The Energy Moves

It took a bit of courage to photograph and then publish the marks that showed up when kundalini rose a decade and a half ago. It was an odd thing to witness these marks, one on my right hip and another that emerged after a clearing of karmic material tied to my heart center several years later. The posts about this are in the archive. I include one from the heart below.

At first when I wrote about it, there was little comment about them, but after about a year comments began to come in with people describing similar marks who had been running searches for burn-like marks after spiritual events, and voila—they found me. Many tended to be either on the hips or near the shoulders. Then, a few years ago, a Japanese graduate student shared photos with me of his own marks which were nearly identical to my own, also on his hip and another like my heart center mark except at his throat chakra which following a kundalini awakening.

I thought that someone or something had done this to me, but as increasing numbers of people have come forward to describe their own burn-like marks, it seems to me that these marks may simply be what happens when strong energy is being released (because of its proximity to the energetic event tied to kundalini awakening). Intuitively it seems right that the marks could happen when energy is trying to move up the legs to the torso, and vica versa, and like an energy bolt used to traveling in a more or less straight line, it has to make a sudden turn and becomes impeded and marks result (this is my theory at this point). This could result in a burn or iritation to the skin. For me, I know that this is nothing mystical or “woo-woo” but serves as a physical trace of the energy in the physical. I also have not just marks that emerged around the time I awakened, but I have a persistent mark over my heart and recently that mark has moved.

It would be helpful if science were to take an interest in this observable phenomenon. Absent that, I am left to investigate and collect accounts by others with similar effects that have happened to them.

Three days ago, I noticed that the mark over my heart center has moved. It started at the lower sternum as you see in the photo. It has moved up by about 2 and a half inches, and the mark, which has tended to be circular, and which has been constant in its presence for years now has grown three times in size. It is less noticable but can be easily seen in the right light. It hasn’t waned in that time and resembles two semicircles that sit opposite each other along the vertical axis of my torso. The end of each semicircle doesn’t touch the semicircle beneath it, but the effect is seeing a near-perfect circle being formed (or at least suggested). I am observing it to see what it does after this move, if anything.

I often find it hard to describe what I feel because while I know that it became a novel but continuous state compared to how I felt previous to this experience of awakening, its constancy has led me to find it to be a new normal. How do you normalize supreme bliss? I spent years learning how to appear normal while speeding through another world within. It’s progress now that I can keep from needing to sit or lie down for an hour or two because the bliss is so strong. There were periods where I would be so blissed out that I would forget from one moment to the next what I was thinking about or even doing. It didn’t even matter in many cases. I can’t say that I handled it all that well in the beginning, but over time I learned how to carry that bliss while being able to focus on the kinds of things that would normally get wiped away by the thick blanket of bliss.

The effect of the bliss is that it has had a significant effect on dulling or eliminating a lot of pain in my body, and softening emotional pain. While this is helpful, even miraculous, I am concerned that it could make identifying a physical problem difficult in the future. Pain is an important feedback when things go wrong that need attention. I sometimes worry a little about this. Could I miss important signs of my imminent demise? The bliss says, “pipe down, it’s okay, just chill…” What’s behind the bliss? A cocktail of chemistry, I have found. It isn’t all just dopamine, but a good portion is based on my experience and investigation into it.

I disagree with Jana Dixon in her assertion in the Physiology of Kundalini that dopamine does not play an important role in the symptoms of kundalini. I have observed that high dopamine levels are responsible for being able to take part in the release process because while dopamine is a natural pain killer, the effect it had on me psychologically was that it made it possible for me to let go, and to stop “grasping” for the old familiar psychological patterns that were the basis of old beliefs and programming. What I experienced fell neatly into the realm of high dopamine levels. Additionally, I have found that in people with schizophrenia, the condition involves an inability to properly metabolize dopamine, resulting in a build-up in the brain resulting in the psychotic break if nothing changes. I found an online conversation of a group of schizophrenics who had gone off their medication just to see how long they could go without serious problems. One person said that he discovered his symptoms after a week were identical to kundalini. For me, this was proof that at the right level, dopamine is directly tied to elements that makes kundalini feel the way that it does. It may also be responsible for boosting psi ability in the brain by allowing the self to tune out the usual signals through the sensory cortex in favor of tuning in the nonphysical senses. Dopamine, it could be said, gives peoole a pleasant rush at one level, but could do much more at higher levels.

When I read accounts of people who smoked opium (a dopamine analog in plant form) many of the accounts described symptoms very similar to my own experience with dopamine. When the self lets go and surrenders, the chemistry instantly shifts away from the stress hormones of norepinephrine and adrenaline and into the softer more dreamy dopamine/oxytocin range of the spectrum. And who among us haven’t felt intense feelings of love during awakening? I am not suggesting that dopamine production is kundalini, I am suggesting that dopamine is the concoction that creates part of the experience of bliss in the body. This is all being coordinated at the nonlocal consciousness level. Dopamine doesn’t get produced or released until the signal from the consciousness comes. I will also add that I am aware that other compounds are in this mix, it’s just that the effects of dopamine were so easy to identify with some simple online searching. I do think that without a little adrenaline, dopamine tends to make me want to lie down for considerable lengths of time. It slows motor response, it has even slurred my speech and gave me the stereotypical “Buddha gaze” where eyelids are often at half mast. I wouldn’t rule out the presence in small amounts of DMT since in small amounts it has been shown to create bliss. I for one would like very much to test this in a clinical setting to see how DMT bliss compares to my own physically produced bliss compounds.

When this shift in the heart happened, what I count as the fifth in a five-layered process (tied to the koshas—each chakra is like an onion, kosha meaning “husk” and each layer aligns with the five major aspects of the energy body: emotional mental, physical, energetic, and spiritual). This means that each chakra can be cleared by kundalini up to five times as it acts on each aspect of the chakra and its koshas.

At this time, just a week before the change in location, I inquired in meditation to find out the nature of a hitch that I had for most of my life, which is a habitual tendency to move into poverty consciousness. This never made much sense to me in the past because I always had a capacity to get whatever I needed in life, so what gives? Just ask and it will be given.

I realized in the course of the inner inquiry that there were no limits that existed within, and what was causing it was a vestige remaining that came from growing up in a family where this issue seemed front and center. I was myself taken on a very fast journey through a space that I knew was my being and what felt curiously similar to a spaciousness that I experienced in the wake of the third clearing of my heart center in 2008.

In my recent meditation, my inner guidance took me through this vast open space and there was simply nothing there that would impede it (it was completely clear—a vast brilliant white space–my own connection to and experience of the divine white light capable of being anchored here by me in this life). Huh.

This was new to me because over the years this inner space was always cluttered with something. I grew accustomed to feeling the “remainder” of the stuck energy that had yet to be resolved, with the process always being where I saw, noted its presence (after a while of getting used to this process), knew it was there, but relied on the energy to get to it in its own time. I, as a result, never second-guessed the energy in terms of which block it would get to next because it was much better at getting it done than I could ever do on my own. That said, I did practice Qi Gung and meditation in order to ‘soften the ground’ so to speak in a hope of making things go more smoothly for this intelligent energy. It was my “project” and after years of doing this work sudden it became a wind-swept silence of a space.

“There is nothing there” my inner guidance said to me. There was nothing in my way, whatever that hitch was that I had was now gone. Looking back I realize that most of it was the result of other people who either expressed a poverty consciousness, or it was people near me who tried to connect me with it. Luckily those people have edited themselves from my life now and for the last three years I have been actively engaged in bringing my studio business back to life (with the greatest growth happening during the pandemic).

Within days events changed. I had cobbled together work from last month’s production in the studio, held an event, and in 20 years of doing shows and events, this one wasn’t just better than anything I had done before, it was head and shoulders beyond anything that I had ever done since I began the business in 1997. I thought it was a fluke until the next week’s event was just as crazy as the first. This was repeated a third time for good measure and the result was the same. The whole tenor of the business has changed. I am hiring part time help and the truth is, it wont be enough. A new chapter has opened up. The heart mark had shifted during this time, signaling a readiness to step into the next phase of the journey.

The curious thing about this is that I keep hearing that abundance is tied to the root or base energy center. I feel that for me, it all happens in my heart as a pivot point, a mediator, between root and crown centers. For whatever reason, this was the most natural outcome for me. How is that possible? Is it that when we do something with love, it can only really emerge best from the heart? Would it then be an outcome mediated by it?

All of this is the culmination of years worth of work, so while this recent development was a pleasant surprise, it was one step along a long line of steps. And why am I even saying this? It’s to show that there are different ways of doing this work, to convey that the moment someone says that something must happen a certain way, you can know there are many paths that lead to the same summit. The other side is my sense that none of this is supernatural but is, I think, natural. It’s physioligical and driven by an energetic force we unfortunately don’t know much about in a scientific way because so few researchers are willing to delve into it. We do have reams and reams of accounts both current and ancient by the people experiencing the phenomenon. It is described as a serpent in India. Based on how the energy rose up through my body, I can understand why. But there is no snake, there isn’t even a Shiva and Shakti meeting at the crown. Those are apt descriptions to say what it is like, no one thinks it actually is that. This is much the same as Jesus saying the kingdom is like a candle, or a treasure in a field. The kingdom isn’t literally those things, it is like those things. Based on my observations it is more likely that this energetic even is the result of the two brains, the left and right hemispheres finally synchronizing in a very particular way which leads to a sudden rush of energy and bliss flowing into the crown and radiating throughout the body. That may not sound terribly exciting, but how the mechanics sound and how it feels can appear quite different. Prana is just electricity?? It might be that a slight “over-volt” in the body is enough to supercharge the brain and kick the endochrine system into high gear where a host of hormones kick into high gear resulting in better health, sharper physical senses, and an expansion of cognition even into intuitive abilities. Clearly these burns or marks are the result of a real physical force, and the best explanation is an arc of electricity perhaps coupled with resistance at critical points where energy flows from and to the torso to the legs. It would help if someone with a technical background were to take an interest. How to rouse those in slumber?

Personally I suspect that the phenomenon represents an area of inquiry scientifically that would likely serve to challenge materialist views long held about consciousness as arising from matter rather than the other way around (which is what I think this is). It also has the potential to vault us into a new understanding of ourselves, and our potentials If only we can break the log-jam of enlightenment-era thinking (namely Descart who championed the idea that we are just biological machines entirely driven by the matter assembled that we call biological life). The incidence of marks that show around energetic events like awakening is one such example of real physical traces that help to anchor the phenomenon in something more than “woo-woo” and gets us all closer to “how-to” through an investigation of this field as a once-rare event that is fast becoming a more common phenomenon.

