned what. I availed myself of every opportunity, every method, every happy accident and synchronicity that led to a release. I was in the belly of the dragon for years. There were times in the first few years when it all seemed bleak, but persistence has paid off.

I will also add, there are more things to heal, but the difference now is I don’t feel defeated by them. Every single thing dealt with was like acruing some cosmic grace that never went away. I have found great solace in this. I also found myself drifting away from “normal” human understanding. I fit less and less. That too was an adjustment. I would feel out of sorts, but then find a new angle with which to be able to relate to people I know and love.

Twenty four years ago I was awakened out of sleep by the angelic being who had appeared in my room only weeks before and I was told at four in the morning to go outside. There in the dark, he said “Look over here..” and motioned to the woods. There I saw a long hallway open up, kind of like something out of a Maurice Syndak story where the boy’s bedroom slowly turned into the wild outdoors. This hallway began tilting downward uneasily as I heard my guide say, “This lifetime is the conduit through which lifetimes may be healed or redeemed.” That hallway was shaken like a bag of potato chips to get the last bits out that were left. I was being shown how this would go and that my guide had been there since my birth, “Watching over you.” I realized the next day that this had happened on Good Friday.

Maui

Since then, I have been reminded, like on my trip to Maui, that I am the “doctor” for my soul. I was connected almost immediately to a past life on Maui with a man who had become stuck, mired in a poor definition of what being male was all about, and in a fifteen minute direct experience while driving along the coast, I was able to telepathically show him the way to feel. This was a past life of mine that was unfolding very quickly. He was taught to be the tough guy who didn’t talk about his feelings to the point that he was miserable. When I hear about “toxic masculinity” I think about how little our culture really understands how the culture carves out behavioral niches that are not natural or healthy for men (or women). A lot of toxic masculinity is the result of cultural expectations put onto men that are not natural. But what man feels like he can emote and not have his woman feel her stomach turning or feeling like her man is weak…because we misjudge just how attracted we are to these programmed responses. Men are silent strong and quiet. We support and the quieter we are the better. Don’t talk about your feelings as you really feel about them (millions of men quietly wanting to explode from holding it in or so disconnected from feeling that they don’t even know what the heck their feelings even are)/ While being the mute male sure makes women feel secure, it is making men neurotic in the same sort of way that women have difficulties with unrealistic expectations put on them as well. Okay, so in that moment I could enter his heart and show him how to feel, to bring in what he could not allow himself to feel (which he really needed but equated with being feminine or being weak). Immediately, there is this expansion, this joy that was completely new and then this guy lying in his hammock began crying for the first time in decades in his hammock. Crying because his life had been made into a kind of emotional sepia tone image. When I reached him, there was a tear coming down his eye already, but it was not a tear of feeling deeply, it was more the tear of a man who had been put into a vice and then crushed for about forty years. He had been holding it all in for so long and he was miserable. And with those tears, his hardness was gone. It bled out of him like puss from a wound. I had to pull over to cry, to let all that emotion out and to move it along so I didn’t get stuck, too. To him, my past life gentleman, I was like an ancestor spirit coming to him to give him that good medicine. Me, I just knew right where to go to find him perhaps at his worst point in time. I just had this feeling like I had to go to Maui, but not for the reasons other people go there. It felt like I really needed to go to get something done or to see something…it wasn’t really clear. It was ironic, too, because there he was, dressed in traditional Hawaiian garb, lying in a hammock near the beach, looking at the sunset in what most would describe as paradise, and he could not have been more miserable. All of this was done by way of feeling, and being open. Truth is, I don’t know much, a lot of this involves me being led by a more capable self. So when my guide showed me all of those doors in that hallway and explained how this life would be a life where I would be able to clear and cleanse my soul going back lifetimes, he wasn’t kidding. It has been quite the ride and there have been no dull moments. I am glad I am alone because if I were to describe this to a “normal” person, I would likely wind up in a hospital.

I do a lot of listening inwardly and outwardly…and I also realize that I have a turn of mind that allows me great flexibility emotionally so that I can be what these past selves need me to be in order to get over their own humps, glitches, and limits. Every time this happens I feel as if I am rewriting the past and improving the present and future lifetimes and timelines. While its hard to travel physically through time, your consciousness can travel back with ease! I can only imagine the ripple effects this will have. Has this ever played through your mind, the implications of this work? If nothing else, I was able to help a number of people in my soul, all past lives and one future lifetime, to reap greater reward through this awakening. No matter what happens, the ripple effects will be spreading out through time and consequence…

Sometimes I tell my higher self that I’d like to help others, too, but it tells me that in my evolutionary spiral, it is better to help myself so that in other lifetimes my purpose can be dedicated solidly with serving others.

There was a time when meditation was tricky. I would drift into another energy state, but it never went anywhere. I wondered what I was doing wrong. Only after opening up this powerful energy did I realize how solid our “veils” in consciousness can be. The rise of kundalini found me pierced from bottom to top seven times. It was as though I had been pierced and opened so that the flood waters from the cosmic could come in. They did. I had to navigate tsunami waves. It wasn’t always easy. With practice and familiarity, it got easier.

Sometimes “it” felt like a challenger, but it wound up an ally. It depended on what I brought to it. After months of struggle, the same struggle over five months, something finally clicked and everything went quiet. I mean to say, no thoughts. It was as novel a condition as weightlessness might be the first time in the body. After that, a great peace was available to me. I will also say that despite such a wonderful outcome, I would find plenty of instances where I would choose to be upset about something! We are so very human. Note to self: you can become a yogi overnight but you will still have to pay the rent…

I think that I think differently now. I rely on the grace of the universe saving me sometimes. It is tricky to be both Mr. Cosmic and Mr. Business at the same time. When I rely on God or the universe, it always seems to work out perfectly. A customer who is used to worrying about things, was put off by my peaceful demeanor recently. It was funny because she was speaking as though the thing out of place with me was this devil may care attitude that I seemed to have. Perhaps there is this idea that artists starve, that it’s a problem and since I am an artist, that is what must be happening. It isn’t happening, lol! “It must be so hard for you as an artist…” people often have said, and I kind of roll my eyes because it isn’t that way at all. It is a business like any other.

People incorrectly think that this is me not caring, which is my bliss state, when I care very much. I just don’t care to think about or worry about the same things other people worry about. I get how the visionaries tend to all get killed: they are no longer bound by the same steering forces and are no longer governable or controllable. People can look at you funny… It’s been worth it though.

