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/

 

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My Interview With Ian

The interview with Ian is now up and is now permanently installed on its own page, which you will see along the header for the blog.  My thanks to Ian for being willing to go along with this project. I hope that it helps folks gain a broader perspective based on those who have been going through it.  ❤

 

The Interviews

Sunset over St Marks Nature Preserve, Wakulla County Florida. Copyright Parker Stafford 2018

 

Several years ago I decided to interview people who had experienced awakening for inclusion on this blog.  This was an effort to help bring the perspective of those who have experienced the phenomenon to the fore in order to help others who have gone through this life changing event to gain perspective, understanding, and perhaps greater awareness. I have recently published two of those interviews and they have been given their own page which are located under the header at the top of the page.

 

It is hard to know how much awakening can change your life.  It is like a quantum leap into the unknown.  It is bewildering.  It crowns just as it crucifies.  Navigating it is at once easy, difficult, with old rules now completely out the window.  It leaves many feeling scattered to the four winds sometimes, and yet it is also a saving grace.  It is powerful medicine.  Many awaken without a background in any philosophy or religion to provide a framework for the experience.  My sense, as it was perhaps my own experience, that we have much more to learn from awakening when we don’t have those frameworks in place. This is for the simple reason that we face the phenomenon without preconceived notions of what it is that we are experiencing.  We don’t get “captured” by the “rules” of other groups who, I note, have been unable to glimpse the larger potential that awakening offers us. While the experience happens in every culture and corner of the world, there is also a rising tide within the Christian church, factions of it, who would paint this as an inauthentic experience, what is called a “counterfeit spirit.”  Sadly, there are those who would resist the universality of this experience and they do so out of nothing more than ignorance.  The only way to deal with ignorance is with education, with information, and with what we find to be true (rather than what we believe) from direct experience.

 

There are plenty of frameworks that do speak of awakening and many of them wind up, for me at least, to include just as much belief as they include factual information, which to my mind makes it a mixed bag.  To know the truth, it seems, we have to go beyond what the masses are saying about it in order to learn to trust our own experience.  This is a lonely proposition and can put us at odds with the mainstream (like Advaita or Neoadvaita for example).  While awakening has very specific symptoms and signs, it leads us to an awareness that places us in a whole new kind of mind and heart space.  This can be a lonely road for many of us.  The interviews reminds you that you are not alone, that you are part of what appears to be a growing number of people waking up all around the same time frame.  Curious, perhaps purposeful, we can each learn from each other.  This is my hope.

 

My hope,too, is that we can build a library of these interviews for the assistance of anyone wanting to learn more about the experience, be they curious or an “experiencer” themselves.  If you have had an awakening and would like to add your voice to the chorus, your interview is welcome here.  Interviews are kept anonymous if you wish, but very real people are behind them.  You can simply respond in the comments section and I will arrange to receive your answers to the questions (which are just a jumping-off point) for inclusion here.  I am interested in whatever insight that you feel that you have, regardless of what others may say about awakening (or even myself) because we all have a lot to learn.

The Anatomy Of A Synchronicity

It is so personal, the synchronicity, isn’t it? Try explaining the synchronicity that you had that blew your mind to someone, and you often get a less-than satisfying realization about just how personal these events are. You really really needed to “be there” for sure.

Since Carl Jung helped to bring the subject into popular awareness with his coining of the term and even describing some of his impossible events that he filed under the term synchronicity, we have become fascinated with what these events are all about.  I have been observing them now for years and at a particular point in my awakening when energy was at its highest, I was able to observe how synchronicties were happening all over the place, some on the order of one every few minutes.  I saw how synchronicity appeared to be tied to the level of the energy. No one was talking about this, and it led me to digging into the subject more to see what I could find.

I began by reading Carl Jung’s book on the subject. What I found was that Jung appeared to not make any correlations with our ability to possibly involve our own psychic energy in events, which brings about the synchronistic event. Jung’s work was carefully observant, but it also stopped short of calling it what I thought it was, which is a kind of collaborative event. Just the idea that thoughts could effect events is itself a huge discovery for any researcher, right?

The nature of a synchronicity is its relevance to you, and how private the meaning is. It is private because as is so often the case, the meaning of an event exists in the fact you have not told anyone about the thought that the event is tied to. It is often utterly private in nature, which of course is what makes all of this happening in the way that it does, so uncanny, so exciting, and so utterly amazing. It can seem as though the world of events or the universe is somehow able to read your mind, or that your thoughts get projected into events that then come back to you….. like a boomerang. It is as if the universe got sentient for a moment and began communicating to you through events.  Is it possible that the universe is actually sentient so that what I just said isn’t far-fetched, but very possibly the case?

It is widely known that awakenings and synchronicities are correlated. As a person who has experienced awakening, I am very interested in understanding the phenomenon better from observable phenomenon (not merely speculation). Sometimes when we see two things together we want to draw a correlation to them, but sometimes we can wind up drawing the wrong one. In social science there is this lesson I was taught when taking sociology courses in college. The caution goes like this: a researcher is looking into house fires and sees that fire trucks are almost always present during house fires so the researcher surmizes that fire trucks are what’s causing the house fires.

Synchronicities, in my observation, happen when we are aligned to the energy we call kundalini. The more prana we have, the more these events happen.  This is one important data point I would like to pass on to you. I found that I could chart the rise and fall of synchronicity as the energy rose and fell in my own private experience.  It led me to suspect that there was a relationship between prana and the synchronistic event (besides the fact that those who awaken begin experiencing them all over the place). My observation is that prana (which is precisely what kundalini is) amplifies thought so that these significant thoughts get materialized quickly.

I have found that there is something really important in terms of how synchronicity is related to our own energy fields. The more (energy) we have, the more synchronicities occur. In fact, the stronger the energy, the more rapidly they have come. Let me point out that there was a period of time when I was having extraordinarily powerful energy flow, and that the energy reached such a pitch that I was tingling, vibrating in an overt way. It was when the energy reached this unusualy high level that I noticed that synchronicities were correspondingly higher. This was a noticed and repeated event. I was able to see how synchronicities dropped off just as the energy calmed down. I observed this over many months and scores of times.

My observation has been that events of all kinds come to quicker manifestation once the threads of self are touched by awakening (or by more prana or chi). I will admit to you that for a very long time I had this sense ever since I was young that the more energy that we could realize in our consciousness, the more our reality would appear to change or be impacted by this energy. Maybe it was so ething I learned from another lifetime, but it certainly was there ever since I was very small (age three for certain). Long before my awakening I noticed that whenever I got in this groove where I was in touch with my innermost self and there was an uninterupted flow of unusually high psychic energy, events had this uncanny quality about them. I thought of it as being in a magic zone where events happened more in accord with what was in my mind. It also felt effortless and that the events that happened would come to me and bring me things that were most needed in my life at the time. This was so clear to me that I began meditating because of it, developing a method of meditating that involved feeling my energy (because feeling my energy put me close to it in awareness and also because this also led to the energy increasing). I used this method for years, right up until awakening came, during which time I practiced a new meditation method thathelped push me over the edgeinto awakening.

As we align to our inner energetic potential, I think that the twin energies that make up prana (and by extension kundalini) increases  and they serve each of us as engines of creation. Sound prosaic? I don’t think it is at all. In fact, the more aligned the twin energies of the yin and yang were in me, the stronger the incidence of synchronicity was for me. And what is synchronicity but a significant event that comes to you that is tied to something meaningful (maybe you were thinking about something on a given topic one moment only to have it rise up couched in the context of an event in your life over which you had no involvement….its just happening to you, around you, but certainly completely outside of your control).

Now I will indulge in something, take it for what you will, but it too is based on my own observation from early awakening. This is that prana or qi is a creative energy. This creative energy is expressed not in narrow terms in consciousness, but is expressed throughout the organism such that we can see its effects. It stimulates the body to help heal it physically, it increases sexual energy (a way to create in the physical by making babies), and it also increases creative energy as we normally think of it manyfold. We like to think of sexual energy as all by itself. In my meditations when I go to its root, I find that sexual energy and all other forms of creativity return or emerge from the same source, and they spread widely, being translated into different channels but still riotously orgasmic and blissful when felt in abundance. This is a great primordial energy that feels as though it exists at a much deeper level or a foundational layer within the field of awareness that makes up a vast entity that I suppose one could call God or the Tao.