I know that it is entirely possible that my heart mark could help show the physical traces and existance of the chakra, not as a belief or notion promulgated by Eastern philosophy and esotericists, but as a reality that could serve to point to the system most directly tied to the forces of consciousness.

Additionally it could help us to understand the size of the chakra in the energy body. The fact that the mark on my heart emerged immediately after a heart clearing event, was the size of a dime at that time (in 2011), only to change size while also moving up my sternum by about three inches may have a lot to tell us about how this system behaves. While we may not have dozens of people for a half-decent study, we may be able to glean information from the few who do exhibit these markings as a response or reaction to the energy. Is this mark, which persists, the result of a strong energetic pathway that opened up in the wake of awakening and the release of emotional baggage? It feels electric to me, so that would be one clue for future investigation. I also sense that what might be increased electrical activity in my body may well be felt or read as bliss in consciousness. I see a connection with this energy serving to stimulate my endochrine system which has led to a host of positive physical results. It also, not surprises, has pushed libido a good deal, and with so many experiencers describing kundalini as a sexual energy, this effect may help us to understand why, while helping us to see how this energy impacts the body in a positive way (while understanding better how to support the physical organism so it has less chance of burning us out or experiencing negative side effects from the energy).

Currently most materialistically inclined thinkers think that the idea of the chakra is just speculative hogwash. I think that by upping our game on this front we could begin to show anecdotal evidence that this is more than mere speculation.

The problem I face is finding the people who are affected in the same or similar ways as I have in regards to the marks. While I have a handful of people who have reported having had simkar marks only one has been willing to share pictures which he took before the marks faded after the surge of energy that likely produced them faded. While I had a hip mark, my Japanese friend developed a mark at his throat chakra which is not that different in size and shape as my heart chakra mark. At this point, these kinds of numbers are not enough to convince any researcher that there is anything to it.

If you have experienced this type of phenomenon, I would like very much to know because it will help us to better understand this phenomenon and without data, there isn’t any interest. If you have images you can send them to info@staffordartglass.com. Your info will be held in confidence for any contacts that you make.

~Parker

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Kundalini Flu

There is a large and growing community of people who have experienced a phenomenon known as kundalini, tummo, golden flower, or awakening. This used to be an extremely rare occurrance, often requiring a guru or teacher in order to reach it. Because so many have managed to “flip the cosmic light switch,” a group of people who have had little to no grounding in yogic practices or methods are suddenly dealing with the rammifications of such an occurrence.

There are many symptoms tied to awakening, and most of them are listed on this blog on the symptoms page found along the top menu of this blog. One of the symptoms or effects from the energetic event that is kundalini is a range of near flu-like symptoms. I am going to go into understanding this symptom and ways to cope with it if it happens to you.

I have had to deal with this symptom in a variety of ways throughout my awakening process. Before the full “rising event” I was experiencing bouts of diarrhea that had no apparent cause, something that would come and go about every three to four weeks in the run up to the fuller awakening or rising event that took place in January of 2007. I even went to the doctor for it, but nothing could be found that could have been the culprit. It was suggested that I try adjusting my diet, a mention of perhaps too many fats in my diet, or that I might be eating at odd hours. It was a kind of mouse that roared.

After the full rising event happened, just a week or two after my visit to the doctor, most of my initial stomach distress went away. I hadn’t felt flu-like symptoms through my body, just the odd coming and going of diarrhea. I never felt really sick. This was different, I just didn’t know how it was different at that time. Since my stomach trouble seemed to resolve itself, and with the blast up my spine not long after that, I quickly forgot about the incidents of that distress.

My awakening process was gradual, one that came in stages over 5 months,so while the energy hadn’t risen, it was moving.

Over the next two years, however, I would have more symptoms much more like flu. These were never marked by an elevated temperature, at least not one that I would consider out of the normal. But I would feel something very close to flu symptoms of a mild sort.

I would sometimes feel warm, but not hot. I would feel nausea the most. I would also feel a mild but fairly persistent nausea as if my stomach felt on edge. I would lose my appetite sometimes, but I never would throw up or feel so bad that I wouldn’t be able to work. Often, it could be pushed into the background and ignored.

During the first five years after awakening I had many changes physiologically, and from time to time stomach upset would come and go. In some cases it would affect my appetite somewhat, and at other times my appetite would not be significantly impacted. I went through periods where I couldn’t eat meat, and there were times when I would crave certain foods. There was a period during high energy that eating spicy foods would make me feel blissed-out, but that would cease after about six months, only to be replaced by some other facet of reactivity with digestion.

My sense has been, watching my own process, has been that stomach issues have remained but have changed, waxing and waning depending on the way in which the energy, prana, has flowed or has been blocked along certain channels in what we know or call the light body.

I found that there were foods that I was directed to eat at one stage by a being who unceremoniously entered my bedroom early in the morning hours, showing me what some of them should be.

I was shown that during this early stage of awakening that I should eat eggs for protein. I was also shown cantaloupe. I ate both. I found that the cantaloupe had an unexpected yet welcomed effect of smoothing out the energy. This worked for about a year after this initial experience. I think the changeability was due to my own working through the knots or samscaras, suppressed emotion, that was rapidly being liberated from my system. My reaction to foods was based on my inner process I observe, dependent in part to the effects that stored emotion has in a body “lit up” by this excess of energy.

I continue to eat a lot of eggs as a protein source. I also have found duck eggs to be very good I suspect because ducks are a very calm bird. Their chemistry I suspect has an effect on what compounds wind up in their eggs.

Overall I have found bland foods, often grains, have been helpful. I have found oatmeal to be soothing while providing good amounts of fiber. At one point I lived on the stuff because of what I was going through digestively.

If you have read through my blog you might know about the five month period where I inexplicably lost my appetite. I began to fast and never felt hungry. I did eat a meal each week, though, because I felt like it might not be healthy to simply not eat. The very curious thing about this is that while I did lose weight, I didn’t lose as much as I thought I would. It was kind of bizarre, really. I had developed sensitivity to potato a couple of years previously and I suspected that I was mildly sensitive to wheat as well. I tried to avoid it, but never cut it (wheat) out completely.

My appetite returned after this period and I went on to eat like a horse, and a range of foods.

I found that high fiber foods were very good. There would be times when I would eat close to a vegetarian diet while at other times I ate like a caveman. I would say, though, that a plant diet has been the kindest to my system.

I would reccomend having a powdered milk protein that you can mix up in smoothies when your stomach feels bad. You can experiment with nutrients. I was using blue-green algae for nutrition as well as fruits and vegetables. I was given a juicer right at the time when I thought juicing might be a good thing to do. Sometimes a liquid diet is very soothing. I often took lunch at work as a shake or drink with good nutrition. I often did this by taking a thermos to work to provide this during my short lunch period.

It turns out that in the Hindu system, melon is used to “cool” kundalini. That means cucumber, watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe are all good. Cucumber is surprisingly nutritious and can be used to calm your system at the same time. Consider how you can include cucumber and these melons in your diet. While cantaloupe was prescribed specifically to me by a guide, you might find other melons as helpingto “cool” the energy as you experience. While melon didn’t calm my stomach, it had at a specific period in my process a positive overall effect on the energy as a whole. You could say it calmed my mind and response to the energy.

When worse comes to worse, pepto-bismal has calmed my stomach. I suspect that it should only be used occasionally, though. It may be that other things that coat the stomach can soothe it during periods of irritability.

Nausea is often felt as a result of the stomach producing mucus. Mucus is a way to protect the stomach lining, and mucus is what can cause nausea. For me, nausea is a sign that I am running strong energy or that blocks are being dissolved. I have learned that mild nausea is part of the experience. Small buts of some foods, mentioned above (bland grains-if you don’t have reactions or allergies to them).

Broths can be beneficial if you are having trouble with heavier foods. Try bone broths, or vegetable broths, created by cooking these things down. You can create flavor by first sauteeing them, browning some of the vegetables first. Consider using oils like roasted sesame, which will impart lovely flavor once the vegetables have been browned, then boiled. Other light soups can be very soothing. Miso has been particularly good. I can add ginger (which is soothing to the stomach) and garlic along with onion and other vegetables and udon noodles (Japanese noodles-found in Asian food markets most often) if you want to go all out.

It’s important to listen to your body through this process. Make adjustments when you do not feel well. What grains work? What protein sources feel the best to you? Are uncooked vegetables better or do cooked work better? I say this because awakening has a great deal of variability that its hard to say exactly where you are in how the energy is impacting you. It can change from day to day!

During times when I feel like not eating, often it has been eating that has been the very thing that helped calm my system. Nothing has led me to think that only a vegetarian diet was THE way to go forward, but a vegetarian diet is a healthy one provided you keep your diet balanced so you get enough protein and iron.

I suspect that some stomach problems are linked to awakening. Celiac and other conditions considered permanent I suspect can be brought on by a reaction to prana (this is not to say celuac IS a condition stemming from awakening only). I have observed a few historical cases of individuals who showed a level of awakening who also had stomach trouble.

I hope that this helps you and that it gives you some insights and ideas of your own for caring for your system. Additionally, I would be interested in your own experience, whether it is similar or different. This blog is about helping understand and come to grips with this phenomenon.

Blessings…

Releasing Barriers

Twelve years in and I have had enough water under the bridge to see how all the work I spent clearing away the dross has impacted my life.

I can say that for as challenging the early stages can be, sticking with it has its benefits. Awakening led me to an undeniable awareness that I had made many compromises in my earlier life that came back to bite me once I could no longer live the old way. Not living the old way simply no longer was tenable once awakening came. This wasn’t just caprice, a desire to be different, but was itself a fundamental return to a basic ground state that had become, to some degree, self-evident.

What was interesting to me as awakening got underway was that the mere presence of awakening in me was showing every sign of affecting those in my life who didn’t align to the presence of my own truth. I thought this curious effect was my imagination at first, but as awakening proceeded it was clear that as I released old karmic material, it served to unsettle others who did not fit this truth, what the Polynesians call “Pono” which means correct alignment.

I should explain that this was not merely the result of my behaving differently in front of others, but that there were deeper subconscious reactions taking place around me that were tied to my own inner work. I have described in previous posts how my then-spouse would go into emotional meltdowns as I privately released inner blockages in my own field of awareness, a reaction that I was able to see was causally tied to what I had been doing just the day before. I observed nine times in a row that this took place over a three month period, each resulting in her going into a temporal meltdown each time. These events continued beyond the nine, but I stopped counting after nine times because I felt I had already met the burden of proof for myself at that point.