It’s worth it to see my breath, so full of bliss, enter this world. I pray that it can be a gift to someone somewhere. I am not much of an evangelist…no religion, or guru to be found. I find I am just as J. Krishnamurti was on his pathless path. When you rely on yourself, an abundance of wisdom makes itself available to you. The more you rely on it the greater the wisdom that pours forth. We aren’t aware of the deep well of knowing that is available to us. You are one life among many. You are a child to a still-larger self. You exist outside of time. You are instantly god-realized in that part of you outside of time…and it then seems to be the task of these selves to realize their own divine lineage. Everyone is like this, I think. The answer seems to be found in our becoming limited in order to learn the most precious lessons, which often is about how to experience limitation and to touch one thing at a time, rather than constantly embracing the All in such an all-encompassing state.

All the work has been worth it. Keep at it. Follow your gut and heart while remaining open. If you can feel something with all your heart, that something will come. It seems like it takes forever, but every single ounce of it is accounted for and as the load drops, the soul becomes light. The bliss, which we once thought was to be used, or even thrown away, is now seen as The Way, a part of who we are. Instead of rising and falling, it is steady now. Hardly anything lessens it now. I am glad to have been able to show one person the way to bliss. If we all did that, the world would be a much better place. I talked to their soul about it and in one week the switch was flipped. I pray it has remained. If we can each do this, we would have a better, more peaceful world, perhaps.

It gets better. Stick with it. Surrender. Be a devotee. Within you is all the wonder you could ever imagine. Your divine parentage makes it so.

All My Love,

~ Parker

Let It Through

Not around, but through. Don’t resist, let yourself feel what you had refused yourself. For all the reasons. Trust the innate goodness of your heart and your soul.

Let it flow through you, no worries about what might happen. Let it happen.

We often let go best when we feel into it without that reflexive grasp. Why do we do that?

It’s a mystery. Let them be mysteries and away they will go.

Does being reminded of what doesn’t align to the one true light help? Or does it remind you of what you aren’t here for?

I wish you all the great works in whatever way they work for you. In the end, it will be about a love that knows no boundaries nor limits, and confounds so many rules we have made to try and control and contain it.

Breathe it in, let it through, this is how all sacred flames are kindled.

Twin Soul Pain

I was searching kundalini awakening on Youtube today, a first for me in quite some time. I didn’t know what I would find or even what I was looking for. Then I found her there in India….she has this hard unyielding way, but she is also able to express what I might need to thrash about in a poetic trance to spit out. Any insight is always appreciated. More about her in a moment.

The questioner asks her how to deal with the issue of having the feeling of the other within…even though it has been a lot of time since they parted ways. I am reminded of how these “twin” or soul connections work and how people I know even years later are still affected by their other. I know how I have been affected.

So I came across the work of Maharishikaa on kundalini. She helped a man who was really having a hard time in one video. Then quite by surprise there was this touching video about a woman who was trying to move on when her soul connection abruptly moved on without her. She came trying to find a way through this. The response I found to be unique, novel, and beautiful. Watch what she says. I think maybe the way through is not to go away but to go through. Step into the fire, do not run around it, ask what remains and be ready for what might come. For me, the answer was so simple, really. So much fuss over such a little hitch in my heart and ego.

Some put so much on these connections. More than they deserve, in my experience. At the same time, though, they help to show us what love can be, how we are the love instead of that moment of dissatisfaction that then fuels a connection later, in another life.

I find the arrangement to be paradoxical once you see what happened (in another life). It is like bread dough left to rise too long; it winds up much bigger than it ever was in that last life. Perhaps it is the effect of letting karma go for a single life – it grows bigger than it was when first minted.

Except no one seems to know this. That, or all my searching has somehow led me astray. Aren’t we passionate about getting it right? Could that be enough to open such a vibrant portal to the soul and it’s love?

We only see the large loaf and surmise it is more than it is. The paradox is…..that it is more than it should seem. Perhaps that is what these connections do; they open us to the love shining in the soul. For the soul, it seems that this is an everyday thing, completely common. But here on Earth, it seems singularly unique (which of course it is). It remains enigmatic to me. I wish I could go back to those simpler days of believing that it was a twin. It is, tbough, more mysterious than that. Perhaps it is enough that it moves us as it does. For what else makes us examine so much over something we might not have ever known that much about?

I know it may not make sense, but I think there is something here for those who need it. We let go of our need for it to be a certain way. When we do that, there is a greater peace and this cosmic presence expands and it’s one less thing that creates pain. We think it is about them when it’s just about our reaction to something that we think fell short of expectations. This is, I think, the genesis of these soul connections.

I’m Ready….Are You Ready?

I want to take a moment to tell you about someone who has figured strongly in my awakening journey.  I want to mention her because of how much experience she has in the arena of energy, consciousness, and awareness.  There is the saying that when the student is ready, the teacher arrives.  For me, this was true.  I wasn’t going to find a traditional teacher, though, this much is true, but at a very specific point in my awakening when I began questioning what it was that I was reading and hearing about the phenomenon (Twin Souls/Flames especially), she came along at just the right time. We struck up a friendship and would have conversation about the process of awakening, consciousness, and how we can recreate our lives to find a better way.

My friend is a professional psychic intuitive and has worked in the field for decades.  She is not a fortune-teller but is someone who uses her gifts to supercharge change for her clients.  She has worked with individuals, couples, groups, and businesses large and small.  Her gifts have been used on start-up projects that have gone on to do big business, to couples who are wanting to get married.  Big or small, Ali has helped people from every walk of life.  She is like a big fish that you would never realize is the big fish because of how humble and soft spoken that she is.

My friend and guide was born with gifts that were off-the-chart incredible.  Talking to her at first, it wasn’t readily apparent just who I was dealing with, but as time rolled on I began seeing the evidence of her gifts.  I have been lucky to have known her since 2008 to the present day.  I have gone through my own contortions and difficulties during that time, have remained dedicated to pushing my own envelope of understanding and find that my friend is still there as brilliant and as insightful as ever….and forgiving of my own difficulties when I try to push them onto others (we call that projection!).

What is so amazing about my friend and her gifts is that she was not born with the “veil” that most have.  If you ask me how this veil works, I will tell you that I think it is very simply a process related to our development here. It is also how our brain works in consort with consciousness and the way that some parts of the brain actually “brake” other parts that have the ability to process information that doesn’t come from the five senses. I say this because I have had my own forays into this realm, perhaps just enough to get me into trouble.  But in truth, Ali is like that person who didn’t get programmed to be like everyone else and the barriers that most people have, she doesn’t.  I know for my friend, based on having known her over the years, living this way can be very hard because you feel EVERYTHING.  The other side is super crazy and over-the-top psi ability. My own sense is this is part personal interest that accrues over lifetimes, but can also be a feature of the awakened state.  Kundalini, after all, is said to bring many abilities, and Ali has had this since she can remember.