The nature of this force has suggested to me that our world is alive with creative energy, and that we create our reality moment by moment based on our beliefs about what that reality is or should look like. I also have found that the more narrow your beliefs are about life, the fewer possibilities can be created. In awakening it is possible to drop what you previously believed as truth to become more open to the possibilities. What happens when you reach a point where anything is possible?

What I am here to tell you is that the anatomy of synchronicity is that synchronicity is part of our creative potential as human beings. Synchronicity is showing you a very novel facet of your own ability to manifest. Here you are, sitting there, and it just comes to you, and you are not controlling it at all. Most are focused on how wild that is. “How could that have happened?” you think. But do you stop to consider that the power behind synchronicity is actually way more, that you can use it to find fulfillment in your life? I observe that synchronicity is fueled by the energies within us, and if something is wanted or thought about clearly and strongly enough, it comes to fruition and that can happen in minutes (as was the case for me many times).

In writing this piece I used an example of how a synchronicity came in three events, all with the same message about a french philosopher Tielhard De Chardin whose ideas were similar to my own. I was actually guided by a series of synchronicities to help resolve what the main thesis of a book I was writing should be about. The story of how it unfolded was hard to believe except that it happened, and in doing so, it was like the universe showing me that all of this is just the tip of a still larger reality-we are only just now learning it seems to tune that other reality into our lives, this creative aspect which is inhibited by our shame but unleashed by our willingnness to embrace the orgasmic bliss that it brings.

namasté

In The Shadow Of The Light

In my last entry I described a meditation I got caught up in that resulted in strong light activity, a phenomenon often tied to awakening experiences. After what was a very productive session, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit the meditation again to see if I could continue with the work. This time was decidedly different, but was oddly similar to the movie about the after death experience “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams. In a similar way, it was also a bit like the movie “Inception” too. This was due to the lucidity present throughout the experience, I think.

When I say my meditation was like a movie, it’s not lost on me that there was an undercurrent of drama, hinting at a subsumed emotional energy, like a great big question lying in hidden veils at the center of some great edifice that kept coming up and up, over and over. But this meditation took me deep while awake, and then took me into dream, while I alternated between lucidity and full-on dream state and forgetfulness of earthbound ego awareness. This time, instead of brilliance, I delved deep into the shadow.

I have tended to see awakening taking on this kind of cycle; a moment of brilliance followed by a deep dredge of the muck as though one serves to bring up the other. It isn’t perhaps why many people misunderstand the power that awakening contains. It’s not all rainbows. It is more about clearing, cleansing, and it can be hard on you to do this kind of delving. I know it’s not fun for me….but it always comes with a reward that is forever reaped, an inheritance that remains perennial.

I slipped into the deep state. This part is the easy part. It’s being able to remain lucid enough inside such a deep lovely swirling eddy of energy and not lose consciousness, especially when it’s at the end of the day and you are ready for bed. I remained neutral, not seeking to do anything since the intention was already placed. I just had to wait for the subconscious and higher self to do their part. I was along as a witness to what would unfold. My cat lay next to me, again, purring softly, a few snorts as she drifted either deep or up out of her own deep sleep. This time, she would project right into my lucid dream, acting as a reminder to remember why I was there.

I wound up inside a dream. It was night and I was walking around an old house that I remembered having dreamed of years before in another shadow work dream at an earlier stage in my progress. Nowadays, dream imagery and its meaning tends to be much more direct or understandable than it ever was before awakening. For me, a house represents the construct of human consciousness. It is an image that Jesus often used, too, and it has been a consistent image each time I dream of it. In one dream I might be in a house, in another, a warehouse, or in one, I stood on the streets of a city as I observed the roots of some massive tree or plant that was growing in a large building, revealing its roots as it emerged through cracks in a deep stairwell….an image that spoke to me of the work that remained to be done in the root chakra, the foundation.

Last night, it was that same old haunted house. It had the weight of ghosts, of lives and people who had lived inside of it and now it lay abandoned. A moment of lucidity began to build and I felt myself dream while kicking into meditation all awareness simultaneously. The last time I was here, the dream ended with me discovering that I could lift up into the air; a clear indication of my letting go and allowing the organic force flow through me. I lifted up into the treetops. This time, though, I was solidly grounded. I pondered what else was there to clear out, to resolve in this tumble of an old home? It was in its own slanted way, a great life, but it wasn’t my life today, but one lived a long time ago. All of this was emblematic of the work I had left incomplete in that previous life, and here I was, having to set it right, to give it that moment of forgiveness it so needed in order to be free.

The house lay in a depression, between two sloping meadows. It must have been a lovely sight in its heyday, but it was lying in moonlight and was ramshackle. The large wrapping porch had sunk in, taking a wing of the roof with it. You could see into its interior and as I made my way around it, I realized how much it lay in shadow. “If there is to be light here, I am the one who must bring it…” I realized.

Just as I thought this, I felt myself lift and the dream fall away from me. I was warm in bed, and only had a moment to ponder as, like a swimmer, I went right back in, grabbing a quick breath as the waves of sleep lapped over my head and everything went muffled and I lost ordinary waking consciousness, trusting that I would find myself again on the other side.

I was walking in yet another building, another old house, and this time I was inside it. There was no light, and windows down the hall and into a large outer room were painted over a kind of greenish color. Drapes hung in tatters, and there was a drip of water that made a smacking sound as each drop filled a puddle on the wooden floor, now a wash of sepia in the dark of the night. I remembered this house, too. This was one I didn’t like at all. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in in forty years. Nothing was bright about this place, it had a dank and decaying feeling to it. I kept walking though, wondering if I would find something that would mean I had broken through to something. I noticed kitty was with me. She has a name, but she knows kitty best. Sometimes she is monkey, sometimes Georgette. There she was, her tail flicking upwards. I could hear her thoughts, wondering why we were here, then immediately realizing that she was in my dream. She settled in after that and began following alongside me with less trepidation. She predicted that we wouldn’t be here long,and she was right. I surfaced yet another time out of sleep and felt my deep breathing. It was like being awake, but feeling the spell of dreaming still all around me.

The answers didn’t come in the usual fashion. So much of these places represented aspects of myself from the past, mostly distant, unresolved, lying unseen, needing badly to be seen. They had a surrealistic quality to them. I felt that edge of…fear, dread, and yuck about it. But that was exactly why I had to go back into these old haunts. I wasn’t there seeking to do what a guide once admonished me never to do, which was to try and drag it back into my life again. No, this was different. The idea that I had to carry the light into these darker corners was what this was all about.

Awakening is ruthless. You can’t bullshit yourself. Only when it’s completely clean, clear, forgiven, can things be forgotten. Until our inner compass is satisfied, we wind up going back to those places to sweep that little remaining bit of shadow away. I felt like I was ingesting it, taking it in so that I could metabolize it into light. Kitty stirred and looked at me through blinking eyes, sleepily, her head up, then back down, nonchalantly falling back in for another round of sleep. This felt like it was turning into a tag team wrestling match, dipping into lucid dreaming using meditation as the launching pad.

I kept at this all night in a marathon of visitations, never knowing where I would end up next, but in each case it was some long forgotten building, some old remnant that I have inherited in this go-round and am tasked with emptying of what is less than it’s best. Like  a big cleaning. You know how it is. You pull out the big stuff and haul it away, and with each time you go back, the particles get finer and finer until you go from sweeping up the last bits to wiping up the dust. This is all old business, an old self, a past life, and it’s now being brought forward.

I thought about that first house I dreamed of in the months before awakening came. It was all so much brighter, more optimistic. A road led up a hill with a creek running beside it. The creek grew stronger the closer I got to its headwaters, which revealed how this wasn’t an ordinary body of water. It was prana itself, filled with symbols and brilliant. How could water be so bright? Climbing the hill, on the right, was a beautiful arts and crafts meets Zen monastery. Built from large beams, the building interlocked, revealing its construction. Stone rose up through its middle, and when you walked inside you could clearly see two fountains inside, split down the middle, representing the Ida and Pengali currents with the Shushuma in the middle. That was my house, my temple, a place that was more than just home, but was who I was. It still is. But since that time, I have had to venture out into the past in order to heal it and cleanse it. Actually, I can’t even say it is I who does this; clearly my earthbound self isn’t up to this, but something deeply rooted in me is. It is this part of me that teaches, reveals, redeems, and ressurects. I wish dream could be brighter sometimes, but there are plenty of regular dreams that are, and besides, digging into shadow always resolves some deeper sense of feeling ill at ease in me.