This was the crazy world of my awakening, an awareness of this underlying truth of what we all are that began to emerge even though I was living in a toxic environment that favored slumber and dysfunction of those around me. To see how they sought to demonize it (awakening) and me, I saw graphically just how off they were. I was able to see how deception and dishonesty was raised in order to attempt to keep the old regime up and running. It was sad back then, and hard to take because I was the butt of these efforts at keeping the lid on a poisonous can of worms. This helped me to see how buried we can all be in beliefs that limit us all. I would lose an important reationship with a child who was swept up in this web of deceit. It sound so cloak and dagger saying it this way, but it was just as if a child’s mind had been swept up in a net of belief: all-encompassing, and enclosing on all sides with untruths an gaslighting. My eyes were opened wide to how humans do business here.

After a serious injury the same year that awakening came, I was unable to work and the economic debacle of 2008 the following year made clear that this was a major turning point in many ways for me. Like it or not, I was being put into an environment where my eyes would be opened more and more by having time to myself to reflect on my life. If you knew me pre-awakening, you knew someone who worked long hours trying to grow his business who had his head buried in the sand. With my seventy-hour work week suddenly behind me, I had to see what was now clearly in front of me.

In a psychic reading many years later, this time period was described as my being made into a sacrificial lamb. This characterization seemed odd at first, but as I reflected on what this reader had told me, it made a lot of sense in the end. This is what we ALL do when someone presents us with a view of truth we are not ready to face: we dismiss and sometimes even demonize it. We literally begin to project the falsehoods of our own inner deceits on others as if they belong to those people. It’s so strange how we do this, isn’t it?

I was to focus on awakening. I did. I was able, in the end, to spend time on it alone. Life made it happen. While things might have seemed dire to others, I had this feeling like everything was going to be alright. That was one of the most important time periods in my life. My time in the wilderness.

I was able to see that the life I thought I had didn’t fully conform to reality. I was blinded by hope instead of illuminated by clear seeing. I spent easily a year free from the life I thought I had to reflect and absorb what was happening to me. I wish everyone could do this, just take off a year and meditate, commune with nature, and be with people of like mind.

Like clockwork, whenever something was needed, the universe provided. When I thought about finding work someone I didn’t know contacted me about a job that was perfect for me. I landed the job and it helped me to develop my teaching skills, an important step in the next phase of my work. But before that, I had been carefully cared for even though it didn’t seem that way to others. It allowed me an unprecedented gaze into the mysteries of this phenomenon that is awakening and how it was slowly but surely taking me apart and putting me back together again.

I learned that those to whom I was connected were not really able to see me for who I was despite the innextricable deep soul ties that we had. I saw that what probibited this clear knowing was always their own inner baggage. I myself also had my own baggage, and awakening, while clearing me of it, did not clear all of it in one magical twinkling, but was instead a process. Storms of energy would sweep through, and each time less and less remained. More peace took its place each time, but this was gradual. It was fast by any other standard, but still it was a process. I was able to see how someone so close to me could know so little while inserting so much into the narrative that didn’t belong. We see not what is there, but rather by way of our own inner dialogues which we take as the truth. Say this to anyone when it seems to matter and they think you are mad.

I learned that when people aren’t ready to face truth, they will project. It does no good to point out the truth. People are only ready when they are ready.

The mere presence of connection does not mean that there is a purpose or destiny in it, only that there is something in me that is not fully resolved at a karmic level, and that these karmic entanglements are at the heart of the soul connection phenomenon…the twin flame or whatever your term dejour is for it.

Awakening plus karma is a combination that makes it possible to feel and see the other’s soul. The soul, unimited, perfect, standing outside of time can feel like it can be almost anything to the earthly man or woman because it already is. This leads to a deep “fall” into love that feels cosmic, destined, and more intens than anything you could ever dare imagine. In fact, this mixture is so strong it can lead a person (like me) to fall deeply in love with someone I wouldn’t normally be attracted to. People wrongly assume that bliss only serves lofty divine things. It is lofty because it does not divide or judge, but offers itself to all.

In one case for me, a connection was forced. You might think there is no way this could happen, but it absolutely did. It was true that I had known this person before this forced coupling took place and I had no underlying fascination with this person previous to this event. How this went down showed me that a soul connection is not destiny but in fact can be manufactured when the right ingredients are present. It is made all the stronger by a preponderance of karma that can be passed to the other person in this entangling of twinning process.

While others get lost in the foreverness of these connections, I saw that it instead was simply a mechanism for unlocking soul potential and that this had little to do with destiny at all. I know this throws cold water on the entire topic, but I can say if it happened to me, I am not merely an anomoly. In fact, I found an entire community of people who suspected that this phenomenon was not all as it seemed. They attributed the phenomenon to an outside agency or force that had less than perfect intentions. I don’t agree with their take on the phenomenon either, since I see as many holes in the argument as there are in other “twin” descriptions out there today. I think I fall into a middle way that states that the universe is neutral. Our actions serve to form our destiny, which is also to say that each of us can change what lies before us.

Entanglement (“twinning”) is a phenomenon that can occur when all the right set of requirements are met. The universe does not care if the ingredients are positive or negative, only that they are present. If so, an entanglement can take place. The ingredients that are used determine the intensity of the entanglement. The ingredients can be our own innability to see the truth and thus whatever that karma represents in specific feeds into the entanglement. The problem, though, is you can have a direct line to a person’s soul while the personality is itself extremely polarized from the higher self to the point where earthly self and higher self bear little resemblance to one another. This happened to me.

My experience was with someone who resisted her transformation instead of embracing it to the degree that she could have. Still, awakening is difficult for all of us and we do what we can do. All of this opened my eyes to show me that even those who awaken can languish for years in the remaining karmic tangles they have set for themselves. I no longer needed to be their helper or savior. I also didn’t need any more deceit in my life, how one needs to make lies to cover their own unhealed condition. In fact, I was much better off alone instead of marinating in a desire to quell lonliness.

I found that true love arises out of aloneness, in owning our solitary state while seeing how everything is simultaneously wedded together even at the subatomic level. It is the higher levels in us that need the work, not the more fundamental ones.

By seeing how this person tried to blame her troubles on the world and me, I got a clear view on the depth of inner deception we can build around ourselves, even as we awaken. I had in my own way done similar things a few years before, but now I was rushing the exits. I had a little more perspective by this time.

I had been, for my part, unsettled by a lot that went down during awakening, unsure that I’d ever get back to my business again. Clearly, awakening could not be bothered about what I wanted. I was going to take this time to slow down whether I liked it or not. This resulted in my reaching states where I could tap into streams of pure information that I was able to use to further my development. These states came as blissful epiphanies where it was like I was being attended to by a cosmic librarian who would show me to books that would teach me about a host of subjects I knew litle about. In some cases, this “librarian” would push me in certain directions. Sitting by a river on rocks, my mind flipped through the pages of a world of living information existing as energy and described by the Hindus as the akashic records. Edgar Cayce had said he used these to perform his readings. Curiously, the way he described how he achieved this was exactly how I found myself accessing them. This techique is so simple, most don’t seem able to use them perhaps because it hasn’t occurred to them. I’m happy to convey this method, but it isn’t in the compass of this post.

In one instance, I was shown how matter is created from energy. This helped me to see how two complimentary energies served to form physical reality. The bottom line, the lesson, was that the universe was not just alive, but that it was based in play and bliss. It showed that creation is a cooperative unifying event that happens inside of us along the line of the Ida and Pengal currents and that we can also create in groups a well as with a singular other.

I was shown the role that the three brains have in learning how to utilize awakening to its best effect. These brains, the light explained or showed me, were the reptile, mammal, and primate brain all present in us as beings on the planet. It explained that no part of this system could be ignored, and explained how best to use each part of the brain in order to realize the best process. Denying their presence was a disastrous way to go, it explained, and it showed how to balance thought and feeling across them in order to harness them in what could be a new synthesis of consciousness where there is less fragmentated behavior. All parts had to present. The brain had a way to mirror higher order consciousness by kowing how to use what gifts we were bestowed with.

I was shown in another epiphany moment how the energy body and the neurophysiology are in some ways mirrors of each other. I was shown the role that the “zero point” energetically has with the way that the brain and body are arranged in order to mirror a very similar principle in brain wiring or mapping.

I am pointing these things out in order to illustrate how fleshed out all of this information was and that all I needed to tap it was a deep open bliss state coupled with a focus or desire to know more even though I knew little on the topic. I mention this because you can do it also. This was what a psychic who did a reading on me described as my ability to speak from the master realm. If I can do it, you can too, but it requires an ability to keep your mind a total blank slate or else you will fill it with information that does not belong. You have to constantly feel as though you are empty and constantly grasping for the material. You always do this blindly, always unassuming but excited in the heart that soon, its life/information will fill you. There is no determining or chewing or digesting in process as far as trying to determine what it all means as it is coming, you just soak it up first, then roll it around in your head later. No expectation of any outcome. This got easier the more I could trust the process.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have changed anything. For years I lost my creative groove. I lost confidence and then discovered how easy it is to do that when surrounding yourself with toxic people. I had been using my creativity as a way to gain approval. Yuck! It all crashed and burned and was ressurected to what it is today, which sems to be much healthier and much more stable and dependent on no one’s say-so. It was me handing my power to another. Shame on me.

Now, over a decade later, I have recreated my lines of work in my business. I literally have all new work including the old standby’s. I am utilizing the internet for marketing, building community, and growing my business. This is a third incarnation of my business, first on a retail model, then wholesale, and now using the internet to do both. The thing is, it’s working. The steps are modest but each one is a step forward instead of backward. I have as many new designs created as designs that I had originally before all this happened.

For me now, I am using this new alignment of purpose less tangled from past karmic issues to help to manifest in a whole new way. While a yogi or yogini often would go on retreat, but we often do not have such luxuries. That said, I think that it would be brilliant if we had a Western inspired retreat facility where those awakened might attend to their new state with the right kind of support that such a state deserves.

~Parker

Energetic Tidbit

I’m an artist by profession and was trained in being good at observation. I have been involved in fairly technical media during my training and career, so I have spent a lot of time testing things for a wide range of results and insight. I have had to pay attention to a broad range of phenomenon in order to properly understand what is happening, from melting metal to melting and forming glass.  This power of observation stemmed from learning to be a good observer, to really see what is in front of me without my applying my own bias on what I think is happening and why.  It just so happens that because of how technical my materials are, I have had to expand that power of observation into more arena’s than when I was drawing from the figure in drawing class all those years ago.