I think most people who have done the work like she has simply are at a place where they no longer need to reincarnate here, so perhaps this is why we don’t see a lot of these types of people. People like her are rare.  I know in my own experience that I am showing evidence of pulling back the curtain through a growing memory of past lives both here in this reality as well as others. Perhaps you have also been experiencing this very thing yourself, so you might know what I mean firsthand.  I know that along with awareness there seems to be a willingness or ability to begin using our minds in ways that are contrary to how most are taught here on Earth….all of which contributes to enough of a difference that we begin to see more and more open windows through consciousness.  At least, this has been my observation thus far. But the point is, my friend is so clear she can get to the crux of a problem so fast that you will be left wondering what just happened.

I am writing about my friend because I want you to know her.  I am telling you this because more people need to know about her because the gifts she has are remarkable.  While she is a healer, her healing work is so incredibly versatile that she can do her work over the phone and literally work a miracle for you inside of twenty minutes if you are ready.  These things happen so fast that I am left wondering what just happened sometimes.  It’s hard enough living in a world that wants to pooh-pooh these things as it is, but if you suspend disbelief and go into work with her with an open mind and a ready heart, there is nothing that you can’t do with her help.  I know I am waxing grandiose here…but let me explain…

A number of years ago my friend came to visit my home in Virginia.  While she was here I had been invited to a gathering by a family friend and I took my friend along.  A lot of the people there knew me and were curious about who she was and why she was there with me. My friend explained that she is a healer and an intuitive.  In minutes, she was in the next room conducting impromptu sessions with people whom I have known since I was a kid.  My friends looked at me before we left to go home, “Where did you find her?  Oh my goodness, she is the real deal!” I have watched my friend as she has held healing sessions with friends, and I have seen what she has been able to do for me over the years.  It has remained consistent in terms of her level of ability. Yes, she is the real deal.  My friend is remarkable, a real talent, and I feel fortunate to know her.  I feel fortunate because for so long I didn’t know anyone who liked to talk about the things I like to talk about in terms of our hidden potential as beings here, or how to tap into alternate layers of consciousness, or how events begin to change as consciousness is used differently.  When she does work with her clients things can change on a dime.  I don’t know why she shouldn’t be a household name.

My friend is Alison Neville.  She lives in California and she has the gifts of clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, and an ability to read and heal energy.  She has had these gifts her whole life.  She began to learn to use them in her twenties and has been doing so up to the present.  Her “toolkit” is so inclusive that there isn’t a situation that she can’t work through with aplomb.  As a result, Alison doesn’t employ methods or scripts, she just goes into a session and uses what needs to be used at the time.  Each session can be wildly different one from the other.  It is because of this that her work is so beneficial.  You aren’t getting a script, you are getting real boots on the ground work. It is why sometimes when I start a conversation with her I might wind up completely surprised with what comes up because of something that her inner guidance says that puts us on an unexpected trail.  More about this in a moment. I will say that if you find yourself wanting her help, all you need to do is to be clear about what you want to cover because she will do that so long as you are honestly seeking to get to a better place.

You don’t have to believe in this phenomenon in order to benefit from what Ali does.  But what Ali does is not some cute parlor trick.  I have spent sustained time with her over the years and there was no way that she was able to gather all the information beforehand just in order to make it seem as if she had a gift.  You know what I am talking about here; the cynical skeptic, who, no matter how much proof they are shown, refuses to concede that there might be something to what she does.  This is probably an occupational hazard for her, but either you want help or you don’t….and even for  cynical skeptics Ali delivers in spades.  It makes you wonder why someone would fake it if they were so incredibly good at bringing solutions to your life that work so well? I guess I don’t think about those things because I have been around Ali so much over the years and I know that it’s real.

In the beginning of our correspondence and discussions, Ali helped me to remove or heal a long-standing issue from my childhood as it related to my Mother.  It was a thorny problem that had eluded me for about forty years.  It had developed at a time that was so early in my life that I had lost all hope of being able to use memory as a doorway for getting to it and healing it.  Ali showed me that these kinds of things are always accessible and so we used feeling (instead of memory) as the doorway.  One moment I was talking to her on the phone in my car headed to the studio and the next moment I am settling down in a chair in the studio, the lights off, with her speaking and taking me into a guided meditation.

The effect of healing this issue was like correcting something that had been wrong for years inside of me that I had been projected outward as something that I believed was a problem with the world, or my Mother. Gently my perception was turned ’round so that I was able to see it in the right way.  Once seen in the right way, once truly heard and examined without the distorting lens of my beliefs about it, this healed very quickly and righted itself.  That was in 2008 when that happened.  It changed my relationship with my Mother from that day onward.  Having been in the mental health field as a counselor for years, my Mother wondered how on earth I was able to heal something from such an early place in my life.  I had help from Ali.

That experience is emblematic of the huge leaps forward I have been able to make.  The truth is that the vaulting would not have been possible without her help.  When I write in my blog about having had an energetic “reset” years ago that helped my energy field become many times more sensitive, it was Ali who helped with that.  Yes, it was hard to deal with, but just when I thought my sensitivity had gone through the roof in awakening, what she was able to do for me showed me that there was no ceiling on our roof at all as my energetic system was put into orbit.  I’m not exaggerating, here.  My being able to understand how grace is tied to creativity, that was Ali.  My being able to step into my authentic self in many important ways, it was in that time when she and I were conversing and she was sharing her insight with me. I had simply manifested the influence that my soul needed most for that time.  Now I sense that there are others who also need it.  They might not know it is so, but that is how these things happen.

Just last week I was visiting her helping her with some marketing work for her business (and going to visit a regression hypnotist/counselor) and while talking one morning before breakfast, we wound up in a healing session. This wasn’t something we had talked about, it just happened.  A block that had eluded me my entire awakening was resolved inside of forty minutes.  Just like that. I could feel into my own field in a way that I had not felt before….maybe ever.  This was so important for me because I knew that if I was ever going to do any healing work myself, I knew that I could not be working with people unless I myself was healed….that was my own bit of guidance.  So this outcome was really important for me on many levels.  How I feel and relate to my energy now is very different.  Wow.

When I went out to swim in the ocean later I began hearing a voice speaking clearly within me that I had not been able to hear before. The block in the root had kept me from being able to hear clearly something that has been a part of my life and my soul existence for a very very long time.  It was like the cherry on the top hearing and feeling this presence that I simply could not meet or feel or hear until I did this work. As we open and clear ourselves we are more able to use our innermost senses in a more dependable and less distorted way. At least, that is how it seems to me.  The clearer we are, the less invested we are in an agenda.  The source of all life is supportive and free from agenda beyond that of love.  I find that as I go through this process, this is what I am moving into each day. How do I learn from Source?  How do I learn from Ali?

