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The Great Lesson

As a Westerner who had no goal of awakening kundalini, I came to it without the underpinnings of belief or practice beyond my own self-fashioned meditation technique I had practiced for years. No guru, no teacher…

I remember reading somewhere that upon awakening one becomes a yogi. The first awakening dream that I had had me taking a shortcut through a town which I took and found a house that looked like a cross between a Shinto temple and an arts and crafts style house. House is for me, the self. In it sprang two streams of water in the main front room, one on the left and one on the right. The waters were, I would find, the “two” currents within consciousness that would later merge into one, via the sushumna nadi. Water which had light within it. I would see the three people who would be part of my first four years of my awakening journey there, bathing in these waters. Once awakening came, it was as though I was opened to a stream of inner knowing about just about anything I was interested in. As I got situated in this “new normal” and began to learn more about my new state, I would from time to time find things that felt like they were….off about the subject that some teachers had addressed. It was interesting to see how ideas would emerge from the popular culture about the phenomenon, too. They sounded good, but they didn’t land well with me (but what did I know, right?). Of course, these people certainly knew what they were talking about, but an inner prompting said otherwise to me. As I began to question these things, I had someone enter my life who was both friend and teacher. Her approach was different from just about everyone I knew who was on to awakening. She had counseled hundreds of people in her practice, helping people overcoming some of the greatest challenges of their lives. She literally worked miracles with her clients. Some of them were impromptu meetings with neighbors who had come over to say hi and there we would be in a healing session involving a woman releasing a past trauma that had kept her unknowingly tangled in herself. And just like that, she trotted off into the night, ready to take the ferry to the mainland the next morning, transformed from a hurdle that now no longer laid in her path. “What just happened here?” I would ask and she would smile and say, “Welcome to my world.”

In another situation while over the phone she performed what I have called a “reset” of my energy. Up until this time I had familiarity with the phenomenon of “painbody” but after the reset, it was as if I had not known the degree to which I had this in my system. While the effects of this “reset” were pretty miserable, it also made me more aware of my own energy. It was as if I was gifted with a keener awareness of my own inner system than before. While I winced through my days, this new awareness also focused me on my own challenges in a clear-eyed way. It also put a fire under me to learn how to make myself more available to the energy which was there remaking me. It worked: I entered into a period where I released hundreds of blocks that had been driven down into my subconscious. It also accelerated changes in how I acted, reacted, and felt. I was returning to a truer version of myself. While this meant for me that some of my relationships would go away with a fair degree of malice on the side of those who rejected this new me, it also helped to illustrate to me what happens when we think we can make deals with the world that go against our deeper more authentic selves.

She was the most gifted person psychically I have known and when she explained her gifts she said how she was not born with the filters most have in place. She said that she had to feel her way through her life. When she did that, she was always guided to just the right place, the right situation where she needed to be. It seemed to me that it left her without an idea of a plan in the day to day. She emphasized to me how important it was to learn to feel, to be more aware of how to feel more deeply in one’s life than to be so rational in it. She explained that by being both clear within and being more connected to feeling, one could navigate this new kind of life much easier. By remaining stuck in the rational mind, all sorts of ideas a person could glom onto and take as true because the rational doesn’t have the same capacity for emotional intelligence that the feeling side of the self has. The problem, though, we look askance at feeling as some kind of emotional wilderness.

I have seen how the rational mind is that part of our brain that has specialized for all things linear and process-based. Language emerges there, the ability to identify the things that are most immediately important in the moment or the process. This is where abstractions emerge, and for as helpful as they are, abstractions are one step removed from what is real. The left brain, lacking feeling, can draw from larger concepts smaller subsets for use outside of a larger context. It isn’t that this isn’t important. It is in fact what has given birth to language, to logic, and to all kinds of technologies all dependent on process-based methods, including knowing order and placement. Language makes no sense when it lack order and strict rules. The same is true for many computer languages, mathematical processes, for example. We made it to the moon using this part of our minds. What it does lack is the bigger picture. This part of the mind we call masculine. Concrete, linear, rational, and largely unfeeling. I saw how the ego that we tend to know best springs from this part of the mind.