It would be great if I could offer some grand finale, but an ending is itself a beginning, a new thread is discovered and it’s then followed through until something big is exposed from the rubble. Another chapter is begun even as additional chapters emerge. Over time, what I have found, is the gradient becomes finer and finer. It actually gets harder to keep the shoulder to the grind stone sometimes. It’s easier…the energy is less turbulent and it doesn’t stir me in the same way. But what I also find is that in some ways it’s a little easier simply because so many blocks have been removed. The blocks have gotten harder, but the level of confidence has been forged in the flame of awakening. As if that makes any kind of sense, right? The easy stuff came away first, and when I put myself into energy work like Chi Gong, material cascaded away, and this continued for years. Thousands of blocks, I figure, big and small, always burrowing down deeper and deeper.

For me, the hardest blocks lay deep down. For me, the root was where the hardest wounds lay. And despite all of this, I was able to manifest truly remarkable opportunities in my life, and when I was ready, events have simply fallen into place. When I was ready to fund the next phase of my life after a collapse of the markets, I waited, keeping my wealth in assets I could relate to, which was real estate. Even though I saw half the value of my property evaporate, it also came back during a confluence of events when I was ready to make my next step. Wanting in truth to sell directly to a buyer instead of a realtor, my soon-to-be realtor cancels when she gets too busy with a market which suddenly was going crazy. Deciding to sign papers for representation in another three days, I’m contacted by a family who heard through the grapevine that I was going to list my house soon. They asked if they could buy it directly from me, an outcome which I had wished for in my heart. While taking a nap hours before I would speak to them on the phone, I see them in a meditative state, not knowing that they would be talking to me later that day. Before I was set to sign papers with my realtor for representation, they brought a contract. I was able to sell to a family who had loved my house for years and were having trouble even seeing homes because of how hot the market had heated up within months.

Now it might be a big question what this has to do with my work. What I have found is that as each block is removed, so too are the blocks to manifesting the events in my life that support what needs to come next. This isn’t for me about chasing wealth, but finding my own inner abundance, which is less about money as it is about opportunity and helping to make others lives better. There is so much feeling of loss and lack, and for years I too fell for this feeling. But often, the things I chased after weren’t the things that would have been good for me. That was why they were hard. What is easy comes like magic. These things emerge in perfect timing. Life is increasingly different as the years roll, and as the air clears. Life is more a series of serendipitous events that have purpose and flow, pushing some old block to the surface, or leading to the next step. Something bigger is in control. That might sound superstitious, but it’s not. As division falls away, there is a marriage of the small self with something larger within. This is about bridging the gap and clearing the way for this to happen, and it’s not done halfway or half-assed. How’s that for mystical musing?

Whatever it will be for you, getting out from underneath the tangles holding you back, is what brings the change. For now, the work continues, and who knows what is around the corner.

Do You?

Do you think that this was going to be easy

this love I bear in you?

Everything else

is like a mad scramble

like the screams of monkey’s in the trees

-it is how the mind is.

 

Sink into forgetfulness

and into the bliss

a warm buoyant presence

rises up all around

it makes others so ripe.

 

So you chase after me

day after day.

I know how hard it can be sometimes

this vagabond life you lead

having given up so much

for nothing else but this one thing

that rings through everything.

Like a vast thread

with no beginning or end,

constantly being thread through a needle

-desire drives it forth.

 

But just as you chase after me,

I turn ’round and chase after you;

mirror and reflection find their union

in a sweet simple embrace

of equal measure of fire and coolness

that breeds the incorruptible beauty

that we all know

but cannot adequately express.

 

I am waiting for you

there

here

under the vast sky of your morning

as you squint into the new day

and I ride under your feet

like a magical carpet

delivering you

reveling in your touch

abiding here as always

with no answer

nor question

but this abiding taste

that lingers on your lips

and bears within the swing of your hips

and sway of your arm…

 

I am here to show you beauty

yes

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

and that dwells in your heart.

I am here to show you the greatest love there is

it is what I was destined to bear to you since

forever was a child…

but we must work to set it right

so that the beauty of this moment can be known

fully

without reservation

or regret

or doubt

or shame

or sadness…

 

I wrap myself ’round all of these

for you

and it is my mere presence that dissolves them

just as soon as you are ready to let them fall

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

 

I know it is hard for you.

I know the strain

the pain

the sadness

the empty void…

but one by one

like soldiers

I redeem them

with the sweetest kind of joy.

You grow from old to young

like a vast wheel turning backwards

until all the strain is wound out of it.

I am here with you until the end

which is only the beginning.

 

I am the force that revives

the one who opens you

and shows you

the flower within

and the great light

that those petals long to touch

arching upward and outward

a great kind of beauty is coaxed…

 

I am beyond names

and beyond all recognition,

the sweetest mystery

that all of you yearn to swim deep into

and become lost in

so that you might be found.

Adrenaline

You know that pranic movement leads to greater awareness of subconscious material. You know that prana brings awareness. 
So inevitably there is a point in awakening when all manner of hard emotions gets dredged up as a result of this. 

One is fear. But fear is very tricky, you see, because of how self-reinforcing it is. It is an emotional trap that can capture a person and keep them imprisoned. 

Some people repress their fear, which leaves what was creating the fear safely hidden deep in the subconscious. 

Sometimes people will only let fear share a small place in their conscious awareness so it does not take them over. Again, the reason for the fear remains like a weed whose leaves sprout up into the conscious self and are tended carefully by the personal will of the self. 

In awakening, though, fear and it’s chemical mirror, adrenaline, can rise up and show itself in all of its powerful glory. In truth, this can be overwhelming. But hang on; ask yourself what is really happening here. What is happening is prana is merely increasing your awareness so that you now feel more of the fear. At this point, though, you are only looking at the branches growing out of your subconscious, with the root of of the problem lying deeper within. You are being shown a problem, you see, and now you need to be able to go deeper to root it out from the subconscious. 

There is a problem with this situation, which is how fear begets more fear. In order to draw it out, you need a steady sense of calm. Adrenaline does not keep you calm. 
You need to learn how to tame the beast first, then draw it out by healing it. You no longer just calm yourself and then try to forget about it, which is what most people do to cope, but use the fear as a huge sign that is telling you right where the fear is. Now, instead of running from it, you wisely use this as a blessing. 

You now have been shown where a wound exists. You know that it revolves around fear, and you can also know what kinds of events serve to activate it by simply observing yourself carefully like an observer.

 In the beginning of this kind of work, what is often felt can be the kind of fear that is primal, utterly irrational. All of this winds up looking like a tangled mess, which it often is, but lying at the core is often a very simple and utterly uncomplicated event that sparked the fear, which is most often a trauma (s) from your past.  You might have no earthly idea where it is coming from. 

Fear that is strong enough and persistent enough can lead to a deep sense of dread, horror, even….with no known cause (especialy when kundalini awakens-even though pranic force will in the end lead you to healing it….but just not immediately if adrenaline has “got” you).

The worst thing you can do is to react to fear. It can leave you feeling like a deer in the headlights. It can lead you to chaotic behavior and it can make your life hellish. Reacting to it, you feed it. You begin triggering the adrenal response with still more adrenaline.

My dark time with adrenaline stretched into months. It was one of the top five hardest parts of kundalini rising. Besides leading to adrenal burnout, collapse, or adrenal failure, it is very hard on your body. I have a good family friend who had to seek medical attention to restart her adrenals after a long continuous bout with fear and anxiety connected to her awakening experience. However, conquering fear is one of the biggest victories in an awakening because fear robs you of energy that could be used for things like it’s opposites such as love and joy. Love cannot properly grow and flourish when fear and its counterpart hatred are taking up your attention.