Some of what Ali does is energy healing.   How she does this from a distance over the phone is the remarkable part.  While much of what she does can be understood through the lens of known healing modalities, Ali has explained that much of what she does is the result of her own inner connection to what she calls her “guidance” which always seems to know exactly what needs to be done at just the right moment.  So it might be energy healing on the one hand,  the next minute it might be reading an ancient time line, a past life, or speaking with a relative that has passed.  She might do something completely unexpected, even for her, within the span of a session.  In short, there IS no pattern, every single session is unique.  If you watch true pros you will find that they don’t have scripts that they speak from.  They embody what they do. Ali is one of these pro’s.  It’s what made our talks so interesting.  Maybe someday she and I will put our heads together and do a book about these talks. It would be so interesting I think for the very reason that none of it would be scripted, not even once.  You just have no idea.

There is sometimes this freewheeling feeling in a session with her where you are asked to consider what life might look like outside of your own perceptual box.  Now she has you beginning to set up the very conditions for transforming your life, maybe without even realizing it.  By helping to surrogate the energy necessary for rebuilding the conception of what you think your life could be, she serves as this bridge to what your life will be once you decide to take that one little step into what seems like a vast cosmos. It can happen so fast you don’t even see it coming.  You might not even realize that she is holding you in that place, holding the seed of it and waiting it for it to germinate and to find it’s root in a new level of your life. You can actually root yourself in what seems to be a new cosmic place…..maybe it was just a place you never thought was even possible for you. We have chosen all of this, our choices are just that; choices.  Those choices may have represented the very best thing you could imagine.  There was a time when we built rockets that went up only thousands of feet and thought that was an amazing feat, but within a decade we were sending rockets into orbit around the earth.  Then we went to other planets.  You see what I mean?  Working with Ali can be like this.  The limitation is that you think you are limited.

And that is just it.  We each stand at the edge of a limitless cosmos and all along it is we who are limiting and choosing what we will experience.  Yes, you are in a body.  Yes, you are focused in this reality with a set of senses physically.  You are also more than just this one body.  So I ask, what on earth are you waiting for? 

As a result, Ali is one of the most innovative healers ever.  Missing a loved one who passed?  She can tap into that person right now and help fill in any gaps that you might have.  Have difficulty with your supervisor and don’t know why? Ali can dig into that and help to explain what is at work.  Not only that, but she will take your hand and show you how to heal it.  Poof!  Now everything has changed for you with your supervisor and anyone else after that who is like that supervisor.

Maybe it is a challenge with a relationship.  Maybe it is with a parent (like me) or with a spouse, a child, or a friend, it really doesn’t matter, that is how flexible her gifts are.  Maybe you can’t quite understand why the relationship dynamic is the way it is.  Not only can Ali help shed light on it, she can also help you to change everything about it on a dime if you are ready.  Maybe you are starting a business or you want to take your business to another level–Ali can tell you exactly the things you will need to work on in order to manifest that type of abundance in your life and to make it work with the fewest hangups as possible.  You of course need to be ready and you need to make yourself available. But if you can be as innocent as a child, you will not only change things for good, you will have great fun doing it because that is just how Ali is.  Ali is remarkable.  I want you to know about her gifts because I have been helped so much, my friends have been helped, and people that she knows have also been helped. I was able to do in half an hour what might take people years using traditional talk therapy.  I actually think therapy has its place, but what Ali does is she cuts out all of the preamble and gets right to the issue at hand.  The only problem with this might be that you might think that there is no way that she can cut to the chase so fast.  Way.

There are no accidents.  You are the one who needs to hear this right now.  Her gifts are amazing and more people need to know, and now I am telling you.  I have nothing to sell and nothing to gain. If there was a time when her skills were needed, that time is now. If you do get in touch with her and work with her, come back here and leave a comment  about your experience. I want the world to know. I want you to know.

To get in touch with Ali start here:

https://www.alisonneville.com/

 

Can Others Feel Kundalini?

This was a question that came up a while ago and it was something I was certain was obvious to anyone who would be around me after whatever it was that had happened to me: blast of light, lightening strike, rocket engines taking off, take your pick of what “that” thing was that happened on that fateful day that left you in deep mystery about what had happened.  Well it was kundalini, that’s what.  I was asked if this energy was obvious to others and it triggered an old memory I had those first few weeks after my awakening. And the answer is no.  Those not awake will not feel your energy.  Okay, mostly. Sometimes they can.  Alright, that didn’t sound very clear, did it?

Clearly, no one was feeling my energy. I literally thought that I had a giant neon sign over my head that first month after the energy raised.  I really felt exactly that way until I realized, no, no one was picking up on this!  What a relief!

Except that as time went on, I began to see clusters of curious behavior that suggested that some people, not everyone, was feeling something. I wasn’t sure at first, so I did what I always do: I sat back and observed to see if I could gather enough data on the subject that would inform me more one way or the other.  All of this took a while, it didn’t happen overnight.  So the answer here is that in some cases, yes, some people can.  Mostly, they don’t. Clear as mud?  Read on.

This is why it may be that you might want to be aware of this when or if someone starts acting weird around you.  It seems that there is a range of reactions in my experience.  It tends to be either a bliss response (or approaching that-say an unusual attraction or enthusiasm in your direction) or the opposite, which could present itself along the lines of anger, upset, frustration, and fear.  I am telling you this because it has been an observation of mine and it might help to clarify some odd instances of how some people will react to you.  I have had both.  I really wish that it was more nuanced, but in my experience it usually isn’t, at least for me.  People here are not mature enough to know how to deal with the energy that could catalyze their own flow of prana in themselves.  I am hopeful that this trend will change and I think that if it is going to change, now would be the time in our history that it would do so (fingers crossed).  To do this, I think that we need people who are more accepting and surrendered in their lives.

In my garden…

I think that the best thing to always do is to remain neutral when it happens.  Someone is responding to something in you a certain way and my sense is that it can move them to extremes.  I now prefer to keep my bliss to myself and not have hitchikers or hijackers along for the ride. For those who act more peaceful and give me that look that tells me they are spellbound, I have to realize that they aren’t spellbound by me at all, they are actually responding to their own insides and how it makes them feel.  Yes, in some cases they may think it is coming form me, and in a sense they are right, but what they feel as a result of that actually has more to do with their own capacity to feel what they are capable of when it comes to a flow of prana and the bliss it can bring.  In short, when someone is feeling prana that might be attributed to me they are feeling it in their own world on their own.  It is like how we are all breathing the same air.  Is the air me? Is it you?  Well now perhaps you can see how silly it might be to think the air comes from someone like myself or anyone for that matter.