If you learn how not to bias yourself with what you think you are seeing, the data often will lead you right to the issue and you can then begin to formulate solutions from there.

Hang on, there, this does tie into spiritual or energetic work, I promise.

By my second year into awakening, I noticed that while I was having lots of synchronicities, I had this feeling, though,  like there was something more to this facet of awakening than met the eye. Was there a way to test this phenomena so I could learn more about it? It seemed reasonable to me.

I began with a hunch that synchronicites were in fact part of a poorly understood phenomenon that was creative in nature.  I just felt in my bones that synchronicities were just the tip of the iceberg.  That said, I was careful not to be blinded by my hunch.  Instead, I just watched and observed.  if there was any truth to my hunch, I would know.  in the meantime, I would have to be careful not to try and make any evidence for my feeling to fit my own preconceived notions, a pitfall that every scientist can fall into.  Or any person when doing this kind of work.

Let me explain for you how it is for me with kundalini, first.  Through this unusually high level of prana flowing through my body on a consistent basis, I found that the nature of events in my life began to shift right along with my awakening experience.  Was it coincidence?  After having read countless accounts of others’ awakening experience I knew that this was not unusual at all.  Like I said before, synchronicities are a regular experience.  They are the “new normal.”  I also identified that I had been experiencing various layers or levels of what the Hindu call “samadhi.”  This is a high level of bliss brought on by the prodigious flow of prana in the body.  I say that prana causes bliss not because I read this somewhere but because I saw it directly in my own experience.

The period of time in which I made this discovery or observation was in 2009 when I was able to break out of a five month cycle of high adrenal output, another fairly common occurrence for many people who awaken. This was really a horrible time because of how high my adrenal levels were on a consistent basis.  I knew that this was something I had to break out of or else it would wreck my body and put me into adrenal collapse.  Through sheer will, and observation, I learned how to regulate adrenaline in my body.  After five months of this horror-show of an experience, I emerged out of this into a fairly clear place.  This was accompanied by a number of releases of old stored trauma from earlier in life, which also helped my state of mind resolve into a more peaceful state. That said, what I found was that while my energy was no longer in “fear mode” it was replaced or was transmuted into something much finer in quality.  The energy was every bit as high, sometimes higher, but was now a powerful vibratory force that would create a shimmer effect all through my body.  Still, it was a lot to take but I was happy to be at this point in the process because adrenaline 24/7 is simply dreadful.

It was against this backdrop that I was able to see if there was any correlation between my energy levels and the incidence of synchronicities.  While my energy levvel was pretty high at this point, I did have dips and rhythms.  I might have one week of powerful energy followed by a week of quiet energy.  This was not unusual, and it seemed a good reason to begin paying attention.

During this time I noticed when the energy got to a really high in frequency, I would begin having more synchronicities. If the energy cut out, so too would the synchronicities. This was repeated many times.  I watched and observed for months to see if this were mere coincidence or if it was a pattern.  I found, at least to my own satisfaction that each time energy peaked, so did the incidence synchronicities.

It was at this point that I then began thinking about the concept of manifestation as being connected or responsible for what we think of as the synchronistic event.  Now I needed to find a way to test this idea to see if it held water.

Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity and wrote a short book explaining the phenomenon.  The thing about synchronicities according to Jung was that they all had an aspect to their occurrence that involved a coincidence that was meaningful to the person they were happening to.  As a result, these were almost always highly personal or tailored to that person.  There is also an aspect to the phenomenon which is the seeming impossibility of the event taking place in the way that it does.  He described one such synchronicity in which he was in a therapy session with a woman who was describing a dream she had which had Egyptian symbology or archetypes in it.  While he was listening to her in his study in Geneva he watched as he saw a beetle climb across the outside window.  This was no ordinary beetle, though.  This was an Egyptian dung beetle, an insect that is considered sacred among Egyptians.  This is the scarab.  There was absolutely no way that this beetle could have flown from Egypt to be on his window at that precise moment in time, and yet there it was making its appearance.  Jung intuited that this was sign to him, to prod him in his analysis of the dream.  he brought up the scarab symbol and found himself explaining to the woman what her dream meant.  this led to her having a major breakthrough in her inner work as a result.

Taking all of this into consideration, I had felt like there was a lot more “juice” behind what drive synchronicities.  I felt like this was just scratching the surface.  But how could I develop a way to see if I could shift these events into a more meaningful way? Many people who experience these events nowadays almost always describe seeing unusual numerical sequences.  Mostly it is on clocks that are at “11:11” or “3:33” for example.  There are even people who try to decode what these numbers all mean.  For all I know there might be a meaning, I mean, I think for the most part these events are like the subconscious trying to communicate to the conscious level of the self.  It seemed that if I did a little digging I might find a way to expand this more, to see synchronistic events for what I felt like they were.

First, I knew that any event that you would like to see happen has to be something that you really feel like could happen.  There can’t be any “yeah but” feelings in your wish or intention.  The problem with this is that the negative feelings mingle with the positive ones and can either cancel each other out or deliver you a manifestation that has been tinged with both sides of your intention.  To do this form of creative visualization as Shakti Gawain wrote about in her book so many years ago of the same name, you had to have a way to leave out the negative parts so they did not co-create along with the positive part of the energy.  Then, all that was left was to have something that I was really engaged in that I really truly wanted.

Around this same time I began writing a manuscript for a book about the awakening process.  Most of it was first hand, but there was a chapter in the book that I felt like needed to be sound tried and true methods for helping people to cope with awakening.  I knew that I needed to find sources for this because the methods I used were just too hard to explain to people. I didn’t follow a method or teacher of any kind.  I felt like I needed to have things taken from outside my experience.  The truth was, I had no idea where to start.  A week later, though, I had a series of synchronistic events that came in threes that were simply bizarre.  To explain them, I need to set them up for you.  First, these events happened at a time when I had not spoken to anyone about this chapter I was writing.  I had no idea how it was going to turn out and it was ore or less “in the wings” at this point.  The second condition was that I did not in any way initiate the event, it merely happened on its own and involved, usually, another person who was the unwitting participant.  With that explained, let me describe this one set of events.

It was about a week into my thinking about this chapter, but I had written nothing on it.  I had a friend who began telling me about how as a small child she found that in order to cope with the effects of kundalini she happened on shaking as something that made her feel better.  She would go into a closet and shake for extended periods and this would help to ease the effects of the energy.  While she was telling me this, I had this feeling like this was something that I was looking for.  It felt significant.  Almost like a bell ringing in my head, I sat up and took notice.  I didn’t mention how I was looking for just such a technique.  It gets better, though.

A day later, I take my friend to the airport and return home, running a few errands in town and stopping by a friends house who had been going through a battle with cancer for many months.  I showed up completely unannounced and thought I would say how I was thinking about her and to wish her well.  I was greeted with her smiling face and her ushering me onto her back deck as she was eager to tell em about the events of the last year.  As soon as she was finished with her brief history, she said, “you know, I have just finished a book written by an animal behaviorist…..”  Once she said this, I felt that bell going off in my head.  I sat up, took notice, and listened intently.  She went on to describe how the author had observed that prey animals who had survived attacks by large predators (lions, tigers, bears) would universally go through a shaking fit for about fifteen minutes and then go about their way as if nothing had happened.  he considered that this may have been a way for their nervous systems to literally “shake off” the trauma of the attack they had just survived.  He applied a technique of shaking on soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf and found that it gave them relief.  Bells were going off in my head like crazy.  But wait, it gets more interesting!

As soon as I let her house, I decided I should probably try to research some books to see if I could find anything that might be useful for my chapter on techniques for coping with kundalini.  I in fact found very few books on the subject of kundalini at our university library.  I did find one book by Gopi Krishna that was a second book he had written later in life that I was not familiar with. I headed to the stacks to find the book.  Along the way, well before I got to the row where the book was, I walked by a small book that just caught my eye.  For no real reason, I plucked this book off the shelf and took it with me.  In a minute or so I had reached the book I had actually searched for and I headed to the desk to check out my randomly plucked book and the book on kundalini.

It turned out that the book by Krishna had no usable material in it.  No bells, not interesting coping methods.  My “random” book was interesting but it too contained nothing in it as I had suspected all along. I held onto the books for about two weeks and on the evening before they were due back at the library I was lying in bed and I picked up that small book and flipped through its pages really fast,  like how you shuffle cards. I opened the book to a random page (bear in mind I had not read through the book, I had only skimmed to see what it was about and had dropped the book as anything meaningful) and my eyes fell on the last paragraph on the right side page. This paragraph began to describe how a therapist named Arthur Janov had cured a patient of a long-standing trauma from his childhood by getting him to feel the full breadth of the emotion that he had, Janov felt, had been repressing since an early age.  There, on the page, was a description of how just before being cured of this trauma the young man went into a shaking fit while lying on the floor.  Immediately after he stopped shaking or convulsing, the young man looked up at Arthur Janov and exclaimed, “You did it, you cured me!”  he no longer had this hanging over his head anymore.

I was dumbstruck.  I leafed through the book to see if there were more incidences like the one the author had described.  There were none.  In fact, the author did not identify the shaking as even important, only as an element in the retelling of Janov’s own account which was being retold in this small book. I had literally found the one account in this book that described how shaking was part of a healing process. I realized that this concept of shaking was not something that was really understood, not until the animal behaviorist had written about it.  My random book had been written at least a decade before the first one my friend told me about earlier in the day when I had met with her.  What I realized I was dealing with was a quintessential needle in a haystack.  For me, however, this was a huge plus because when you think about it, how was I going to find books in print in a library that would tell me about this method that I would go on to write about in my manuscript?

I went on to have a number of these similar events while writing my book, all just as strange or bizarre as the one I just recounted. I had another set of three events that all pointed me to a philosopher whose ideas conformed to my own and helped me in fleshing out what I was dealing with as a central theme to both awakening and the book as a work.  I will, however, resist telling you about that series of events.  The point here was that I found that if I needed something in my book (or in my life for that matter) and had not real way to get to it “out there” the resource would magically find me by hook or by crook. I remember trying to describe this to someone once and she so distorted the concept that she retold the story as though I had been working some kind of magic on people to get my way.  Nope.  But it was a lesson in how some people will quite naturally misunderstand the nature of a phenomenon by applying their own inner biases on what it is they believe they are seeing.