Most fear is irrational for the very fact that when you are working from a trauma in the past, fear can color everything you see and blinding you from seeing the world as it is. When you are sitting in the quiet of your room trying to meditate and all you can feel is that piercing pain down deep into the core of you, all you are doing is dredging up feelings from the past. To heal the past, you must bring awareness into the moment. The fear might not be connected to anything in particular, but you will still need to learn how to recognize it in order to move on. This can be the alchemical moment where a giant ball of “yuck” gets transmuted into bliss. Yes, really. So how to do this?

Learn to bring forward and cultivate the Witness. Stand back and watch. See what slight deviation in feeling can shift you out, even for a moment, of fear and adrenaline. Over and over, watch what you are doing to break the adrenaline train. If you are caught in a recursive pattern of fear, you might need to study this in small snatches, those moments when you feel adrenaline subside. Watch and ask yourself what was it that caused the shift to happen. You might have to spend days, weeks even, of watching when these subsidences happen and then identify what it was that did it for you.  Then you can learn to direct your mind to different feeling states that bring on greater bliss and train your mind to remain there for longer and longer periods. Leave healing the source of the fear for now because once you can feel bliss, the issue that caused the fear may naturally dissolve, or you will be naturally guided to how to heal it when you are ready. If you have experience with awakening then surely you have experience with this particular phenomenon.

You want to find ways to lessen the adrenal response, and in the beginning, anything that gives you relief is good (short of medicating yourself-this only delays the process of inner transformation). Watch what shifts you out of the fear and duplicate it in order to extend it. This is for cases of extreme adrenal response. You need a coping mechanism so that you can later deal with the root cause of the fear. Your body will follow you like an obedient shadow.

By feeling this deeply, your body is washing itself of fear, but it is you who must root out the fear locked in the body and tell yourself that this fear is only in the past. This moment now is entirely new.
Over time you train yourself how to step out of fear. 

Surrender can help, but this can be tricky at first. Sometimes it can feel impossible to break out of the cycle because it can be so overwhelming. If adrenaline is this bad, it is important to be able to trigger bliss. Surrender can sometimes feel like you will just make it worse. What is true is that by resisting (anything) emotionally, bliss can turn into a nightmare. I know how crazy this sounds. But part of bliss includes healthy adrenal output. Dopamine all on its own will leave you so dreamy and blessed out that you won’t be able to focus on anything except the bliss. A small bit of adrenaline is an accompaniment to the awakened state, but if you have latent fear, the adrenals can shift into high gear and stay there, overpowering the dopamine high and bringing such terrible feelings. It is here that you can manifest paranoia, which is a problem all its own.

Breath work is something that can be very useful in breaking the fear. This breath needs to be slow, deep, and even . I began mimicking the type of breathing I noticed in sleeping people. It worked very well. Alternating nostril breath can be very helpful, and has been used for centuries to stimulate and balance prana through the two channels of yin and yang energies (Ida and Pengali). Try four slow breaths in and out per nostril, holding each nostril closed as you do this, repeating this four times. Continue this at least four times. 
Cranial Sacral massage is very good at getting you relaxed and going deep.

When you get in a fix with adrenaline and fear, believing you need to stay there to soak it in is poppy-cock. The only purpose these negative states serve is to help you in not feeling them anymore. That’s right-flee the building as soon as possible. You will be able to release this fear once adrenaline has moderated.

Music can help, guided imagery for relaxation, and even eating have all been ways I have been able to step out of the pain of the fear body. Climb out and don’t look back. Later, you can release any block you need, but for most people, doing this while the body is in full flame is very difficult. If you respond from a place of fear, you won’t be able to release anything. You will just marinate in it. Once you conquer fear, you can then release the “split” or block.

So often, it is fear alone that keeps you locked in a recursive loop that has to be broken before substantive change can happen. If the block is in you and you are afraid of it, you won’t be able to do this release work.You will simply fear the block too much.

There are other therapies for dealing with fear, adrenaline, and kundalini, and these are included in my blog under adrenaline. Do a search and you will find much more.

If you are experiencing adrenal overload, it’s not easy, but it can teach you a high level of mastery over what appears to be involuntary.

~P.

The Secret Of The Samscara

What divides you is keeping the fullness of awakening from being known within you. What divides you keeps not just your mind in seperation, but it keeps your whole self seperated to one degree or another.

The term “samscara” is a Sanskrit word that means “soul scar” and this scar lies at the foundation of our feelings, motivations, and actions in the world. The soul scar divides the self from being completely whole, aware, and unified to its origin. Many might think that this scar is the sum total of what has been done to us that has caused hurt or pain. In truth, the samscara is created out of our own reflection on the world, and arises out of the contrast between our expectations of the world and how the world actually is. This is the source of all suffering. But this is an inner event that takes place, this perception that things are not how we want them or expect them to be.  
It is a reaction. We in the West fail often to understand how we feel is a choice. We think it is just how we are made, that we have no choice. People MAKE us feel certain ways. Am I your maker? I make you? No, you make you. Always.

If you take five people and have them each experience the same event, you will most likely get a range of reactions. For the person who has a strong sense of expectation that the event was negative, that person will see it and feel it that way. This feeling will also color how they saw the event for years to come. But for the person who does not have the same level of expectation, there will be much less in the way regarding their perception and feelings about the event as purely negative. It will be much easier for them to see that the event unfolded the way it did because of the limitations that the participants had. It wont be taken personally, but seen more clearly. What is so hard for us is that we want to believe all kinds of things, all perfectly noble and good about how we think the world should be, but the truth, more often than not, is that the world just does not match what we believe inside ourselves. When we are unable to come to terms with this, we remove ourselves from our capacity to forgive and move on. Instead, we are hooked by it. If the contrast within us compared to what’s happening in the world is great enough, it forms a soul scar. It then forms the basis of a stumbling block where we then suffer in big and small ways from then on. The nature of the scar, the suffering, will be activated over and over until it is healed.

The samscara is not just one emotional issue, but is in fact made up of a whole cluster of issues. Whatever your expectations are of the world that the world does not match, will most likely form the basis of  problems for you.

Healing the samscara requires radical honesty about how you feel and react to the world around you. Healing the samscara requires the deepest innermost forgiveness, not of others, but of yourself, for having put yourself into a position where you were less than your truest being. To be this true being means being honest about how you have chosen to suffer. As long as you believe that your suffering comes about by anyone except yourself, you will continue to remain in a maze of your own making, a blend of dharma and samsara (different from samscara)…with your own beliefs about yourself leading the way. I don’t think I need to tell you how difficult this sort of combination is for any of us.

The secret of the samscara lies in how it divides our awareness. If awakening is the result of a merging of our opposites, the samscara is that which keeps  inner union from reaching its fullest possible expression in each of us. Awakening is a partial union, an initiation, and is so rich and intoxicating, that most so touched by it forever seek it. Awakening is just the  water upon our lips, and full union is a wholesale cleansing that allows us to become purer vessels, realized vessels, for this water of life, which we once sipped and found so amazing, so celestial, which now pours through us with perfect peace and acceptance of what is. Curiously, this is where we each can best change the world, not in the perception of division and seperation that the samscara always creates.

The curious things about the samscara is that while it divides, it also becomes the agent for change and transformation. It is the crack that lets in the light. When the pain gets to be too much, something deep within asks the question, is this all that there is? Most often, this is the spark that catalyzes a deeper relationship with the full undivided awareness of self and can lead to the kindling of the creative fire, the powerful flow of prana, that is called kundalini.

Do you see how the image above fractures our being? Our awareness of ourselves as truly whole? Do you see how it stands between the two sides of the energy body? The Ida and Pengali? The yin and yang? Do you see that the samscara is in the center of awareness, blocking out fuller union, fuller embodiment of this higher or more expansive experience of ourselves? Do you see that the samscara, the wound, is also opening to let in the light? Do you also see that the whole self already radiates the light of the totalities?

The samscara is made up  of beliefs. These beliefs are about the world, yes, but they are always fundamentally about you. So often we look to the events in childhood to try and find the genesis of our samscara….but the truth is that the origin of the samscara comes from you. Beyond all time, beyond all cause and effect.