I will add one caveat to all of this, which is that you can project this energy to a person. The energy body is not limited to location, and this is why people can do reiki atunements, or why the power of prayer can make sudden changes in outcomes.  We can send energy to people, yes, it is true, but I don’t know that we really know everything there is to know about how this even works from an energy standpoint, we just knows that it can and does work. Are we sending energy or are we communicating with that person’s own higher self or energy body and they accept the idea that there is more energy available to them?  I say this in the way I do because it is like me bringing you a bucket of water that I just filled from a boundless ocean just fifty feet away from us.  Do you see what I mean by that? Am I actually sending energy or am I sending the suggestion that more energy could be available to them, and because they pick up on it, they do….and they do this based on my own thought of sending X amount of energy to them? And who knows, it could be a bit of both.  I really wish we were further along in our study of this energy than we are.  I suppose we could set up experiments to make some important determinations about how this all works. Okay, I know, you probably think I am just splitting hairs, here.  You might be right, but this is what I think about because I have always taken this attempt at being objective and asking lots of questions that maybe most don’t think to ask, but might be worth looking into if only for curiosities’ sake.

The best thing to my mind is to always bring it back to the person so they don’t focus on you as the source when these odd interactions happen.  There are gentle ways that you can do this and it all has to do with intention.  If they can feel the vibe then they can also pick up, perhaps subconsciously, your intention which might be that while you might inspire the energy, the energy is theirs.  If there is a conversation, keep bringing the talk back to how great it is that they are feeling what they feel and how it is something that they are doing and how great is that?  I have had people ask me if I was doing something to them.  I said each time that no, I was not doing something to them.  Instead, I would say, I was just serving as inspiration, nothing more.  I think this is correct and also keeps everything appropriate.  People can get hung up on the small truth and not be able to see the bigger truth that is looming.

I went through a period, a very definite one, where I was literally turning heads.  This started to happen when I was myself at peace with the energy flowing through me.  I just let it flow and didn’t worry about it. As a result, I felt so much better.  It was a breakthrough for me, actually.  I was able to embrace the inherent sensuality of the experience without feeling like I needed to tamp it down or feel shame about it. Its odd to think that I once felt shame about something so incredible, but I did.  But once that was being released,  and this happened quite suddenly in my life, I noticed how all of a sudden I would have these really quite comical things happen to me with the people around me.  It was the double-take or the rubberneck effect as I think of it. Maybe you have experienced this.  I might be walking down the street or driving in my car and I would see these people craning their necks to look at me.  In many cases these were people looking in my general direction with a look like they were trying to find something.  I had many instances where a woman would walk past me and would turn on her heel to scan the street in my direction as soon as she passed me, with a looks like she was trying to find something but had no idea what it was she as looking for, only to give up and keep walking. It was worth a giggle or two, yes.  I knew it wasn’t me, it was the energy.  If it had only happened once or twice it would not have meant much to me, but it was happening multiple times a day during a particular period in my process.

I have also experienced the dark side of what this energy can do to people.  I knew two people who quite literally wanted to destroy me because of it.  Both behaved nearly identically and instead of being able to part as friends, they had to demonize me just to move forward.  I also saw that as I removed blocked energy one ex would go into fits of rage within a 12 hour period of each block that I removed.  I have written about this before on the blog.  I counted nine times in a row where I had released blocked material and the person I was with would go into this rage meltdown each time within about a 12 hour period each and every time.  It continued to happen, but nine times in a row was enough for me to make a causal connection to what was happening.  There was NOTHING that I did to cause the person to go into a rage meltdown.  It was always something that she had somehow procured within herself as the source of the problem.  You just never knew who she was going to focus her rage at at any given time.  So there is that.  Usually in these cases, in my experience, there is always some kind of resistance in the person that precludes them from embracing whatever this seemingly disruptive energy means for them on a personal level.

People who are resistant to change will tend I think (just my own opinion thus far) to go into the negative range of expression or reaction.  Either you realize this and seek to engender a more compassionate understanding and patient approach with encouragement, or you just leave well enough alone.  In my case, I knew that nothing I could do would amount to any substantive change in their reaction.  And it is just that-a reaction-so don’t beat yourself up about it. It really isn’t about you.  It is very easy to hop on their karmic merry-go-round and then get caught up in their own pattern, which can be very hard for you.  It is sometimes better to leave well enough alone.

Those are my two cents on the matter. I think that if you yourself go in the direction of using it to your advantage, this will only result in bad karma, so please don’t do that.  Let it be what it is, a sign, an indication, but nothing more.

There is another instance where your own energy is affecting another person and this is what I would call the twin experience.  Some call it twin flames or twin souls or rays, take your pick. In this case, two people have become effectively entangled in their soul energy where a significant degree of telepathy is involved. These in my experience have always been karmic in nature even though those who have been so affected will hold out for this being something divine. While it leads to our divinity, it is a connection to the soul-self which operates under a very different sort of premise than the self in time and space (in this lifetime).  As a result, there is an overpowering draw to that person that goes beyond mere location and transcends the physical senses. It feels significant, and it is, but it is what happens when two people become connected, and it is always because of karma.  If anyone can illustrate situations where there is no karma whatsoever in one of these connections, I would like to learn more about that case because I have yet to see an instance where karma is not involved as the trigger into the experience.  It isn’t that I am narrow minded, it is that I have looked and observed and experienced this phenomenon and at no point have I found a compelling reason to say that this is a horse of a different color beyond karma being one important element in kicking off the connection.  So I am open to having my mind changed, I just haven’t seen it happen yet.

These are unusual instances and are unique to the two people involved, although there are many cases where once someone has had one connection, they may wind up with another, or several.  Again, all have karmic material at its foundation. That isn’t to say it is bad, not at all.  It does present challenges, though, very real ones, and you should be aware of this.  It can lead to loving their soul but having real challenges that are nearly diametrically opposed to that soul which feels perfect to you about who that person is in their present life. This leads to a conundrum for people in relationships like this.  It is, to my mind, a call to learning how to step into the soul-self in a more embodied and authentic way.  This takes real work to do and it can take a lot of time and requires a lot of patience.  The soul, though, will always seem beyond your reach in this lifetime for the simple reason that it does not exist in time, but rather projects parts of itself into time in order to become flesh.  In so doing, there is a new version of the soul created with a personality and a body, all of which were chosen in order to hopefully achieve certain specific goals. The soul does not appear to have any of this. It just IS.  I suspect this is why we reincarnate in the first place, which is to work through things that the soul cannot in its no-time-space state.  There is a song that says, “In heaven, nothing ever happens at all…” and there is a certain truth to this.  How do you have things happen when there is no time or space?  Where is there to go when you can be aware of being potentially everywhere and everywhen?  It seems the soul needs these projections in order to focus itself more narrowly, to take on roles, conditions, and the mask of personality in order to work through certain dramas central to its needs and concerns, whatever those might be.