For me, intention is key as it is in all teachings related to manifesting your desires.  I found that after I found a way to use intention to go beyond mere funny number sequences, those events tended to lessen and the more significant events took more form.  Always, there was a pressing need, a clear and pressing need and desire for something but without any understanding about how that was going to take place.  All on its own, those events would form around my own life and would repeat three times, often providing additional needed material in order to understand it better. For me, the number three is important because it deals with the trinitarian quality of kundalini itself and served as a kind of code or signal to me to sit up and pay attention.  Even when experiencing the first of any of these events, they always have this feeling that I experience, which is that of being somehow significant, even if I don’t always know how.  Once the number set of events completes itself then I always have just enough material to go on to get to the next point in my writing.

I wanted to pass this along for anyone who has either had this happen or who wants to test it for themselves to see what results they get. I hope this adds a little new wrinkle to your day. ♡

(Copyright, Parker Stafford)

The Yearning: Rewind To Preawakened State

My awakening came gradually. It came in somewhat measured steps. The first step clearly opened me to a strong flow of prana and my first experience of nonduality. Then, over five months, I began having innexplicable events occurring that led me deeper. A friend loaned me a hemisync cd for clearing emotional baggage. Another gave me a meditation technique I have detailed in the last post.

A Voice spoke in my mind telling me to close my eyes and focus on the center of my brow. Complying, I awakened my third eye, a process that expanded over several days once I focused my attention there and saw the fiery brightly lit eye emerge into my field of vision. Then I was taught or tutored in how to alter my consciousness to take advantage of the wave-form part of our consciousness, the part we call the feminine, the Shakti, the right brain and left side of the body. Everything was unfolding, gradually, carefully, as if by some plan. I wrote about it to close friends. I had no idea what it was leading to.

I had several events that all directed me along a path to awakening in a way that left me the last to know what all of these things were adding up to. Clearly, a higher intelligence was involved. This is not to say everyone must awaken the way I did. What is clear to me, because of my own experience, that at the base of awakening is an effort to break through a logjam of trapped energy to liberate or open a hole within us that will let the water of life stream in. First a trickle (for me), and growing stronger each day, each week, until my body was conditioned enough so the full rising event could come. A breaking through this logjam.

One of the events that took place in October of 2006 was a day-long acceleration of prana, which was a preview of what kundalini would bring. I had a vivid vision-a certainty in inner vision and through intensely felt feelings-about how all life feels prana or life force in the same way when it is felt abundantly (which is all kundalini really is—unusually high levels of pranic flow).

Getting ready to go home, this information nagged and pulled at me until I put it down on my computer starting at 7:30 pm and finishing at 7:34 pm (I had no idea why I should note the start and ending time but I did…now try and type what I typed in under four minutes).

This writing spoke of prana and how it was affecting both my body and mind. After writing this, I would find myself experiencing an odd synchronicity involving my finding the only magazine on a rack full of popular magazines whose content was uninteresting to me except one magazine I had to hunt for around a corner, blocked by a card rack placed in front of it. Without anything on its outside to suggest its contents, I would find that it had an article that read in bold: “When it comes to seeds, it’s all about sex.” Here is the piece I wrote to try and get that stuff out of my head, a first brush with a powerful burst of prana.

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The Yearning

The fields are wet from rain after the corn has been harvested. Trees slowly turn from green to yellow, then gold. The air cools and the mind thinks back on days when life was brimming over and the air was thick with the smell of pollen. The same corn, now nothing but stubble, stood gold and green with tassels swaying with the breeze, releasing its sweet nutty smell. To some it was just a delightful thing that marks the passage of seasons. To me, its more than that. It speaks of life seeking its own, making itself over; a new generation. A yearning, a leaning toward the wind in the hopes that Nature will take care of Nature, and carry its life giving sweetness on the air to waiting seeds, waiting for that breath of life, that germ of passion that makes the flowers grow, and makes life turn ‘round once more in the endless cycles this world is known for.

Seeds and plants and pollen, all lean into passion in ways we can scarcely imagine. For this is the glue that keeps life going. For them, it must be pleasurable, a passionate act of giving, a release, an immersion into a mystery far older than our own known seasons, our own individual lives and experiences. For this is the gravity that pulls them, moves them to continue. How can it be any other? Why then would life seek to replace itself through an act as perfunctory as the dropping of an apple from a tree? No, the drop of the apple is not perfunctory, or a second thought, but part of a yearning to become, a part of merging with some larger dance. If trees can’t feel this, then why continue? Why go on? Perhaps in measures we can only guess or imagine, there is some divine spark of wantonness, of passion and pleasure bound up within their shells of being. How can it be any other? Perhaps there is a secret life these rooted beings feel that is beyond our ken, beyond our too quickened ways. We have been “beyond” these beings for so long that they are now “just plants.” And yet, they are more. They will speak if only you will listen, and they yearn to tell of this ancient dance, this incredible desire and passion bound up within every cell of their being, so it pays if you will only listen.

I know that seeds seek and yearn and hope and dream; dreams perhaps that are so different I could never scarcely imagine or see them for what they are. And yet, it seems inescapable that these creatures, ancient as all of life here, yearn for the touch of pollen upon their seed pods and enclosures, waiting patiently for the bee to carry their spawn beyond them into other regions where others await the touch of the life giving sparks that enliven and awaken a new generation. Even the warming caress of sun and drenching rain is an act of divine providence, or giving in a wheel that knows no end and no beginning. Quiet and still, these beings mask their greater inner lives.

So even we do these same things, even we make this dance of longing and yearning, so old and ancient that its root can escape us as we are caught up as if in some whirlwind, some deeper dance both of passion and letting go as we give ourselves to life’s great mystery, to its passionate embrace, and longing that brings us to this place, this wonder filled state where our minds and bodies and hearts are excited beyond the normal trebling that life gives or provides.
To touch my eye with your eye, to touch smile to smile, or hand to hand, we join in this ancient dance, this passionate longing for life seeking to complete itself, and in so doing, complete ourselves. Round and round we turn, like stars upon an endless wheel that rolls and ducks and sways in the lost night of time. We are carried one by the other, some by our imaginings, some by the reality, but always by the same glue that keeps life turning turning back and forward at once, calling to the roots of what it was to the heavens of what it will become.

So as our hands embrace, our smiles merge, as face becomes face, and eye becomes eye; as flesh becomes flesh, we excite in this dance, this subtle movement first tentative, then more certain as we are gathered by the compass of its certainty, of its need to move as it moves, which is ever forward into endless days and tomorrows.

We came here as boundless beings who knew neither limit nor touch, and followed down into narrow pathways into minds of earthlings, like spirits on a cosmic voyage, we entered the world of limit and pain and loneliness, only to be called back by forces that were brought to bear in this world, moving us through realms of limit and bounding to that greater reminder that this is a dance of mystery, passion, and love. In this love we touch the infinite, wrapped in that which pulls and grabs us like hawk talons grasping talons in a spiral dance of yearning, moving us one step beyond this one, seeking the divine, seeking the infinite. 10/13/06 – 7:30-7:34 p.m.

The Nature Of Prana

As I look over our history as a species, from the Middle East and the religions it spawned, to the East and the philosophies, the almost-religions that stopped short of being those because they do not espouse worship of a deity or a god of any kind, I see a pattern emerge as it relates to our creative energy and all of its relatives; except under very specific conditions creative energy is only allowed to be expressed in certain ways.  I am dealing with creative energy in a very broad sense here, so if you thought creative energy was that part of us that solved problems or helped create new things like cars or rockets to the moon or music and art, hang on.  Creative energy, I have come to see includes all aspects of our being, from our desire to create art to our desire to build bridges and civilizations.  Our creativity also includes the forces that maintain our bodies and it also includes our capacity, our ability, to create more of ourselves through sexual intercourse between men and women.  All of this to my mind and experience is part of a cosmic strand that divides out in numerous ways in our consciousness but has at its root an energy that in its origin is wild and free.

The problem in our world today is that except as noted previously, creative energy has been tamped down, controlled.  Churches have done this by instilling a sense of shame about our sexuality. We were to not trust our sexuality or our urges least of all so we relied on our religions to tell us what was what.  And you know, I am not convinced that it was for good.  Look at the scandals rocking the Catholic church and they don’t seem to stop. The Pope speaks out about it, but its like it is some monolithic structure with little accountability or willingness to change.  If you doubt what I am saying here, just do a historical church of the scandals that have taken place with the Catholic church over the years and you will begin to see how difficult this issue is.  Part of it stems from requiring priests to be chaste.  I am just going to say that when our creative fires are so narrowly focused there will always be trouble. Creativity was meant to be wild and free, not tamed, and here we are with our religions trying to tame what really was meant to set us free.  And instead, we are prisoners.

I will admit that what I say about prana is my take.  People are keen to try and point out that our perception is just perception, so human, so frail, so likely to be distorted.  But you know, this time, I don’t think so.  As I read about the hundreds, thousands, even, of experiences describing the bliss of the flow of prana, I see the same thing. It’s seen as a goddess, perhaps, wild and free, powerful.  But this energy is in all of us, the place where our inner man and inner woman meet, the explosion of opposites.  That is the definition of kundalini….which is nothing more than this: prana in supreme abundance (finally!). What I observe is what everyone else observes.  People may have different reactions to it.  Some might close down, some might open up.  Some might open and close in turns.  Some will be highly insightful, some will realize there is more to their ability to plumb their depths.  All through it, prana is the wild child to me, a liberating and spiritually lubricating force.

Torus form with multiple sheathes/fields

Prana is creative.  It stimulates all centers of the body when there is an abundance of it.  The ancients described bliss that was off the charts due to the increased flow of this energy.  As I sit writing this, I feel a steady-state experience of bliss.  I came to this level of bliss as a result of a lot of inner work.  I instinctively knew that if I followed what kundalini was doing that things would get easier.  They have.  I still have my challenges that I deal with, but they change with every realization or inner breakthrough.  I know that in my case that prana has fueled wildly vigorous creative energy.  In fact, I had to be creative in the arts in order to build enough of a flow in my body to sustain the current level of bliss that I feel.  When I go into the energy I can feel its wildness.  I can feel that it was never intended to be tamed.  yes, it is like water and will flow into any container in which it is poured, but the vessel itself is what limits or allows the flow of this force.

As someone who deals with awakening on a daily basis for over a decade, I luagh at the videos of teachers telling people how to awaken the kundalini.  The “Sat Nam!” breath that is one part hammer and one part release into the Mystery.  i know that if I had to depend on an exercise like that to awaken I think I should wait a very long time.  Maybe someone figured out that it worked for some folks, but I direct the flow of prana by way of feeling only.  This has always been what has opened the gates….always.  Even teachers who say prana is breath are wrong; prana is a fine energy that is in no way contained in the air.  No, prana moves by way of feeling. In fact, feeling is how we actually communicate to the cosmos. it is how the dream is made manifest (I write about this extensively in the blog so do a search to find out more).