Everyone who awakens speaks at one point or another about how time is an illusion, yet often we do not bother to consider that what happened in our childhood or in later life came from who we are outside of time, in the very spacious present so many espouse being aware of. It is here, in us, that all of our glitches have emerged. Since this involves awareness beyond the world of cause and effect, it is hard for us to embrace this timeless realm from which we each come to be incarnated in bodies here in this world. It also means that all problems begin first in ourselves.
When you can reach into this realm beyond time, you can heal your samscara for all lifetimes. Do it now, and you can feel the tension in the karmic cords it creates through all that you are and all that you have been and will become. It is precisely because it is so total a healing that it is so effective. The effect this will have for you in your evolution is that of a quantum leap.

This is how total we each must learn to be in our own sense of personal responsibility. It is one reason why whenever I tried to get over a hurt I thought someone had caused me, just as I reached into the root of the problem, I always found that it wasn’t the other person who needed  forgiveness, I was always brought to the inner truth of all of it, which was I had to forgive myself. 

This is the radical honesty that emerges when you heal the samscara. We stop seeing ourselves as being at the mercy of others and events for how we feel, and we own up to our part in it. It reverses victimization by bringing the awareness of what we did to create such a weakened dysfunctional condition in ourselves in the first place. This is not blaming the victim, it is stopping being a victim by healing our part in the equation.

We are energetic beings. So many of us are stuck believing that the five senses are all there is to our experience. Awakening shows us that HOW we feel and HOW our consciousness is constructed has a subtle nonphysical effect on what we experience and attract in our lives. You change all of this by changing what you are inside. 

You try to change it by changing where you live, but it follows you. Some things you can change when you want to heal, like not interacting with someone who you feel has hurt you. This is perfectly reasonable and can give you enough breathing room to be honest with yourself about where the old problem lies (within you). But try to initiate another effort to create a new life, without healing the samscara in you, and versions of all the same problems just keep returning. This is the karmic merry go round. What gets you off of it is how you change how you feel and identify with an aspect of your being that is anything less than healed.

Anything that you see that serves to limit your fulfillment in your life is a sign  of something that needs to be set right. There is no one way to do this, but your higher self knows. It will step in and set it right when you can lay ego and the rational mind aside enough for it to enter.
 By going deep within and finding the root of the problem, you can heal it. In so doing, your own inner awareness of what you are will grow and unfold for you. The result of this is that whatever was snagging you or causing you a problem will no longer be there. 

The way to reach the root of the problem is not by the rational mind. You have to use FEELING. This is NOT emotion! This is your intuitive capacity to know the source of all things in you. You do know. You must practice feeling. 

This begins with a willingness to stop thought to any degree that you can, and feel yourself. Then, you feel deeper and deeper. You let go and drift into yourself with a quiet mind and awareness that is present. It is so easy, but so hard to explain. It is like you are visiting a new world, which is your deeper self, and you are along for the ride. You can access material from earliest childhood using this method. Feel it. Don’t judge or resist. It is deceptively easy, and you need to work through your own beliefs that block you from achieving this.

Tips

When you forgive, forgive with all that you are. Imagine the problem seeping out of every corner of your being, top to bottom, like a vibration that is leaving every cell in your body. Breathe deep and slow. Then use a panting breath, like a tiger or jungle cat does. It will move a lot of energy. Close your eyes and imagine that you are floating in a deep blue ocean, unafraid of its depths and willing to drift deep into it.

Pray to Source to see and accept your apology. Offer up this problem, not with a desire to fix it, but to simply remove it. These problems were not created by the rational self so the must be given up without a hint of ever trying to understand them this way. Hand them over to that in you that touches and lives in a higher vibrational state. This is how you transmute all low vibrational problems within you. 

Expect a miracle.

Be open to change. Be like a child; open and ready for the new.
The moment you think you have everything pegged, step back and observe. Do you really? If you are still suffering, there is more work to do.

Stop assuming that you know where you are headed. A higher intelligence is running this if you will surrender control and allow your awareness of its presence to fill your life. It is so much bigger than your awareness that it takes faith, like a child, to be led by it.Y you go from pushing the river to working harmoniously with it. Your doing is now allowing. Do you see? The rational self controls. It is also limited. It cannot begin to dream of what could enter your experience next.

Grace comes by way of matching discipline and faith together as partners in your day to day growth and progress to realization.
When you are stuck, sit quietly in meditation (this can happen anywhere …even while shopping or standing in line) ask to be shown what remains to do. If it doesn’t show up as inner guidance, it will show up as events in your life. Pay attention and see how they are mirroring something inside of you. Then, by witnessing this, not ingratiating yourself with it by being reactive and emotionally invested, ask yourself how you can choose to feel differently. This is how you can actively break the chain of behavior that keeps the samscara active.

Devote yourself to love in its deepest possible expression. When you do this, seperation is dissolved in you. Love unifies. If you feel like a stranger in a strange land, love has the power to heal this. Love does not exist in condition. If you cannot do this with someone in your life, this is a sign that this is a place where more love needs to be in you. It points to a block in you. It works perfectly when you let it.
You cannot control the world, nor make it better by following old methods or paradigms for change. Instead, make yourself the paradise you would like to see in the world. You will wind up seeing all the aspects of this paradise that you had missed previously because of your blinders. If you are paradise, this will have a much better chance of catching on than any campaign sought to change through the mind.
Every part of this forms the basis of my “work” that always, in time, leads to profound healing. I hope that it can help shift your own awareness too. Nemaste.

Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part II

This post is the second installment that is best read in series about how karma creates chemistry and how we can open our lives up to a new horizon, literally a new kind of life by clearing the karmic threads and “debts” which we owe to ourselves as drops in the vast ocean that is consciousness…

 

So I was thinking about how I was able to clear up the karma from this “soul twin” that I had in the beginning of my awakening. I was thinking, too, about  how effortless it was to dissolve the connection that had caused me so much angst as well as bliss.  Mind you, in the beginning, there was this expansive love that I felt as well as this fiery quality that was part of the rush of prana that is kundalini.  This was not an effort at making myself a recluse, but rather that I felt, knew, that this was not all there was.  Most everyone I observed in the “twin” community seemed fairly situated in what I was rapidly feeling was the mythos of the twin flame and comfortable with this view as the twin as “The One.” It was natural, afterall, I had been there, too.  But things were changing for me and I was no longer content with what I saw as a delightful fairy tale, a beautiful story, certainly, but not one that reflected reality.  Yes, I felt the depths of soul love inside of me and I shared this with another, but I also felt the earthly self, both where I was and where she was.  We were oh-so human.

How to deal with this dichotomy, I thought? It seemed to me that this disjuncture was the proof that there was something more at work.  What the twin community was doing, it seemed to me at the time, was the same thing we do when we are putting a puzzle together.  You know those puzzle pieces that LOOK like they fit, but don’t?  I mean those pieces that look exactly like they should fit, but the shape is off so very slightly that you are kind of stumped in that moment?  Yeah, like that.  Now I was watching as some of us were just jamming that puzzle piece into place and saying “good enough!” and going on with it.  I just wasn’t one of those people.  I am a big believer in letting a mystery BE a mystery, yes, certainly, but there is also a time when you ought to use your mind some to roll this thing around, especially when the “mystery” isn’t fitting into any of the discussed paradigms set forth thus far.

I thought about this and wondered what a later soul connection might have involved, and this time around, for soul connection #2 it was similar, but different.  It also involved a miss-identification of responsibility for a host of issues that caused me a lot of hurt and pain with this person, to be quite honest.  I was snagged by this person with her dishonesty, which was very much like my wife before my awakening began.  In fact, I considered at the time that this #2 connection might have been a way to work through what my ex-wife and I had not worked through. They were so similar in some important ways.  Sounds dysfunctional, doesn’t it?  Well, actually, it has turned out that since the two of these people were sooo similar that it has helped a LOT in working through the remaining karmic snags for BOTH.  Despite the fact that something in the back of my head was telling me that what I was being drawn into and WHY I was being drawn into it might well be bad for me.  Different stories, yet so very similar.