When we awaken, it is said that kundalini is a “goddess” a feminine aspect within ourselves, regardless of whether you are male or female. It is less a literal feminine aspect as it is a quality in all of us, be we male or female. We do, though, connect into the feminine through this aspect in each of us. It brings all of us closer to this part within the human family. Two streams rise upward, some downward, merging in the center of the sushumna nadi. It is here that one finds the meta-view, the big picture, the holistic and nonlinear presence of mind. It has its own form of ego, but it is so large that it is wide like the sky. It is not easily upset like her “masculine” ego counterpart is. In this part of the mind, there is emotional intelligence so this ego could be called more mature, less upset by the vagaries of human events. This is the realm of the superego. It is also here where we navigate through cosmic mind by way of a depth of feeling and awareness that the other side of our being does not possess. While we can build things and follow processes through the left mind, it cannot give us the broadness of view to see those things that are products of its own creative output in context with the world as a living breathing whole. This is, I think, one reason why we as humans can create technologies that destroy our world without any awareness of how this could even be a possibility. We often think how cruel this is, but I tend to think that it is a lack of awareness that this part of our minds simply does not possess. This is the wrong kind of “single-mindedness” that humans so often have that does so much bad in the world. The “Shakti” part of us is what has this kind of awareness.

I think we often think that feeling is the irrational side of us, something to be held at arm’s length. What I have found is that feeling is simply a capacity. Feeling is not the same as emotion. Emotion operates much as thought. We choose our thoughts just as we choose our emotions. The only difference is that most people are driven by their emotions and don’t know the degree to which they do choose them. In the same way that we have thoughts at the subconscious level, the same processes that drive emotion often emerge from the same place. In a very important way, this is what forms the “veil” so often talked about that begins to be pulled away during the process of awakening. What remains, though, is an intact “architecture” of subconscious activity and patterns that remain to be taken apart, cleared, cleansed from awareness, be they in full awareness or buried in the subconscious by the effect that kundalini brings to free them.

In the book “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness” by Bob Samples, the author quotes Albert Einstein and in the process, makes a summary of the quote that many attribute to Einstein himself (and which is a very good lead-in to what I am pointing to here). Regardless, the quote and the summary suits my discussion here. The first part is Einstein and the part in bold is Samples:

The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion. Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

I have come to see that the left “masculine” mind only works when it is a servant to the broader mind of the feminine, which is the right hemisphere, not the other way around. We have for centuries run our bodies and minds in a backwards fashion from what is most natural for us, and the result has been great short-sightedness. And while it is tempting to ascribe this to the patriachy, it has become a part of most everyone’s way of thinking and being regardless of its source. It has belonged to all of us (even as many have chaffed against it). This is a human issue and we exit it through doing and being differently (but not for the sake of “different” but through a native state that can be known to all and which often lies hidden within each of us).

Rationality cuts us off from the great ocean of our awareness and depth of feeling. It is in feeling that we connect with the inner compass within. We all know what is right and what is wrong but through the rational, we often explain it away or make deals or think that this is how we must behave in order to “get along” in this world. I know I thought this way once, but with awakening, there has been a steady unwinding of my own beliefs and inner programming. Instead of being just rational, I took the advice of my friend and began feeling my way through it all. I can say that while you might not know the “plan” in its entirety, our own actions in the moment when advanced by our feeling selves allows the correct plan to become manifest. It isn’t like it comes freshly born the moment we awaken, either. It is instead a process, and to allow it to happen by bowing down in humility to this greater self, is the fastest and most effective means I have seen to reach a more enlightened, inclusive, state. I can’t even say that enlightenment comes at the moment of awakening, but is instead a journey through a deepening of awareness that comes to the degree that our fingers uncurl from those pieces of baggage that we reflexively clutch by our sides and hold in our hearts.