The chakras are energy centers and every one has an emotional vibration connected to it.  This “emotive power” inherent in the chakras is born out of this feeling quality I am talking about.  No, people shut down their chakras and thus prana when they feel a hard feeling instead of a soft opening feeling.  And even if a million teachers say prana is breath, it does not make it right even once.  It just means that they themselves do not understand prana or have not been able to stimulate prana with anything other than breath (and this tells me as the observer that they may be lacking in their ability to connect with their feeling side of themselves to boot!). I know it might sound pedantic, but I promise you that it isn’t.  When we understand something so simple as prana responding to feeling, we can get ourselves on the right track in our own work for bringin in more of it so that its flow can heal (which it does).

Breath, when properly used, has a stimulating effect on the body which in turn stimulates prana. It isn’t even that the chakras respond to thought, it is deeper still than that.  Feeling….the whole world is lacking in feeling and awareness of their power to feel.  People who are not awakened will laugh at this, but trust me, the world carries a level of numbness in them…..even awakened people.  The journey to full feeling can take some time.  I know that I have been gifted with a kind of energetic “reset” by a healer who revealed the true depth of my woundedness, which sent me into a very real sense of physical pain (which was itself emotional/spiritual but now boosted by the presence of prana so it feels physical), so I know that we can go merrily along with the work of awakening only to find, “holy bejebus! there is so much more!” even years later.  So this is why all of this can become such a journey for people.  This is a journey to realization.  Realization comes about as a result of awareness.  Sometimes, once in a great while, we can meet people who we connect so deeply with that they share something about themselves that can spark all sorts of realizations within ourselves.  Some are direct, some tangential.  Some are unintended.  But this is why relationship has been so important in awakening and is also one aspect that is largely denied by the world’s religions as a bona fide religious or spiritual “practice.”

Yes, prana is creative. There are stories of how women who have undergone awakening have experienced a sense as though they were pregnant, that they were going to birth something. A close family friend confided in me during one of our talks about her awakening process that she went through a period of time when she could feel her body wanting to physically birth something. She sensed that this was part of her awakening process, but it was a curious experience to her.  When I explained to her that many other women have reported the same experience it made her feel a little less crazy. The experiences have all been extremely similar and I think that it points to powerful energies that are creative in nature but that operate at higher dimensional levels and are having their effect in our day-to-day lives (because it’s all connected now).

So I think that when we are faced with the spirit and the higher self, it is quite natural for higher-order experiences to be transmitted into the language of the body, to be related to our bodies as well as all other levels of ourselves.  I have noticed that at a certain level the self knows itself to be One with all things, so naturally the creative energy of prana is the same as the creativity of our personalities, the same creativity of our physical bodies in making babies, and who knows what other forms of creative output there are in other realms of experience that we have yet to discover as sentient beings. What is universal is that creativity always feels blissful.  When we create babies in the physical our bodies provide us with an orgasm to make the experience that much more filled with reward, but creative energy also brings chills and goosebumps to creators of music and art.  It at once expresses and evokes powerful feeling. People who have awakened almost all go through intense creative bursts.  As an artist I can say that my awakening has fueled a number of new directions in my work that would have never existed before.  It’s a little crazy in a way just how crowded my inner landscape is with ideas.  My only challenge is in bringing these ideas to fruition.  And, in the way that prana also works, it speeds up manifesting many-times over.  For example, when I began thinking about how close I was to reopening my studio practice after teaching, without saying a word, but thinking how I would like to have some good assistants, I received one highly qualified request for being involved in some part-time capacity at the studio making work as well as two beginners who expressed a sincere desire to learn the discipline.  The interesting part of this is how well-timed it was.  By now, I am not surprised by any of this, but I know that when my prana flow increases, it accelerates manifestation of desired outcomes.  That said, it might bring me a person who WANTS to work in my field, but it does not guarantee that they will be excellent or that they will decide to stay with it a year or even a week later. Sometimes, you have to dig deeper to find where these glitches exist.  But that is for another time.

But here is the problem as I see it, at least as it relates to many of our institutions on earth,  which is that our creativity has been hijacked.  It’s not some demonic conspiracy to enslave humanity, just a desire to tamp down creativity because it scares people who are in positions of power.  One thing I know about power is that the vast majority of institutions and the people within then have a great need to control.  This control on the one hand may have been intended to keep people from killing each other or behave badly, but the other side of the coin has been that it also limits freedom.  It limits our creativity.  When I look at what I have seen in my meditations about creativity and how wild and free it is and when I look at the human race, I see a big disconnect.  And the problem? Here is your problem…..

We value war and destroying in the name of greed and the usurpation of land and wealth through military invasions and keeping our race held hostage by the fear of the next fabricated threat that the military industrial complex decides to come up with next (read your history on this—most of our wars have been coups on the part of the CIA or an effort to fool us into war, this didn’t start with the invasion of Iraq, this has been going on for a long time). We are taught that to be a man we must be warlike, unfeeling.  Women have their place, perhaps one of the greatest fonts of creative energy alive on the planet and our women are shut down to such an unbelievable degree. Their thought process mimics men in their rational approach, with that fabulous intuitive and feminine character of soul nearly gone.   Really, you have no idea.  But so are the men shut down.  We all are, so don’t think I am picking on anyone in particular.  But men are shut down in such a way that it creates this rage and it just keeps feeding their desire to go to war so they can just kill something.  This, my friends, is creativity turned into itself.  This is the dark side of the creative force.  Do I really need to point this out to you? Men who don’t know how to command their sexual energy, women who are afraid of these men, and then women who aren’t in command of their own sexual energy too, and use their emotional forces of manipulation to work things in their favor.  It is a crazy mixed up mess if you ask me.

Our institutions by and large forswear sexual expression as a necessity to make babies, but by and large, we have incredible taboos placed on our sexuality.  While there are good reasons for governing behavior in theory, my observation is that our attempts to govern sexual energy result in greater dysfunction than ever.  Men pitted against women, the war of the sexes, men not in possession of their source of power and women not in full possession of their source of power either.  All the while we are taught that our sexual nature is dirty, that lust is not redeemable, and forget having sex if its lustful.  In fact, most of our institutions teach us how to sublimate sexual energy as a convenient way of side-stepping the issue altogether. In many parts of Asia its as though the teaching of Zen Buddhism and Taoism and other strands of Buddhism would rather deal with packaging bliss so that its no longer sexual as their axis mundi for solving the problem.  Women no longer in possession of themselves will never engage a man at the level of his divinity for very long, but the exact same can be said for men with their women.  I ask; how did we get here? I feel like I am in that video by the Talking Heads for the song Once In A Lifetime where a clearly out of control David Byrne seeks to illustrate the chaos of our lives as controlled beings while desiring finding the flow of life.

When I step back from this madness, I can feel a world within me swirling with the forces of creation in a way that I had always hoped to be able to feel, actually.  I had always hoped prior to awakening that creative energy was this vivid and strong (and it is). But when I look at the world I see we have a long way to go, baby.  We have a long way to go because we have squashed the creativity of the feminine and masculine both.

It’s interesting to me how as men begin to soften, kundalini is coming onto the scene also as women are learning how to find their own strength and their own sovereignty.  I observe that on a collective level humans are reaching across the aisle and integrating more of their opposites into their lives especially over the last twenty years (which also corresponds with the sudden increase of awakening (I could be wrong, but I don’t buy that these awakenings are due to someone decided it will be, but are the result of a myriad of factors all resulting in the changes we see today.  If you know how awakening is itself defined by the fusion of opposites in consciousness, then you can perhaps appreciate how it is that we now have a mass awakening taking place on the planet. Right. Now. And honestly, I observe that the progress we have made not just for hundreds of years, but especially during this last century, just happens to be of a kind that favors the fusion of opposites.  What if instead of this being some grand cosmic event as many want to say it is, we are simply glimpsing the natural result of people having reached a kind of threshold point in their development with awakening being the result.  This period has shown us more possibilities and people have been able to shrug off the control of their institutions just enough to begin to evolve in new directions, directs that favor awakening.

I think we need to be less concerned about how others will react or treat us.  We already are made into a kind of outcast by the differences in our experiences moment by moment from the average Joe and Josephina.  I mean, admit it, even as you go through your life undercover as the awakened being on the planet, you also find that this makes you feel so singular and lonely.  Social things for social creatures.  I think that the teachings of Tantra have a lot to explain about bliss.  While tantra is itself not necessarily sexual, the parts of tantra that are do not seek to shy away from confronting issues in our consciousness (well, it is the same with white tantra or black, both head straight-away right into the center of the fire which is how all emotional release work is done in fact).  The lesson is that you never skirt the briar patch, you head right into it and liberate it of whatever hitches that reside within the self.  Free yourself from shame, guilt, and repressed emotion. I know that in my life I have worked to dissolve as much of it as I can.  I have more to go, but as this last block rears its head I am reminded that if I am to be able to hear the voice of my intuition and my inner guidance as clearly as possible, I have to continue to be clearer.  Don’t be tamed, friends.

I Saw The Light

I’m not going to blow smoke up your behind. I honestly cannot say where it comes from. I can’t even say if it originates in our neurochemistry or in interdimensional space. What I do know is that it figures in most every transformative event for people down through the ages.  Saints and sages all speak of it and in the world of awakenings, it’s presence is ubiquitous. You might even say it’s a prerequisite or initiation into awakening itself.

 

Im talking about the experience of “the light.” Most who have awakening experiences have had at least one encounter with it. In earliest Christianity they wrote about it, even connected it to the same light one sees when one dies, linking this encounter as critically important for attaining something more in this life of ours. What is clear is that whether you were Paul on his way to Damascus, or a monk meditating in a cave, getting hit by that blinding light is an important clue that awakening is here.

 

I experienced it in a completely unexpected way while meditating prior to the full “rise” of kundalini. When it happened, I actually thought someone had flipped the light switch, like playing a trick on me to get me to come out of the dark room I was in at the time. But no, there had been no switch flipping that day…at least no switches in the physical, that is…

 

after my innocuous encounter with with the white light, things began changing real fast. I didn’t see events downstream as being connected, but over time, I have come to see it as one of several central events tied to my awakening. I think that to attain this light leads to what the ancients called the perfection of the Light Body, the Rainbow Body, or soul. In ancient texts an encounter with the white light is the demarcation point most often used to point out how a person’s life has changed. I should add that this is not, in my experience, an instantaneous cleansing, but an event that initiates a process of cleansing.