Those are my two cents on the phenomenon, and it isn’t to strip it of its meaning or importance, only to leaven it with what I think is an important ingredient so that we don’t have a blindside to some important aspects of the experience.  There might just be a very real reason why you react and respond to the Other the way that you do especially when it is a negative reaction.  That bit of resistance that you are feeling is pointing out  the work you need to do most likely. I think this is the only way these unions will ever see a significant level of peace within them, which is to say they could be a call to change, real substantive change.  Otherwise, you will be caught up in the maelstrom of your own triggers, all karmic in their foundation, and it is possible you will be something like those people I discuss earlier who would go into melt-down after melt-down.  If you have had an experience along these lines, I am all ears (and eyes).  I am open to learning more, so if you have something to add, I would love to hear about it.

Blessings, P.

Is There An Energetic Connection With Restless Leg Syndrome?

Restless Leg Syndrome is a condition that many people experience. It can be a distracting sensation, which is often a desire to shake or move their legs, although there are other symptoms that are also part of this syndrome. Because of my posts on leg chakras, some readers have wondered if there is a connection between our vital energy (prana or chi) and restless leg syndrome. I have begun to wonder about it myself as a result of reading comments from readers.

While I cannot say for certain, what I can say is that there are a few coincidental elements that might connect the two. If there is, it will most likely be related to how blocked energy can be present in the legs. What I mean by this is that it has been known that for whatever reason, there appears to be a connection between past repressed emotion and certain places in the body that will seem to store that energy until it is released, which generates emotional relief for those who do this kind of work. I will say, however, that while I have myself experienced hundreds of these releases of stored emotional energy and understand the many ways that it can be released, I have not made a clear connection between that and RLS. What I do know is how much harder it is to release the blocked energy in the legs. I suspect that because of their distance from the core of the body that their energetic potential is different, perhaps less intense, and as a result, more difficult to bring changes in the same way that are seen in the core or torso region where the “larger” more powerful chakras as located.

The thing about the chakra system and the vital energy system in general is that it is not an entirely physical system. This energy system, while appearing a lot like nerve channels to those who can sense them, are not physical in the way that nerves or the vascular system is. It is one reason why modern science does not take the subject seriously despite the fact that the Chinese have carefully mapped out these energetic lines throughout the body with such specificity that their mapping has brought us the meridian system that is used for acupuncture and acupressure therapies that hospitals often use because they have found that they work for certain conditions. They don’t pretend to know why it works, only that it does and because this is minimally invasive, they use it. Additionally, in India, this same system was also mapped out and are instead called “nadi” instead of “meridian.” The nadi were known to house blocked or stored emotion and the ladder of yoga as it is referred to often details exercises intended to dislodge this blocked material from the nadi system. But it is the very same thing as the Chinese system, but with the addition of the chakras, which are described as being like wheels, and all sorts of illustrations have been made down through the centuries to help people to visualize them (like lotus or other flower forms for instance). While the Indian system does not appear to identify the points along the meridians that the Chinese use for needling in acupuncture in order to open up blocked energy pathways, neither does the Chinese system conceive or acknowledge a wheel-like vortex called a chakra either. I suspect that this is a cultural difference, and may also be attributed to what the adepts were doing, an outcome of their abilities and their focus when it came to subtle energy like prana or chi.

That said, being able to divest this energy that is stored from the body has as its end result in helping to release the stored burden upon the psyche or of the self. It is liberating to do this work, and it has the effect of shifting the physical chemistry in a long-term fashion of the body, which has positive effects on physical and mental health.

Consider if you have stored fear or anxiety, psychologists know that this stored or repressed memory has a recursive nature that can stay with a person their whole life if the issue isn’t dealt with. Every time that the person is triggered, so too is a burst of adrenaline or norepinephrine released, which puts the body into a pitched flight-like mode which most associate with fear. If allowed to be triggered often, the body wears under such a condition and disease of a degenerative nature could creep in if this trigger is, exercised often. The body does best in stasis or a balanced state.

What medical science has to say on the subject is best summed up by this article about a potential breakthrough in understanding the physiology of the condition which was published in November 2018 in Science Daily:

This new research indicates that the involuntary leg movements in RLS are caused by increased excitability of the nerve cells that supply the muscles in the leg, which results in an increased number of signals being sent between nerve cells.

Targeting the way messages are sent between nerve cells to reduce the number of messages to normal levels may help prevent the symptoms of RLS occurring. This could be achieved by new drugs that block the ion channels that are essential for the communication between nerve cells.

The research conducted by the University of Gottingen in conjunction with the University of Sydney and Vanderbilt University involved measuring the nerve excitability of motor nerve cells of patients suffering with RLS and healthy subjects.

The next step is to investigate the effect of different medications in patients and the effect on RLS.

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114234848.htm

If RLS can be attributed to chi in the body, then a treatment will most often be more of a bandaid, a therapy that would likely never change the condition itself, but would bring relief through taking a chemical into the body that aids in the ionic actions that the quote describes. While it may be possible that vital force of chi/prana could have a role to play in stimulating RLS chemistry in the body, it could prove helpful to investigate alternative therapies before using chemistry.

So is there any relief produced using acupuncture or variants of it? It turns out that it has been used. The following article, while technical, provides the point locations used in a therapy and could be reproduced with a skilled acupuncture therapist. I will note that the article describes both acupuncture and what they call “acuinjection” of a synthetic dopamine-like compound (from the look of it) into the acupuncture point. Anyway, it may be worth reading to learn more about this technique. It can be found here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028364/

In this article the result was that an extensive study did not return a conclusive result.

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2020/01170/acupuncture_for_restless_legs_syndrome__a.90.aspx

The following article is interesting for the method of massage that a Chinese practitioner can perform that is said to be helpful for RLS:

https://www.acufinder.com/Acupuncture+Information/Detail/Acupuncture+Helps+Restless+Legs+Syndrome

I hope that this helps those who have inquired about this topic. I had hoped to have had an opportunity to speak with a noted energy healer while on the Hawaiian islands in March, but we wound up not covering this topic before the trip ended. My hope is that I will be seeing this healer again but this time in California before too much longer and will see if I can make a video of the encounter. Since uncertainty with Covid continues, no specific date is set, but it has been a topic of our discussion but we were so busy that we had trouble fitting it in on our last meeting. Hopefully I will be able to put something up in the next few months.