I am not fond of quoting teachers, but since I have already quoted Einstein, I will mention how Taisen Deshimaru, the Zen master who explained the workings of cosmic mind. One reaches this state of cosmic mind not by seeking to clutch it, but to wait for it with an openness of mind. He explained that as long one does this, all of the sand of all the deserts will flow through your hand. “Try to grasp it, and you only get a little bit of grit.”

This is not the work of the rational mind at all. It is made more difficult that language springs from the part of the brain that has no capacity to really comprehend this cosmic mind at all. Words are themselves a very poor way, an extremely awkward way, to go about expressing what it is. The rational linear mind cannot begin to grasp the enormity of what the nonlinear more feminine side of our consciousness can. It is perhaps one reason why so much teaching along these lines involve a look, the movement of the body, the tone in the voice, and a presence in the room which transcends all reason or logic. This is because this part of us defies what our species has created thus far in terms of understanding. The understanding of the awakened mind is a quantum leap beyond the rational, and it must be. The left brain must remain in awe if it can….spinning stories that only tell half of the content contained within it (or less). We live in a very small circumscribed reality fence. We don’t know what lies beyond that fence. Much of what is in our cultures have been designed to keep us in that fence. I don’t see it as any sort of conspiracy except one of ignorance. We can break free from this. While it can also break through some old trusted beliefs and show them to be based on a limited understanding, the result is that a much bigger picture emerges.

The simplest manner in which to go forward is to learn to cultivate feeling. Even if it seems like it might be messy or scary to you, it is the genuine path forward in my experience. You might not always hit the bullseye every time when you do this, but as you find where you were off and where you were right on, you will learn your way. If you are like me, and you are interested in gathering data about the experience, you ask questions and see if what was being sensed remotely has a basis in reality (instances of feeling a person’s thoughts, or seeing scenes from a distance, for example, all of which are some outcomes of the awakened state). As I have done this I have been able to see quite clearly where I have had accurate intuitions or perceptions that go beyond the five physical senses and dip into the realm of the mind and its ability to know what is beyond itself. Instead of senses, you use the portal of feeling. It seems that the more we can relate to this type of material, the more successful or the greatest “hits” are. Until you begin doing this kind of work and inquiry, you might feel like you are all thumbs or it may feel unfamiliar to you.

It will feel like feeling yourself in a dark room at first. It was for me. But then I found that I could feel my way through that room through my inner senses. I learned by testing my perceptions in this inner room that my perceptions were often highly detailed and amazingly on the mark. There is a world within each of us in which half of ourselves have been hidden from our own view. Cultivating this side of ourselves also cultivates the power of intuition, and this is itself based in feeling. There is a reason for this that has everything to do with what happens when you stare at a blank page of paper or are in a dark room of the mind where you believe that you are blind. By feeling and feeling clearly and not just inserting what you think needs to be there, you are in fact opening up to a latent ability that resides in all of us. The result of this work? I can only speak for myself. I have felt for a very long time that these inner senses are what we use beyond this one life and we carry them into countless lives and find them manifesting themselves in different ways. Here, we speak of five physical senses, but these senses are a subset of many senses that we have in consciousness. Why it is that most people are cut off from these inner senses is itself a story, and part of it is told and known by tapping into our capacity to feel for surely that is where these senses emerge, the inner ones. They do defy what we currently think we know about material reality, or what the mainstream does, that is. While they can often be fickle or seemingly unreliable at first, continued work with your own mind and body and the blocks that you still have all serve to also block them from your own conscious awareness, or can often make you second guess yourself when they do not always work perfectly 100 percent of the time. When we are clearer, they are more easily accessible. By clear I mean not interfering with them through the beliefs that we still hold that serve to limit them.