But here’s the thing. I can’t say for sure that it’s even really light. It may simply be an interpretation of an energetic emanation of some kind. It might even be connected to how we perceive. It might be inside of us all along. I say this because it feels like it is within. It does not feel like it’s coming from outside in the least. Perhaps this is a realization about our true nature as this light? I really cannot say. It is a bit of a mystery. Maybe it’s God, Maybe it’s an emanation from it. Maybe it’s my own connection to higher order awareness. What I can say is that while I am aware of it, I don’t feel anything particularly special at the time while I see this light effect. It seems to have had a healing effect, but more “downstream” from the light event itself. It remains a bit of a mystery in my experience, and I am loathe to jump to conclusions about what I think it is or isn’t.

What isn’t a mystery, though, is how this encounter has life changing effects.

Last night, on what can arguably be considered one of the coldest nights in years, I snuggled into bed with my cat purring by my side and after watching a documentary, slipped into a nice meditative state. I did this after feeling a bit of upset about something happening with a family member who is unable to understand something which I felt was important at the time. For some reason, it had me tied in knots. All the more reason to go into meditation and see if I could find resolution of one kind. So with eyes closed, I felt my energy begin to move, fluttering, spinning, and pulsing. The more I let go, the more it was free to simply be itself. My meditation nowadays tends to center around letting my energy body simply be itself without controls from the mind. Call it a surrender to the higher self, a larger order or picture of what is true. When I did, even though I had been tied in knots thinking about the world as it is, everything went by the wayside as a world of light effects began to take shape for the first time in years.

Since my encounter with the light, my experience has been largely one of sensation but without a visual compliment. No light effects. As I found myself very quickly in deep water, I prayed about the state of the world, my experience in it, and how I might resolve my feelings about it. That’s when the light came.

It was without form, but it felt as though it had layers and that these layers were unfolding from within, as though from my core a light was being generated and was propagating such that it had sheaves or orbs with different layers nested one inside the other. It was multilayered light. Suffusing it was this white light. I know I just said it had no form only to begin giving it form. It had the idea of form, but was not tied down to how form is linear and composed as it is in the physical. If something was in a center point, it was more the idea that this was so. In truth, I can’t adequately explain exactly how it appeared to me. It was at once no local while also having locality, shape, and form. Formlessness within form.

Was I being cleansed? Was it healing me? Was it a neurological effect? All I can say is that when I awoke, whatever feelings I had last night that weighed on me, they feel far away.

So here is what I am going to do. I’m going to see if I can repeat last night’s performance and try and place my unresolved feelings into the light, if it comes again, to see what happens. I will see if I can begin doing this on a regular basis to see how it works. I suppose if one believe in it enough, anything is possible. But humor me my experiments. I’ll report back on what I have found. And I also should include that it’s easy to say there has been a change 24 hours in. The story will probably be told after weeks or months. Only after seeing sustained change can we ever know that the change was real and not just wishful thinking.

In a sense, this is what awakening does anyway, which is to resolve blocked emotional material. In the healing method called Ho’oponopo, one offers up your brokenness to the universe in order to heal it. It is offering it up to a higher power. There are countless other methods for healing that are from many different traditions that all involve very similar methods, a “let go and let God” sort of idea.

I think it could be interesting…<3

Understanding Kundalini

People say a lot about it…and for the most part, there’s a lot of good information out there. But there are a lot of things said that just aren’t so. Some say you must have a guru, receive diksha, and stuff like that. But they say it because that’s their only experience, so they can’t imagine it any other way.

I didn’t have a guru. I didn’t receive diksha. I didn’t do yoga. I didnt sit in full lotis with back straight, eyes on the nose. I did have a confluence of serendipitous events based on my singular intent to get to the bottom of a few things in my life. These were things that I had buried and needed to resolve that wound up being the switch that turned on the lights. I didn’t have a guide, I did what I was trained as an artist to do: I observed. I’m no different than anyone else except I have been seeking this something “more” that came crashing into my life like a cosmic visitor who made sure nothing would ever be the same ever again.

I see so many searches done on my page that show me that on a daily basis people are just trying to come to grips with their awakening. In the beginning it is a lot to take in. But I think that you were made for this. I also think that we all have existential threads that we need to learn how to cut while awakening is present and strong in us. Doing this will free you up to go from intense awakening to smooth flow. For as hard as it was for me at times, I always knew I was going to make it. I think I chose this at some level. Something in me has the resilience to get through the harder parts of the experience. It’s incredibly personal, so it’s a bit like being laid open like an experiment in dissection…and yet, if you notice, the things that are dissected are never a loss to you. I had this fear….like it was going to destroy me. It was really my fear of change. Over time I learned simple forms of surrender which took me twenty feet into my soul depths, then 40 feet…only to find there was a still deeper surrender as it took me deeper into my psyche to dig out the deeply rooted issues. Not happy with trimming my existential bushes, I dug deep and asked the energy to take me with it. It has always been my teacher and my guide. I am the guru…but that guru is mine. It is your job to recognize the guru in you, too. There is nothing wrong with seeking to figure out how you will do this. My words are just a reminder that you have this. Get curious about yourself.

Today as I was working, there was this channel of information streaming in. Normally I ignore it so I can focus on the busy-work of my day. But it comes, and when it does, when I listen deeply and give myself to it, I can later go and lay on my soft carpeted floor on cushions and give it my full attention. This makes a lover of me, I am not ashamed to admit, and it draws me closer, a great nothingness that is everything, that I am drawn to. And then, I am on fire again.

So as this comes in the moment, let me see if I can explain something that it’s telling me and if you can relate to it.

Kundalini is just an abundance of an energy we call prana, chi (qi), ka, or life force or vital force. It comes when enough blocks are removed to make it possible to let it’s flow increase. I know the Indians say you concentrate on it to imagine drawing it up from the base of the spine, but energetically something “gives way” inside of you that allows for this flow. This isn’t a physical change. It is a change in the structure of your thoughts and your feeling. It’s simple. In fact, way simpler than most people let themselves to be.

Since prana is a force that is also conscious energy, the “structures” that govern it is the subtle energy system. Normaly, we were made for it’s flow, but as humans, it’s stopped. In most people, its a trickle. Once it flows, little can stop it.

The one thing that can stop it is strong negative emotional energy and your thoughts. In the early stages of awakening it seems nothing can stop it, but I have seen that it can be regulated. So if this is so, then the way you can work with this energy is by learning how to be so that the ride is easy instead of hard. This is how it teaches you. You might want to resist it at first, but this is the universal intelligence in all of us, and it has no limitations. The only thing that limits you is you. And for a time, keeping a handle on it may be what you need before going deeper with it. Just follow your instincts and your comfort level. You can, though, go as deep as you wish with it. It is without limit.

Growing up, I had a lot of run-ins with energy. I could have awakened early in life, but the material didn’t move enough. I knew intuitively though that I needed to increase the flow of my inner energy. Interesting things would happen when the flow increased. I often missed what the trick was in increasing the flow. I didn’t realize how I felt was the valve that opened it up. I was too much in my head. I was shown that as this energy increased, my ability to be more aware of numerous streams increased, too.

In an experience at age 18 with a past life as a Native American man who was having a Thunderbeing vision, I found myself swept up into a high level electrical energy of the spirit that made it possible for me to be simultaneously aware of being in four places all at once. Without going into the experience in detail, as the energy rose in me during this vision quest experience in that past life, I was able to be aware that I was alive in numerous aspects or spiritual beings in the vision. I looked out through my eyes as the native man, my own eyes in 1984, the eyes of the thunderbird, and the eyes of the Thunderbeing who was in the storm. I was able to be aware of each location at once. There are exercises that yogis use that do the same thing, and I suspect it’s to achieve the same type of state.

I am telling you this to illustrate the point that as energy increases, so too does consciousness and it’s ability to perceive and take in information incredibly fast and on many channels at once. This only happens when there is enough energy present. I am telling you this to help you be aware of what your potential is and that you can use this to help yourself understand better what’s going on inside you. And if you don’t believe what I have conveyed to you is possible, try imagining the possibility that it is possible, and then do an experiment where you tell yourself that you will allow yourself to open up and be led. Depending on who you are, you might slip right into it, achieving what you thought you were not capable of moments before, or it might need to incubate in you for days or even weeks before you have that surprise “a-ha” moment. Could be, too, that you have it come to you in dream. If it fits you enough, it’s only a matter of time before you encounter it. It’s really about where you put your focus.

So the really great thing I was being shown today was a version of something I think about a lot because I find it so interesting. This is the energetic engine that keeps prana flowing. I’m being shown that it’s these two polarities, things I think of as a cosmic quantity that I might symbolize in my mind as the shakti-shiva or the divine pair. But when these “two” which are really just one wake up inside of you, it wakes up the rest of the cosmos inside of you, too, because this pair is seeded into everything, so it opens you up and gives you access to all that is.

The energy in you is moving through all other things, and since the energy exists outside of space/time, it is everywhere all at once. This means you are also everywhere, too, by extension. I know you aren’t everywhere physically , but take a moment to feel the “god” state alive in this experience and feel how the very fine energy within it is simply not limited. Do you feel that immensity?

Maybe you think you should do something with it. Maybe you think it’s just that way and nothing more can be done. What I find is that as I turn my attention, the energy can “fetch” whatever it is I want or need to know about a good many things. I also need only think about something and it winds up happening. I have been having some very nice adventures in manifesting lately. This reveals to me how the world is really creating using our thoughts. The world is not for or against me, it’s giving me what I am.

Imagination is the gateway for this experience. Beyond the most obvious use of imagination, which is the creation of things, is also the capacity in you to image things that you never knew about before. Imagination becomes a portal for direct knowledge, direct learning, and your ability to feel is what makes it possible for you to relate to whatever information you are picking up on. All of this is experienced not as concepts but as a living reality. Everything has a life. Everything is alive, sentient, even if it’s not physically alive. It is the aliveness of atoms that makes it possible for matter to evolve or to become living like we are.

This aliveness, this livingness is in everything, and it isn’t that our existence as sentient matter is the ultimate state, because it isnt, it’s that everything that exists exists because it is aware. Far from dead matter, atoms have an enduring life of their own, with subatomic particles making up the “cells” of each atoms “body.”