The Universe Becomes Your Mirror

In an interesting twist, I have been having a lot of problems popping up with my ex-wife as I have been headed towards the end-game of this soul connection, trouble that she has been initiating all on her own.  This has always been telling to me because whenever I was working through some karmic material it was as though they could feel it and would pop up out of the blue.  The timing on this has always been bizarre, at least in the beginning.  Lately, I just see this kind of behavior as proof for how we are bound by common material and that we can indeed all feel it whether it is conscious or not.

I chose to remain neutral with my ex-wife, though, in this last series of interactions, choosing not to engage her by pointing out the error in her way of behaving (which has always been over-the-top mean and hurtful).  This tack or approach has proven to shake things up in me just enough to help release some significant karmic material in both cases, ex-wife and connection #2.  In this case, the release was sooo simple. God, just to think about how much hand-wringing and worry and concern there had been about approaching this day there had been!  So much self-doubt, so much loathing of myself for being tied to these hard people! The release happened with #2  I when I was able to see an admission that one of them had emotional problems.  All I ever really needed was that moment of honesty from them, that “come to Jesus moment” that never really happened, and probably wouldn’t happen.  This had kept me active and turning on this karmic merry-go-round.  And this moment was not one that involved me talking to either of them, which was actually really nice.  Poof.  On my own, I got the one small thing that I needed that flipped the switch on all of this.  And now?  All of that hard stuff is just gone. I feel different.  I look different.  I now realize that the thoughts that I once had that I often dismissed as just a fairy tale way of being were in fact the depths of who I am, the beauty that was waiting for me on the other side of that garden gate.  One side was thunder clouds and uncertainty and the other side was bright and hopeful without a need to convince myself that anything was anything except what it was. Now, whether dark or light, I just don’t see the dividing line but feel the bliss of simply being.

I will also add that along with this hard behavior taking place as I reached the home stretch in all of this, that I was approached about two months ago out of the blue by a guy I know only peripherally, asking me if I could help him with his business.  As I was working with him and his employees, I felt deep into the energy of the group and found this troubling but interesting swarm of energy there.  I just worked for weeks and felt into it as I went about my day.

I found that there were all of these similar energies that all went back to the male wound.  For the first two to three weeks I only felt the energy.  I really had nothing to go on beyond what I was feeling. But by the third week, people were suddenly opening up and telling me exactly what I wondered about on an energy level.  All of this felt so familiar to me, but I had no hard physical history to pin it to. Without saying a word or asking any questions, except in my mind, they each began to tell me just what I needed to know.

This time, instead of working this like a problem, I accepted it without feeling a need to fix anything.  The interesting thing that happened was that I went from repulsed and upset the first few weeks, to feeling a strange affinity for these men.  I understood where they had been because I had been in similar places, too. I think we all have in one way or another.  It was as though life was giving me this opportunity to step deep into this chasm that was the inner life of these men in order to ponder my own wound, what is called “samscara.” But the brand or nature of their wound was so similar in so many ways to my own. This was tricky…..be in the world, but don’t be of it.  Step into the abyss but remain untouched…..no….not quite….surrender and accept all of it, see it, feel it, know it and don’t feel a stitch of resistance.  Yes, that is much more accurate.

It was at the moment that I began to accept them that the changes began to take place with my ex chiming in with her junk, all in perfect timing.  The distance between these men and their admissions about their past happened within 24 hours of my ex texting me and trying to “yank my chain.”  I remained stolid and calm.  It all passed with some hurt on my side, but no reaction, which was the big difference.  In the past, I knew that she took some pleasure from getting a reaction out of me.  As long as I reacted in pain, it confirmed to her that I was just as messed up as she was.  It was her way of keeping me in the boat.  But wait, no, it was me allowing myself to be controlled, effected, and enmeshed.  And THAT was the difference.  I had control now. Hurt me all you want, or try to; it just no longer works.  The first few times, yes, it still hurts…but the behavior and the energy is actually changing, and this was part of how I just stepped out of that old restrictive suit of clothes that made the man who he was.

After this took place, about a week later, another layer was unfurled and this time there came the beginning of a series of releases. I was able to feel the energetic side of the block releasing from my right lower range of the meridian when I got out of the work van at our work site several days ago.  This was between root and sacral chakras and was not felt IN the chakra like so many releases in the past.  This one was stubborn, bug in, and I felt the root block more as points within the meridian line on the male or solar side of yang energy (based on the Chinese medicine system). Then I was able to read about an admission from this soul connection and it all resulted in this perfectly timed matrix of effects that felt like a landslide or cascade of inner releases that brings me to where I am now. Poof. Gone.

Energetically, I feel different and my thoughts are different, too.  I am no longer obsessed with loss and lack churning inside of me.  Poof.  This buoyancy has resulted in my feeling like I can reach something that I didn’t feel….worthy of.  Can you believe that? With this hard energy weighing me down, I just didn’t feel like I could reach it easily.  Everything had this cast over it that had an edge of the negative. With a root-related block this type of thing relates to issues of nurture and abundance.  If the block is big enough, it can result in problem taking care of ones self or creating abundance.  I knew that my block was partial because of how events happened in my life.  I had always used creative visualization for the important things in my life: school, job, career, and children.  They all came as I had asked.

In my life I have always been able to manifest pretty big things in my life, but they almost always have some kind of hitch in them, sort of like the wish the genie grants you that you always wind up regretting.  Now, though, I know that we no longer have to regret the wish because the wish is now forged in the clarity of the soul’s purpose free from these troubling alliances having to do with loss and lack and hurt and pain and all the rest. This corresponds to the root now being clearer. I should now see a new level of clarity to what is brought into my life through our ability to co-create our lives.  I also find that any problems that come along just don’t flatten me like they had before.

Today as I opened a new book I bought for myself as this change was underway, it revealed a quote by the Buddha that spoke about how releasing the karmic bonds that hold us down to the earth…..free us so we can fly like eagles who can leave this world or be untethered by the concerns that weighed us down.

I have been hoping for this moment for years.  Years. Me an my dear friend Ali  have been talking about this idea which she brought up in our early discussions back in 2008 about how karma creates chemistry.  I wondered at first how anyone would believe such a thing as this?  At first, it didn’t make sense to me.  What I felt in connection felt natural, not fabricated, and this karma=connection sounded a lot like that. There was something about it that didn’t make sense….but now what I know is that the reason why it did not make complete sense at the time was because I was seeing through  distorted lenses, that my way of sensing and seeing the world was itself….bent. I was myself captured by karma and you cannot fix an old problem using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place (thank you, Albert E.) And this is something that you will need to know about yourself if you find that this also makes little sense to you. I wont ask you to believe me, just file it away and then get on with your “work” and when the day comes when it happens to you, let’s talk.

When I  explained how karma created chemistry to my second soul connection, she did not believe what I was saying.  I hadn’t either.  It just didn’t seem right, based on how the energy felt. It felt like a “foreverness” that you just don’t want to ever let go of.  There are lots of people similarly hooked in the twin phenomenon that keeps them engaged but not healing the blocks.  But do you know why this FEELS like a forever thing?  Do you really?

The Reward Cycle

Dopamine.  I know it sounds simplistic, but it is really that simple.  Our reward centers physically are designed to give us that peasant reward for just about ANYTHING that our mind/brain believes is a good thing.  Sex is one of these things, but there are loads of others. Prana creates bliss and as it is identified, the mind sends a signal to the body to produce dopamine among other things to reward us for something that is actually very good for us.  The idea of connection with another person whom we love generates this rich chemical landscape that keeps us coming back, though, and the connection itself is most often karmic.  This means that on the one side you are feeling prana flow, which is good, but the karma is in there, too, which is a kind of soup of both shadow and light, so you get a bit of both.    If you have a lot of negative karma surrounding an issue, then the chemical train gets colored with that karma and you have the potential for bliss along with the chaotic emotions that are still suppressed within the psyche. This is the double-edged sword of life.  You have the dark and the light.  Learning how to navigate through all of this is what yields victory in clarifying and cleansing the self. There is this very insightful saying in the Gospel of Philip that says in essence that God is a dyer of souls. When God dyes a soul, it goes in one color and comes out white.  This is to say that the dying work that God does is to clear us of all color.  This is not to say that we are colorless. We do not lose our character or personality, but that we lose that which made it hard for us to see the divine within.