In time you will likely find yourself “feeling” your way through everything, and more often than not, you will find that for reasons you might not have known at the time, you were right in your inner sensing. This includes every possible situation and event, even those in the future. Slowly that veil or filter falls away to the degree that you learn to use this part of yourself. It can take time to learn how to do this, but like how fish know where to go to spawn in the same waters where they were born, you also know how to navigate the waters of your own consciousness, perhaps first with trepidation and uncertainty, but then more and more boldly. What you do now and over the years accrues to your own self and cannot be taken away. All of this is within our capacities as human beings. it is a birthright that has been forgotten. It is also a birthright that in some cases will be treated in superstitious ways by the “believers” among us that this is somehow demonic, evil, unnatural, or bad. This, I contend, is how humans have inoculated themselves against discovering the rich bed of awareness that is available to all of us. While some will be better at it than others, studies have shown that every person tested thus far has some degree of second sight or inner knowing about things they could not have known anything about. Personally, I think what makes the difference here is the degree to which a person can cause the mind to go blank. This is not something most people feel comfortable with, but is described by genuine psychics. By doing this, they also describe feeling as though they are tuning in some other wavelength or “channel” of information. They are able to get the information through the feeling self, that part that is expertly capable of “assembling” the information streaming in in a coherent and understandable reconstruction that is intelligible to both themselves and to others.

When I look at the cramped quarters that people lives in in their own minds, I see how much they are governed by their unacknowledged beliefs, I see how limited they have allowed themselves to be. I was once like that, and I no doubt may still have some beliefs still lurking in the shadows that might still be serving to limit me along these lines. People often they feel estranged from nature because they are themselves a part of all nature but they have become distrustful for one reason or another. There is this natural self within that includes a balance of the two sides and when those two are allowed to merge into a unity, they form a level of ongoing bliss that is hard to believe is even possible. While I do feel all of this can be explained physiologically, I also know that it is sustained in the same way that a tight-wire walker is able to balance on the wire and more forward, never going too far to one side or the other. This is a balance of the two, a very specific form of balance, and it seems nature prefers it and will reward you greatly for finding it. It may not sound scientific for me to say, “just feel it” but the thing is, the feeling side already knows. It doesn’t need to be taught. It is already immensely capable. It knows. What needs to happen is for you to acknowledge what is already there within. The yogis and yoginis have been saying for a very long time that kundalini is not something that you get but is instead something that you already are. Our awakenings, then, may well be a conscious recognition of something that had not occurred to us until the moment that the floodgates seemed to open all on their own (which they most likely didn’t, you just weren’t cognizant of what it was at the time that catalyzed the change that seemed to “bring it on”).

Feeling is of immense importance. Don’t be troubled when you allow yourself the luxury of doing so. When you do, you will no doubt find a closet full of skeletons. Yes, there will be intervening feelings or emotions that you will have to navigate through first. Cast them aside, turn them out, looking at each one and forgiving yourself for allowing them to be there in the first place. Yes, it is likely that there is a lot of buried energy there and it can go back a very long time.

I have read of accounts where people began to suspect that the energy was satanic or dark. I have observed that the truth is perhaps a little less dramatic. Instead, it is our own subsumed junk and it needs to be dug out of the psyche by giving it expression. “Give it expression? Are you crazy??” What I have found and what many others are also finding, is that when you give it a voice, especially when it is repressed, its force bleeds away. The scary lion becomes a meek mouse. This is how all material that is pushed down comes back up. You let it up to let it out. Just by reaching the air, it disperses. The real problem is in keeping it down where it remains active and creates all sorts of problems for us by “running the show” so to speak. Perhaps you have seen this in yourself where you are triggered by something someone says and you react in an over the top manner, only later asking yourself why you reacted so passionately. This is what this material does. But unlike those who would push the emotion back down, you can allow it to break the surface and bleed itself of its energy, after which there is this reintegration that often takes place that is the heart of healing. It isn’t enough to just talk about it and acknowledge it; allowing it to break to the surface of your awareness so that you can see it once and for all is to me the lost aspect of how to heal. Many are experiencing this kind of healing today and they are doing so without a therapist but with a wisdom and awareness native to all of us. The more you do it, the more it shows itself. Anyone can do this, and yes, you have to have a good sound tether to reality.