What makes this possible is the sweetness, the uncompromisingly compassionate and ever-present energy on which we are all riding. By sinking into it, you avail yourself of its healing as it straightens out the kinked and blocked places within you. It feels fierce early in awakening only because it’s like trying to fit a thousand gallons through a straw. This is due to the energy body still being restricted or blocked. The more you let it flow into you in your dark places, the more it removes and the more smooth everything within your body and mind gets.

This is to me like the biggest story around. It is for many, a secret. But hidden in your ability to feel (not your emotions…this is your ability to feel and to be more and more sensitive inwardly) is it’s “secret” revealing itself. The less you rationalize with it,the more it will unfold in you.

The more aware you are, the more capable you will be of feeling the remaining blocks in your energy body. As you turn your attention to them, the prana flows. It flows through your attention. This is why we can transmit energy through our eyes. It isn’t that the energy literaly flows through our physical eyes, but that it flows through our attention, and for this energy, a gaze is a form of attention.

It’s quite something knowing that your body is host to trillions and trillions of other lives existing in your body at this moment. It’s true; every cell has it’s own life, even if it lives for only a few weeks, or even days. Every atom, when you see it up close , pulses and vibrates in such a way that it’s a wonder that your body mass doesn’t just slip through everything.

The world’s secrets can open up like a beautiful mountain flower which only you are privy to in that moment. What would you like to see? Would you like to see how we were made, how we came to be here on this planet? It’s surprising to find out that human life as we know it was active long before earth was hospitable, existing in different genomes in different regions of this and other gallaxies. Sound impossible? Go look. Use your minds eye. Or maybe you ant to learn how other cultures existed, or how the light body works, or new forms of technology that use sentient energy as a way to interface with them without the use of dirty fossil fuels, or how you can cancel gravity through high frequency waves, or how some theories in physics only get it partly right. Or, closing your eyes, you can listen to the life of plants and read about their story and how their passions exist in differently seeded ways than our own, a realization that helps to open the mind to the possibilities.

Kundalini & Flu Symptoms?

Its pretty amazing to me just how big the stats are on people searching using kundalini and flu symptoms. This has been going on for a number of years on several blogs that I have.  It is consistent across the board. This tells me that kundalini awakenings are going strong and that people are concerned most with this, next to a handful of other observations related to awakening. I think that it is important to help illuminate this subject because this spectrum of experience effects so many people.

 

I dealt with flu-like symptoms a lot during awakening and my sense has always been that prana as a force has a stimulating effect on the body, yes, obviously, but it also creates some irritation as well. I have for years made a habit of making careful observations of my experience.  this goes back to the days when I began seeing energy fields around people, which was about twenty years before I had awakening.  being an artist as well as a scientist-minded person, I have been taught to be a professional observer as part of my training as a visual artist, so this has been easy for me to do.  When it comes to this flu issue, I have dug into it and I will provide you some key observations that I have made.  Understanding the basics can help you in knowing how to soften its effects.

 

I felt this irritation  or flu before the full rising of kundalini in the form of stomach upset and mysterious bouts with flu-like symptoms that affected my intestinal track.  it would come, I would take Pepto and things would settle back to normal again for a few weeks before it would come back again.  It is normal.  Along with this I also found a lot of other bodily fluids being produced that I felt were the direct result of this stimulating effect.  I could be wrong, but my sense has always been that these fluids were being produced as a way to protect the body from further irritation.  When prana flows at such high levels, I think the body does what it can to deal with it.  When I had gut trouble in the beginning, I used pepto, which always made it go away for a while.  I think that similar stomach coating methods can be helpful.  Just a little something to provide comfort.  At the time this was happening, I didn’t know it was related to kundalini.  I even went to the doctor for it.  He showed nothing of concern, and suggested it was just my natural system adjusting to something.  All good, he said.  And a week later: boom!  Then things began making more sense to me.

 

My observations have led me to observe that the type of energy that is causing this irritation the most is what is referred by Chinese Medicine as “solar” Chi (Qi)  prana, or the “masculine” side of the energy.  But then it came time for me to see if what I had found in my inner observations  was correct.  When I looked it up on some Chinese medicine sites, sure enough, they described solar energy in the gut related to Qi flow and its effects, most notably irritated bowel, production of mucus, etc., as a result of this stimulation effect.  So yes.  Normal. But the questions about how to cool things down. How do we deal with it?

 

My first thought is to focus on the feminine energy, the yin side to this for comfort.  It has what is called a “cooling” effect.  On the one hand, the masculine energy can clear and heal a lot of things, an energy that I like for letting things go having to do with blocked energy, but it is only one side of the equation.  While the yang energy is good at pushing through stuff, you also have to work the other side of things, by really going deep in another more “feminine” shakti way.  Push out, draw within. Part of a cycle of innermost creation.  And this cycle is what makes consciousness whole.  We each have both, so don’t be afraid to explore it.  It will also connect you in to issues and balances that will help you in your process. I often meet people who tell me they have no idea how to balance this energy.  These are people who have awakened sometimes.  I think, “really?” Each one of us has both masculine and feminine energy, not literally male and female energy, no, but what we call that.  It has more to do with the nature of consciousness and the fact that we have these two “sides” which are in fact part of a spectrum of experience or character.  To understand how this works, imagine the letter “U” and on one arm of the letter there is a male side and on the other, there is a female side.  This is negative and positive energy like a magnet or battery.  The point to realize here is that there is no one point where the U is either male or female, positive or negative.  Do you get that? So if you still don’t get it, let me see if I can help you.

 

U

 

How you are able to anchor the feminine energy will be something that you connect well to, your own inner associations.  You will FEEL “her” in you, so the trick will be how to explore it more.  When you anchor this awareness or focus on this part of your awareness, you are effectively opening up to what I call a wave or field-based awareness instead of a particle awareness (which is masculine).  This awareness is vast, it is very very large in its scope so when you shift into it, it allows issues to not be felt quite as acutely and it can also help you to shift or transform the energy by allowing the wisdom within the field or waveform awareness (feminine)/  The opposite can also work but in a different way, but usually particle or masculine energy will often mean that you are willing to “burn’ through a block.  There is also the possibility where you can use a balance of the two and in those cases, healing comes about much more quickly and can lead to large releases all at once.

It might be that simply thinking about the feminine, looking at images of goddesses, dakinis, or yogini’s can do it for you.  Sometimes just reading something about the divine feminine….meditating on the moon and its symbolic nature in your own mind as an archetypal symbol loaded with meaning….deep rivers, the dark side of our being, a deep void pregnant with possibility might do it.  if you are actively experiencing awakening you wont have to go far to encounter her.  She resides along the left side of your body and then as she moves up into the neck and the head, the energy does a flip as it goes into the “zero” state, where the flow moves into what I calla “flux” condition where its polarity changes.  It meets in the head and the hemispheres of the brain mirror this.  Right brain is holistic, sees the big picture, is diffuse, vast, wildly creative, but also needs the direction of the left in order to create a focus within that vast field.  Learn how the energy works in your consciousness and body.  I think that this will help if you do this kind of work daily.

 

The other thing you can do is to look at what the Eastern traditions say about foods that are good for yin.  These will be described as “cooling” in nature.  Before I knew about this type of diet I was approached in a vision by my guardian and he showed me an image of several foods.  One was eggs.  That was the protein I was to eat for a while because meat was giving me a lot of trouble.  Then alongside the egg was a slice of cantaloupe. “Really?” I thought. But I tried it, and by golly, it really helped to calm kundalini effects a LOT.  In fact, it put me into this very calm blissed-out state.  It was like a drug.  This only lasted for about a six month period for me, though.

A year later I came across an article on a site that described that eating melon was very good for calming and “cooling” kundalini down.  Well there you go, right?  Along with melon are other foods like cucumber which are supposed to be good.  I found myself not eating meat and eating a lot of eggs, fruit and light uncooked vegetables.  I also found that a couple of years later that raw jalapeno would really even me out and put me into a similar blissed-out state as the cantaloupe had a few years prior.  Again, this was synchronized with where I was at the time.  Jalapeno does not affect me the same way as it did then when kundalini was stirring me so strongly with all those blocks to clear out.  You might want to listen to your intuition, consider lucid dreaming and mediation to get messages about the best things to try.  Trust that you can discern these things. Whatever the way is that works best for you, the information is there and it can help you out a lot if you can learn to trust that this can happen.  Sometimes just being aware that you can do this is enough to begin grabbing that informational tiger by the tail.  Heavier foods have had their place for good grounding, but there is also a time not to be grounded completely.  Sometimes you have to go waaay out in order to do the work, right?  So go.  Do.  And then, get your grounded state in so you keep balance in your life.

 

The other side to all of this is that during rapid block removals you can feel achy.  It feels almost like you are going to get sick.  This is a good time to let the junk flow through you.  it is a bit like the “hair of the dog.”  When I had rapid removal during Qi Gung work, I actually felt clammy and sick for several weeks.  Then, just as a block was getting ready to move, I would feel sick a little to my stomach.  This always became a sign that I was moving energy.  At this stage, it can often be the result of what I call chakra energy movement where the force of the chakras are moving many blocks in a given region of the light body instead of individual blocks.  This is more a wholesale kind of removal.  You can often be dealing with a whole cluster of blocks being removed at once and this was always where I got flue symptoms.  It was a lot to deal with, so symptoms emerged.  But instead of this being a situation where I was being made sick by the junk floating through me, it was more its last hurrah before it was gone.  So think of it as a positive sign and that once it all moves, the flu feelings will recede until the next big series of blocks go.  You will likely find after a few years of this that things quiet down and you begin experiencing blocks moving more from the meridians than the chakras.  They are ALL moving out of the meridians or the nadi, but the chakras are creating these powerful stirrings of the energy in certain areas that sweeps all that stuff up and out.  Let it do its work!  Its good! Just know that this is simply a reaction and you are not getting sick.  If it gets bad enough, consider minimally invasive ways of calming and creating comfort for coating the stomach. Teas, honey, even yogurt or milk if you can handle that.

 

Drink plenty of water, too. I know it sounds simple, but your body is working overtime.

 

I hope that this helps you.  My hope is to help ease your way, to provide you with what I have found useful, to add to our base or understanding.  Use what works and bear in mind, too, that some things wont work at one point in the journey and suddenly work in other periods.  ~P.

 

 

The Marks Of My Awakening II

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

Continued from the previous…

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

 

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

 

Below, see a close-up of the mark.

 

The Second Mark

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

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

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

Enter a caption

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

 

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

 

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

Marks Are Not A Given Nor A Necessity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time…

 

 

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