~Parker

Sailing Through The Pandemic

Hibiscus, Kuawai, March 2020

 

It is easy to get caught up with the swirl of emotion that is gripping the world right now, and with what has recently taken place with the events surrounding Covid-19,  the George Floyd death and the fallout from that, it gets hard to keep perspective. I will say, though, that being impacted by what has been taking place in the wake of the events in Minnesota are important to be touched by. This relates to increasing your level of awareness about what the trials that others who are not like you in terms of race or class go through.  With enough people aware the sheer mass of numbers of people doing this can help press for change.  While this process may be messy and imperfect, here in the States it has become clear that we have not made the kind of progress that our sisters and brothers of color have needed. It is easy, though, to get caught up in the tornado of emotion and to get swept away by it, and then finally to find ourselves in a deep state of division. Everyone on both sides will have a reason for why that division exists and it has mostly to do with something about how values and beliefs are different between those groups.  Regardless of the side, the situation as it is right now often helps to encourage  fear and upset. I have seen a nation gripped by angst, upset, anger, and frustration over conditions in our country, some of which are not immediately changeable (like the President in office) while others are (like treating people unlike you with common decency).

I find it curious how much time my friends spend paying attention to tweets made in the middle of the night by our President and allowing themselves to feed on upset and triggers. Why would you spend so much time on someone who could be gone in a year?  Are you afraid he might win again?  Work to make sure your voice is heard and contribute to campaigns like I did.  I will note, however, that the two people I had hoped might win the nomination in our country did not.  I gave a decent amount of money to both campaigns.  I hoped it would bring change, but it didn’t.  I didn’t lose sleep over it because that is how it is going to go.  This is the direction we are going in. When you can learn to accept things that you wont be able to change, you will sleep better at night.  I hate how I know that gravity is going to make me look old, but I don’t let that worry rob me of sleep or peace.

It is important to learn how to cultivate calm.  Not forced calm. It is important how to learn how to be aloof.  This calm aloof nature does not mean that you don’t care, it means that you are not prepared to have your peace and joy taken from you because you dipped into the well of unresolvable human emotion.  The fact remains that a tweet by Trump will not itself resolve itself on your terms. I know he is a buffoon, so why would I act surprised by what he says?  It’s like hoping gravity will somehow be negated one day and everything will change because I wanted it to.  Pish! Nor will similar words of his spoken or written by others ever resolve in a way that you want.  No, clearly, it is important for being at peace to learn to find it on your own terms without having to rely on anyone to provide that for you. This is an inside job.  Only you can do it.  People will be people, the world will spin and events will unfold.  Are you willing to allow the upset of others and your perceived ignorance that they embody to turn over your own boat on what could have otherwise been calm waters? Do what you can do, help those that you can help, and then be at peace knowing you did what you could do.  If you tilt at powers beyond your orbit, you will tend to come up upset, you just will.

It is useful to consider this quote:

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kind-hearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings you,
and when death comes, you are ready.
—Tao Te Ching, 16

 

I know how hard it can be to get swept up in fear and to have that fear rule you.  But what is your fear based on?  Are you afraid of catching Covid-19?  It could help to educate yourself about it, to read widely and to make sure that you are sourcing your information beyond merely mainstream media.  Why?  Some have come forward to point out that the deaths from Covid-19 are in fact more in line with flue and other deaths each year in he United States. On a pure numbers level, so far at least, the numbers and the severity of the pandemic has itself appears to have been hyped by many in the news.  I know how unpopular this assertion will be with most of you, and you might think that I am off base.  Now of course it is possible that we in the States will not act in a careful way as a group and the virus will spread more.  It’s possible.  Covid is real, and it is a real concern that we each need to treat with care and awareness, but this does not mean that it should rob you of your joy or peace.

When there was a lot of mixed messages being sent about Covid-19 in the early months of its spread, I was finding that there were those arguing about the efficacy of face masks.  Fauci himself has come forward to explain that he and others cautioned Americans against using the M-95 masks for fear that those in the medical industry would run out.  The problem here is that this caused news to spread that masks were not as useful as had previously been thought.  This then led to a debate about masks that continues to the current day.  OSHA recently released a statement explaining that masks reduce oxygen levels to what they consider to be unsafe levels and that this needed to be understood.  What all of this has served to do is to create an atmosphere of uncertainty for many people, and with uncertainty comes fear.  Keep reading, keep educating yourself, but expand your reading beyond mainstream media because as I said in my previous post, the mainstream media, now owned by about six billionaires, has its own financial interests that serve to keep them from reporting as truthfully about they news as we might need them to.

Absent this, after having traveled half-way across the world recently at the earliest stages of the Covid pandemic, I saw how I had been in airports and locations where the virus was actively spreading in large numbers.  I kept to myself, I washed my hands and I exercised care and awareness about touching my face and all of those very basic things. Had I gotten Covid?  As far as I can tell, no. Was I asymptomatic?  Possibly, but I wouldn’t know that for sure without a test, and the testing itself has been questioned in terms of its accuracy.  So I did what I knew was best to do:  I stayed home.  I made strategic trips and then relaxed and used my solitude to meditate, to do breath-work and to find my center of peace.  I found that this was an excellent opportunity for me to cultivate this peace I am talking about.  I allowed myself to be still, to do nothing.  This reminded me of many of the cornerstone moments during my initial awakening experience, say, five years in.  I had allowed my mind to become much more busy since then, cluttered, even. this was a call back to the woods of my deeper self.  What a wonderful opportunity! While the world seemed to be burning, I was finding calm.

I was able to go to my studio and work alone. Well, truth be told, this wasn’t all that different from before because most of the time I work alone.  I was able to get caught up on work, to focus on getting ahead post-pandemic. I saw the silver lining and how if I could be careful financially, I could turn this into a win.  Unfortunately, not everyone has been so lucky.  For some folks they are out of a job without a sense of what they will get when they go back to looking again.  Others seem to have sunk into a deep morass of sorts emotionally.  There is always hope.

Limit Your Social Media Exposure

One important strategy has been to limit my exposure to social media.  I run my business on social media, but I just found that by ignoring my own personal accounts, I could focus on my artwork.  There, it is an island of calm filled with beauty.  My personal page might scrutinize what this or that leader may be saying or doing, but I have this one island where none of this ever even comes up.  The people who follow me now seem to like that….a lot.  I get to be one of the messages on social media that is positive.  It isn’t that I am ignoring what is going on, I just don’t go there.  I don’t.  I know that to discuss it would invite discord and infighting.  I have seen a lot of it already.  People are on weird hair triggers lately, it seems.

The Power of Gratitude

There is a feeling, an emotion almost that I find is critical to authentic joy and that is gratitude.  By being able to find gratitude in any moment, the self is transported to an entirely different place.  Joy grows there.  By being willing to let others freak out and be in an uproar, I could allow others to feel what they needed to feel.  I just didn’t need to feel that range of emotion.  I didn’t need to tune in or tap into that well of uncertainty, anger, frustration, chaos and fear.  There is this sense in some people that if you aren’t caught up in these same feelings of others that you somehow don’t care.  No, that isn’t it.  I do care, but I have found that it does not good riding the same merry-go-round as everyone else because doing that never gets me anywhere.