This is an awareness as humans we seem to either have lost, or are so uncomfortable with doing, that it isn’t something that is in most people’s wheel house. Certainly this is what talk therapy is built around, but when you begin to make a deep connection to the subconscious, a link with it, more and more material can be released which accrues to ones own sense of peace and inner stability. Slowly, bit by bit, those dark closets of self, the shadow lands, will become full of light and the self will be seen less as one strange annex of self after another and more a unified self with less reason to be so sliced up and divided within itself. By being more at ease with feeling you will be better able to navigate these issues.

In the same way that the feminine has been pushed down and out of the world stage for eons, so too has our more intuitive abilities been subsumed and not give voice. While I think that developing the rational side was the easiest and most obvious part of ourselves to work on over the ages, it wasn’t something that needed to be done at the expense of our other more mystical cosmic side. What I hope is that we are entering a period where people who are more free than ever to be themselves (men and women both), that we will see an expansion of our abilities as a race emerge more and more. I think that awakenings are an outcome of a liberalization of human behavior, in essence, people being free to just be themselves and not shackled by societal norms. While doing this may cause the pendulum to swing to extremes, it also frees a lot of people to be at ease with aspects of themselves that they had not been able to acknowledge.

When I awakened I was keenly aware of two qualities in my consciousness that were responsible for the transcendent state of awareness that is a feature of awakening. It felt like how two materials when kept separate were ineffectual, which when put together, set off a chemical reaction that begins transforming the self. The more they moved into a state of union, the more powerful the effect. All of my notions about how I thought things were went out the window. I also realized that THIS was what I had been searching for my whole life. I had finally found it. What came, I suppose, was this missing element within me that I had kept at bay and that every person keeps at bay, which is the more feminine feeling side of ourselves. When that part emerges, so much changes.

…feeling is in fact a super intelligence that is designed to deal with the transcendent.

My advice to you is to cultivate this more feminine side that we all possess. It isn’t literally female, but it is enough of it to bring greater awareness to both women of the importance of their feminine natures and it will aid men in beginning to understand the benefits of cultivating the more feeling side of themselves while also having greater empathy for their female counterparts. Feeling may seem at first glance to be nebulous or vague, but what I have found is that feeling is in fact a super intelligence that is designed to deal with the transcendent. And if it might seem unimportant to you now, the big picture is key to knowing our place in the order, in being able to experience how we are connected to everything else, and how we exist beyond this one self, this one life and this one world. It is the path to awe and it is also where the great inspired minds go in order to glimpse the next big discovery. We tend to think that we cannot tap into knowledge or information that we ourselves have not learned before, that everything we know is what we have picked up as we have read and experienced in life. I am here to tell you that there is another side to the coin, and while it may seem elusive at first, it can be cultivated as you learn how to swim in its limitless waters. It isn’t “magic” and it isn’t “woo-woo” but is instead poorly understood. When we investigate the unknown, it goes from mysterious to a normal facet of our world. We don’t need to languish in superstitious thinking anymore.

Overcoming Resistance As A Path To Healing

Many years ago I overheard my Chi Gung teacher speaking with a person in my class between sets. He explained that we can learn how to let go of all kinds of resistance in our energy field and consciousness by paying attention to the body. He said that many unconscious feelings are held in the body and that they can be held in different parts of it. He said that sometimes when we allow ourselves to become aware of this tension in the body it can tell us something about our own feelings. By going into and letting the resistance in a part of our body relax and unwind itself, we can also let go of emotions that get stored there. He said it might just be a little feeling in the back, the hips, the shoulders, or even a toe….all of this had something to tell us and teach us about letting go.

By letting things go like this, you can unwind all sorts of unconscious emotional material. It can be surprising how much that we hold onto. I have found that the more I do this work the more aware I become of still smaller elements in my body/mind landscape. It can lead to greater and greater clarity and a state of inner peace. I can also attest that if this process happens quickly, like it did with me during kundalini, the landscape is changed so quickly that it can even be bewildering sometimes. So, I suggest that you take this kind of work slowly and be easy on yourself.

When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings, then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape.