Dopamine also does something else where pain and trauma are concerned.  When it is created in the body, it helps to eleviate the pain so that it does not burn deep grooves in our minds.  It helps us to move on.  This is one reason why kundalini works on emotional blockages so well; the body is pumping out a LOT of dopamine (and there is evidence for this state at various stages of the awakening process that I wont go into here but I write a lot about it on the blog).  This is also why people who have PTSD or other types of trauma-based issues will often turn to opiates to soothe the pain.  In fact today as I sat waiting to pick my child up from an appointment, I listened on the radio about a woman who had begun using heroin as a way of dealing with her pain.  She spoke of how it soothed her, made her feel like she could cope.  Sadly, by doing this, she was actually shutting down her body’s own native ability to produce the compounds necessary to make her feel the way she needed in order to heal. Dopamine does this, it is the body’s own natively produced opiate and I can tell you that once I identified what it was I was experiencing that was making me feel so peaceful and smoothed out and wonderful and dreamy, I was able to see how a strong “dump” of dopamine into my system also corresponded with releases.  To put it simply; you just don’t CARE about the pain anymore.  When you do this, your brain and body can simply release the old hurt like that: poof!  The mind stop supporting the old programming and the brain and body are now charged and ready to take in a different story.  The result?  You feel instantly transformed. You are literally reconnecting the brain and the body in new ways, creating new pathways for though to flow.  At an energetic level, the change is felt in a myriad of ways as well.

The dopamine cycle works for a host of reasons, from building a strong family unit for the rearing of children, to the benefit that being with another gives to us as a couple as well as the cohesiveness of a community. There are other compounds involved like oxytocin (which is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter—think on that one for a minute!) a little adrenaline, estrogen, and testosterone.  Once our mind/brain has identified something as important enough, it sets up a reward system for it.  And we can become addicted to it in just the same way we become addicted to the very behaviors that keep us enmeshed in certain karmic merry-go-rounds.  But is this bad?  The curious thing is that some people, in order to get the dopamine blast into their systems will use some behavior that will trigger it.  The important part is whether you are using something else to make it happen, or are you choosing to just feel differently, which is itself the spiritual compliment OF dopamine.  You see the difference?  If its, say, sex, that creates the dopamine reward trigger, then you can become a sex addict.  The sign is that sex is an empty experience for you at some point because after all, you aren’t in it for the experience that sex can give, not really.  You are after the high of the dopamine. As a result, sex addicts wind up having a feeling of emptiness in the wake of sex. It is a terrible place to be.  They need to move the dopamine cycle, the reward cycle, so that it is not divided from the self by any degrees of separation. The trick, people, is to learn how to trigger dopamine production in your body so that you get a nice flow going all the time at a low healthy level so you mirror the physical state of peace.  We have forgotten how to do this, or that the body will respond in a fraction of a second to a desire to feel bliss by pumping out dopamine. We are a generation of pill poppers.  This does not solve the problem, it only masks it.  What is curious is that it appears that when your body is producing dopamine for no other reason than to feel good (not just for a reward cycle) the body does not appear to become addicted to it.

Sometimes the glitches in our karma can go on for lifetimes.  The trick here, the whole point of all of this inner work, is to choose the beneficial positive karma over the negative ones.  If you watch people who are obsessively upset, you will see that they are actually enjoying being upset.  They spend so much time engaged in explaining why they hurt and why.  Most often, they are pointing to some source outside of themselves as the culprit, when all along the culprit is  within. Through a simple turn in awareness, the true culprit is seen for what it is.  Doing this work accomplishes this.  And the result?

For me, when this last wrinkle unfurled in me and the hooks dropped away, I felt….a series of new feelings that felt authentic and good.  My energy felt buoyant.  So simple, so clean and so clear.  I didn’t feel this clenching tightness that could also be associated with sexual tension in an intimate relationship.  When I say tension, this was a tension that felt a little over the top and was a kind of warning signal even as I was unable to change it until I healed the karma at its deepest level. The really interesting thing was how supercharged my sexual energy felt in the wake of this.  I was actually concerned that it would all just go away.  As kundalini/prana cleanses the body/self, the energy is less chaotic or intense.  I worried that I might lose this intensity.  I identified that the intensity made me feel vital and alive….I just didn’t like the hardness.  It finally felt like a flowing powerful form of energy that was unencumbered by these tight or tense spots that I knew were there but was powerless to do anything about (until they were healed).  Like some silent reminder, they let me know in each moment that they were there, these tight spots, these blocks. But in the end, it was much-ado about nothing.

The “Reset”

There was a point in my awakening when I had what I call a “reset” of my energy field about a year and a half into my awakening.  This “reset” helped me to more clearly relate to the blocked energy that still remained in me. How this was done was completely unexpected by both me and my healer.  She was told by her guides to simply follow their guidance and take on my energy for a moment.  I was on the phone, doing this at a distance, and didn’t know that this was happening.  She told me to hang up and just breathe deep and wait.  I felt a sudden lightness to my being that was very nice.  Peaceful.  But after about one minute, I felt my old energy come back down around me.  The only way I can describe it was that in taking on my energy, by entering into my energetic capsule, she was able to lend or imbue or surrogate a much needed form of awareness that I was able to inherit as a result of this exchange.

What took its place was….not easy. At all.  I think if I had known what was about to happen, I would not have gone along with it.  What it felt like was a screeching clamor of metal like the sound of a freight train wrecking all around me.  It was accompanied by a deep and abiding physical pain that remained with me throughout my awakening until I released the remaining material. Okay, so that sounds really bad.  But actually, it wasn’t.  This was NOT physical pain.  What it was, was referred pain.  This was soul pain, a pain I had been blocking from my awareness….even in the midst of awakening.  Yes, I was aware of this pain, I had felt it, but I had simply dialed the volume down.  My healer dialed the volume back up so that I could hear what was happening.  I was, simply, much more aware of what was happening to me. And this sped me along on an accelerated path because the pain I felt in my heart was really hard.  But when the pain was released, as the blockages were released that following year, what followed in its wake, was a wonderful feeling that I keep with me to this day.

This level of awareness based on this “reset” has been of huge benefit to me because it has enabled me to see or feel into my energy body that much more deeply so that I can detect even the smaller things in a much more vivid way.  It will, in time, make me that much better of a healer should I choose to go that route.  It was this awareness that created a sense of pain in one of my meridians that helped me to pinpoint the exact area a year ago so I could show my Kahuna healer where to concentrate on in order to begin releasing material there through energy medicine and deep tissue massage.

And?  Poof!  Gone was all of the obsessing over this person I felt connected to but who I knew had been hurting me and would continue to do so because of her entitlement to being trapped in the meme of victim.  I had been told that I just needed to forgive this person…..but in the end, it wasn’t forgiveness that did it.  What did it for me was in being able to see things so clearly….something that I KNEW but that I seemed to hear from them as being the truth.  That was my hitch; I seemed to need to know that they knew.  I know that seems weird, but for my brand of karma, that was just what the doctor ordered.  Quietly, I was able to simply slip the bonds and soar.  Now, how it does it for you, what YOUR trigger is, I can’t say.  For me, though, it was like someone finally saying, “I know that what I was doing was messed up….I know…..and I am sorry about it…” That was all I needed to know, that yes, they knew that what they were doing was off. And now?  I feel no draw to this kind of thing at all.  It is as though I have transcended a murky layer in the ocean and am now in a much clearer place.

Having said all of this, my own energetic awareness shows me that there is still more murk in the root chakra, but it does not seem to be so entangled with others and this blame game that I have gotten tangled in.  I for one am glad to be free from it.  Come what may, at the least THIS part has been cleared, something I have been working on clearing for years.