So bliss swells within me.  I often feel more remote, alone, but I remind myself that the whole business of awakening is itself a solitary act of reclaiming my sovereignty as a person.  I don’t need to feel as others feel in order to understand what they are going through.  I just don’t need to have those emotions as part of my journey to awareness and innermost change.  I grow more simple, and I grow more happy.  I am so grateful to even be here seeing all of this take place.  I know that this will all lead to change most likely, and I place my mind on how I would like to see that change manifest.  I remain hopeful, but I will also accept what comes instead of railing against it.  If the change is not deep enough, then it just means that we keep pressing for change. The more of us all saying the same thing, the more likely it is to change.  There are forces behind our systems of finance who want very much to keep the apple cart upright, so it may not all happen overnight.  I am well aware of the strands of consciousness on the planet that would like to keep the system as it is for the simple reason that it serves their needs.  Chop wood, haul water: more work needs to be done.

Breathe

So breath work is an amazing tool to help alter how you feel.  It has the benefit of bringing you to a state of deep calm in short order if you do the breathing the right way.  Also, alternating nostril breathing, which consists of holding one nostril closed while you breath in through one nostril for a series of breaths (say four, for instance) and then alternating with the other nostril for another round of four breaths in can be amazingly helpful.  Also, the speed with which you breathe is important, too.  I have noticed that the breathing that creates the greatest calm for me is the same kind of breath that I take when I am sleeping.  I suspect that when you breathe like this you are sending a signal to the brain that you are in fact calm.  You might not be, but the trick in all of this is that you can trick your brain into changing all of the signals for chemical production in the body that will then support a calmer state.  This means dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and other feel-good drugs that the body produces.  The way you breathe is by drawing in a long slow breath in, hold that breath for a couple of seconds and then exhale long and low until your lungs empty of air.  Then, just like at full breath, you pause for a moment before taking the next lung-full of air. By breathing in this way, you set up the signals that you are calm.  And it will calm you.  In fact, if you feel upset and simply sit down and do this exercise for four or five minutes you may just realize that you have forgotten what it was you were upset about before!  If you do find yourself in just such a place, examine how you feel and that particular state you are in.  I bet you will find that it is sooo different from your usual form of focus.  Yep; being a little defocused can help you to be calm and at peace. The problem was that you thought you had to be hypervigilant.

Length of time is also another important factor in getting good results from breath work.  I have found three to four minutes will do it for me quite well when I am upset. That length is shorter.  Sometimes I can take just a few breaths and feel renewed.  Try it and see how you can put this powerful technique to work for you.

Change Your Mind

Learning to train the mind to not constantly obsess is also an important skill to have.  To do this, it will probably most often mean diverting your attention away from what is bothering or upsetting you, and then allowing yourself to feel differently.  I know that this might seem a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but really, it is just a firm decision that you make and then you use your imagination to get you there.  That’s right you heard me say: use your imagination.  The truth is, the way a yogi or yogini will change their state of mind is through posture, breathing, and also how they use their imagination. What does imagining yourself in a beautiful flower garden do for you?  What does imagining sitting on the beach do?  Begin to imagine your happy place and use that to help shift and change your desire to go into repetitive thought and emotional patterns.  You can do this, and once you try and begin getting results, it can begin to snowball.  If you keep with it regularly, you will find within a certain amount of time (it might take a few weeks so be patient) that your mind is more calm and you are less vigilant and feeling fearful.  We have been a population all worrying about a brick falling from the sky and killing us.  I don’t think that a brick falling from the sky would be something you would see coming, so is it really something you should be worrying about?  Covid is like this. Do what you can.  Be careful, wash your hands, wear a mask, do all the things that will lower your chances of getting the virus, but does it help you any to constantly worry about catching it?  I would bet that you may have even imagined what it might be like if you caught the virus, how it would impact your life, and how you might feel, circling the drain of your life.  There are far better uses of your imagination, I can tell you.  Drink up this life while you have it. Others are now long gone long before they should have probably died, and you are still here.  Celebrate that.  Some things will be out of our control, but practice what you can that is in your control and then stop letting the unknowns rob you of the present moment, which is the point of power in your life.

Eat Good Food/Sing/Listen To Great Music

Take care of yourself.  Eat simply, you can, on a budget.  Let the economic uncertainty be.  Cook beans and rice and dress it up from time to time.  Be in nature.  Burn sweetgrass, sage, and copal.  Write, sing, create art and music. Listen to music that soothes you, lifts you up, and helps you to flush your system of what might feel like toxic emotions. It will all help!  Express yourself however best suits you.  It is still a wonderful world and you can feel wonderful within it.

For me, this pandemic has been a wonderful opportunity for me to go within, to examine, and to work on my inner peace.  It’s been great and it has helped me to keep my head.  In every bad situation there is always something positive to come out of it.  After years of reading why it is so beneficial to invest in a down market, I finally was able to do so recently. Most often people try to catch an investment wave after it has already gained steam and as a result they often lose out, always chasing after one bubble after another. By patiently waiting and then being ready,  doing this one simple thing resulted in my net worth nearly doubling within a very short time. When you consider that many are in uncertainty economically, being able to have this one small silver lining is a blessing.  I zig when others zag.  I did that not out of emotion, but through a calm state of awareness.  You can do the same kinds of things with other events, too, and it can bring you a better result than if you were just carried away by emotion.

While others fear what they will be doing next year, I am working on building awareness of my business in a way I have never done before.  I am doing this cheaply and carefully, yes, but wisely.  I am designing new work, some of which is made to be affordable for my customers.  I want to help them, not soak them financially.  They will return the favor with their excitement and gratitude.  That is a good life to have, in my estimation. Doing what you love and living a good life filled with peace and gratitude. In time I have found that the more you cultivate this the less prone you will be to worry and fear.  Fear is the mind killer.  Isn’t that what Frank Herbert wrote in his novel Dune?  Isn’t it better to have a heart filled with gratitude and love instead of fear? It is all a choice, and you get to decide.  What you decide in the moment will tell the story of your life.  You get to write that script. You can change all of this at any time. You can even choose to ignore what I am telling you if you want!  How cool is that?

I hope the very best for you, I do.  If you find yourself in times of trouble, try putting a few of these practices into play and see how you do.  I wish you all the best! Once again I will provide you with the quote I used earlier as a reminder for how to be:

Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kind-hearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings you,
and when death comes, you are ready.
—Tao Te Ching, 16