How It Works

Until such an event takes place where you can resolve the “hitch” or the “hook” of the karmic connection, you remain on the merry-go-round caught in a recursive set of behaviors due to a suppressed set of emotions that are begging to be healed.  This can be done by a simple moment of honesty.  In this one important wrinkle, I was waiting on the honesty of another in order to feel the sense of release I hoped for for so long.  And for me, in my case, it released a whole series of difficult to live with feelings.  Now, free from all of this, I can FEEL myself unencumbered by the weight of another and their feelings of incompletion.  I simply had to know once and for all that this was not mine….but had been making it mine in this codependent cycle that was my karma.  Now with this new clarity of self and heart and soul, I ask myself: what am I going to do now? It will be interesting to see what manifests in the days that come.  With the karma gone, so too is the old chemistry that was caught in the dark goddess.  I am ready for the one who dwells in the light.  And the ONLY reason why I am going to the trouble of opening up like this is because each of us can reach this same place in our own time.  It is possible!  Whoot!

There are numerous methods that can be useful to you in assisting prana in doing its work re-magnetizing you to your larger authentic self.  I have done all of this work without traditional methods like yoga.  While I esteem yoga greatly, I know that it is but one of many methods that can be used.  Ultimately, the goal is doing what makes you flow and open up to the energy.  Breath work helps a lot, including alternating nostril breathing, something I created for myself that I call “Active meditation” which involves working on moving energy in my body and dropping into a deep state where I can feel the buoyancy of my lovely energy that connects me to the universe and reveals to me how the presence of the All is hidden in the atoms and cells of my body.  Centering attention on centers where you feel resistance helps to clear flow, as does movement, ANY movement from dance to things like Chi Gung, deep tissue massage, energy work, reiki, and more.  If you are dealing with awakening, drop into your deeper self and ask yourself what you most need to know.  Try it; then await the answer.  I will bet that you will wind up with resources coming out of your ears….people handing you books, people showing up to act as mirrors, teachers, guides, any number of things can manifest themselves. So trust in the power that is yours and that is also part of the universe.  You are, after all, a part of it and it is part of you!

नमस्ते

Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part 1

When I had my awakening, I awoke aware that I was feeling someone in my head, in my space….it was hard to pin down at first….but some part of me that woke up KNEW this was so, even as my rational mind was struggling just to keep up with the newness that was taking place.  All of it was novel, interesting, sometimes even scary or anxiety-producing.  I lived with the idea that I had a soul twin because, simply, there was no other theory out there that explained it so….well.

Cracks began to show up in that fairy-tale world when I heard the really hard and mean things this twin of mine would say sometimes.  I began to question, and as I questioned, more things popped up that showed me that something was amiss.  The concept of the twin soul was a fairy-tale.  Like angels on clouds and happily ever afters and gurus who are perfect (note: there is no such thing-these are things we would like to be true but are not). The experience was cosmic and I WAS feeling this person at the soul level deeply.  Yes.  Wonderful, yes.  But human still, yes.

In perfect timing, as I was beginning to question the mythos of the Twin Soul and the Twin Flame along came a person who had gone through all of this herself and we began this dialog.  It was one of the most insightful of any kind of dialog I have had with another person.  She spoke my language, and she helped to fill in some spots that I was clamoring around in the dark for.  One of the things that she talked about was how karma creates chemistry.  At first, this was so non-intuitive that while I took it all in, I honestly had some trouble with it.  After all, the energy that was a part of the connection felt so….natural. It just felt like it was so deep within me, right?

But the same is true for karma.  Whoops.

I have been at the cleansing process that is a part of awakening since early 2007 (early February) and I have slowly come to a realization through many many releases that some of the biggest troubles have been in the more base chakras.  Each release in the meridians or chakras (or both) has always been accompanied by changes in how I felt and how I reacted to things that might have upset me before.  I have been hard at “work” getting my field cleared because of how much better it has made me feel, how richer and more…..buoyant….my energy has felt following a clearing.  Despite how some have said that the root is cleared first, I have to take issue with this and call such tales utter nonsense. No, kundalini clears the easiest to the hardest.  It is like water, following the path of least resistance.  If it had tackled my poor solar plexus, sacral, or root chakras first, I would still be here today telling you how kundalini is still trying to bust down that one hardened armored wall!  Instead, I have hundreds, thousands of victories both big and small that has made the last three years easier.

The last three years has been a time period where MOST of my energy field was cleared with mostly sacral/root blocks remaining.  it has been challenging and sometimes utterly frustrating to see how big the block was, but I can say that over the last year especially, I have spent every single day surrendering to the flow of prana in the hopes that it would flow into those hard places and break up the material.  My meditations have shown me that it was a densely packed series of layers.  Some of the work that I have done has included utilizing a reiki practitioner as well as a  massage therapist who specializes in the Kahuna method, which honors the balance of the masculine and feminine current in our bodies.  I was able to break a lot of material free from those sessions.  I even reported a year or two ago how one reiki practitioner could not detect ANY blockages in my root and patted me on the back and admonished me about not trying to create a problem where no problem existed.  This was a person who was the head of a massage school and is well known in our community for her therapy work.  And this is mentioned as a cautionary tale that for those of you who are going extra deep into yourselves that there may be some who could help you that don’t….or can’t…perhaps because they themselves cannot feel that deep or detect what exists at such a cleared level.

I mean, think about it….most everyone on the planet is blocked from head to toe in some way or another.  I know this may sound severe, but as I awoke, my ability to sense energy was increased about three to four-fold.  Before then, I had been reading auras since I was 18 and I am now 50.  So lots of experience with this end of awareness…..and I can say that those who slumber are simply not aware all that much.  And it is probably good that they are not aware for the time being.  Only when you are ready to tackle such a backlog of material as we all have here on the planet can you really have any hope of getting it done.  otherwise it simply seems to be too big of a mountain.  I know that it has been a mountain for me, and I also know people who have been at this for decades who are still wearing away the stone, so to speak. I am not saying this to be negative, I am saying it because I observe that it is true.

So the “proof” part….

I was reflecting how I was able to magically release the soul connection I had when I first awakened.  God bless her, but she had issues that made dealing with her hard, and being connected to this, once I became aware of the hardness (I was not aware of the hardness in the beginning you see), it got more difficult.  But what “did it” was a couple of years ago when I initiated a correspondence with her in the hopes of clearing up whatever was left was the moment when she wrote to me, “Parker, I am really HAPPY in my life now…..I woke up and had someone like you to help me through it, to share and make sense of it…..and I now feel things I had not felt before but knew was possible….I really love my life!” Poof!  In that moment, it was like this thing gave way in me and I realized I was holding something up I just didn’t need to hold up anymore.  Then thre came this awareness in the clarified moment that I had known her in some official capacity as an advisor.  It FELT like she was a leader of some kind….and somehow I had let her down in some way.  THIS led to a hitch karmically that led to our connection later while in the super-charged environs of an awakening (a double-whammy!).  Then, as I began breathing more deeply and more slowly, I dropped down into it deeper and I was shown that no, I had not let her down.  It wasn’t event THAT clear-cut.  I had FELT like I had let her down.  Her problem was HER problem, but I had taken it to mean that I had failed her.

The interesting thing is that this was exactly what happened in another relationship…I was hooked, literally hooked into this fear of failing another person and letting it eat me up energetically and karmically.  It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it is HOW we choose to FEEL about an event that is the hook of karma.  And this is one reason why I have so much trouble with the concept of karma.  It is called “action” and I have recently considered maybe they were including inner action, because otherwise the definition as given by the Buddha seems…shallow….and prone to turning into being a punishment or something of the like.  People do this, though.  They are upset that something didn’t turn out the way they would like and they say “Karma is gonna get you!!!”  All the while, though, the deeper truth is that karma isn’t a punishment.  It is based on how far we have chosen, yes chosen, to turn away from our inner divine natures.  THAT nature is….perfect.  it does not NEED to be anything except perfectly itself.  And yet, we allow ourselves to get pulled in all these directions that are not in our highest.  Like me, just wanting people to be happy and failing at it because…..well…I am not the Lord of people’s happiness.  They are.  This was so bad in a prior relationship that my ex told my children that I had failed them at a time when I was sticking to my guns when the economy was in a rut.  Truth be told, when you tell children this kind of thing, YOU are the one “failing.”  But this was the consequence of living in this way.  The person who acted as the put-upon victim became the victimizer.  Terrible.  So it was in my interest to untangle this mess as soon as possible, right?

To learn more about how this all turned out, I have broken this post into two chapters, with the second one immediately following this one.  So now for chapter two….