 

Everything that we feel is not the result of what others have done to us but is instead how we have reacted to events in our lives. Buddha had something to say about this, and it is sage advice. No one makes you feel a certain way. No one. When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape. This is not always easy to do, especially in a time when people are increasingly wanting to have the world to conform to their own feelings instead of just being an adult and understanding how we each make choices ever day about how we feel and respond to the world. Being able to develop this honesty about how we feel (and that we feel) what is happening is the second big leap in work of this kind. Be easy on yourself, but be honest and be responsible.

When you feel resistance in your body, the first step is to observe it. It can sometimes manifest as physical pain. Instead of resisting it, try going into it. It wont hurt you. Explore it with your intuitive faculties. How does it feel? Why is it that you are holding tension there? Try breathing deeply and slowly and then imagining that your own breath is filling that tense hard space in you. Depending on how tense or how resistant the area is, you might need to do this a number of times. As you breath, imagine warmth going into that location. Imagine that your breath is being sent there, that it is opening up that area. Relax. Give yourself this moment to simply explore. What things that you do help to limit or soften the tension in your body, this pain or feeling of resistance? Often you will reach a place where you realize that the tension was in fact in your mind, being fed into a part of your body in a way that sent a message to tighten. Over time, this location can begin to hurt because of how recursive this feedback loop can become. A back can develop significant pain, hips might hurt, leg muscles might remain chronically painful or fatigued. In some cases, stretching gently can help, but in others, merely recognizing the feeling that is feeding the resistance is enough to short-circuit the feedback to that location in the body. Always, bringing awareness helps to limit the problems, but this is just a first step. If you can stop your mind after you reach the problem area and let your mind go blank, you will actually be in a much better position to intuit the problem.

Albert Einstein, who learned how to cultivate this form of intuition in his life described it precisely this way. He said that as long as his mind was busy with the problem, he would not find an answer, but once he let his mind go blank, the answer would just come to him. It turns out that this is what yogi’s and yogini’s do also. It is a cornerstone state for resolving all sorts of challenges in life.

By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here.

There is a hazard in going about this in too much of a rational way because if you do, you will tend to draw on previous experience, whereas this approach I am describing to you now is the opposite. It requires your mind to go blank. Imagine that you mind needs this silence in order to pick up the deeper messages which will arise through your consciousness, for surely this is how they do. By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here. As a Westerner, you probably have been taught to always have a busy mind. This is one big problem many of us have, which is that we tend not to cultivate more nuanced forms of awareness as our busy monkey-minds steal the show. There is a great benefit in allowing your mind to go quiet and to slowly learn how to cultivate this state of mind. In fact, all meditation practices have this as one of their chief goals. By quieting the mind you can more readily get to the substratum of awareness, to the Essential Self which tends to lie just below the surface. When you do this, it is much easier to delve into these problem areas and see them for what they are. It always requires some degree of discipline, courage, and self honesty.

Are your shoulders tight? Is your solar plexus hard as a rock? Do your knees hurt? In some cases, you might have some issues with your physiology because of an injury or something that comes to your through your genetic line. That can sometimes be separate from what you hold in a center, like say, your knees. And yet, the knees can go on to hold tension that is more than merely how you have been gifted in your physiology. There is a lot that we do with feelings of vulnerability to further impact a part of the body. It is worth noting what part is purely physiological and what part might be exacerbated effects of emotion or tension in that area. I once had a shoulder in jury that I made worse because of my protecting it too much. The shoulder joint literally froze in place, hard as a rock from inactivity. I had to learn to open up the injured shoulder and not be afraid to move it and allow it to work as it had before the injury. In time, I found that I was able to bring more flexibility to it than it had prior to the injury itself, which was an unexpected bonus.

It sounds cointer-intuitive, but many reflexologists and energy healers have found that certain parts of the body tend to be areas where quite specific feelings can get trapped. Have had self-esteem? Your root and your sacral region might need some attention. Is your willpower off or is it too strong? That could very well be an issue in the solar plexus. Feelings of being a victim? Goodness, your heart might need some work. If you take on too much of others’ stuff, you might find your shoulders literally tightening up with shoulder and upper back issues plaguing you.

The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems.

It is helpful to have a good body worker who can help to loosen those areas up, the open the energy channels so the old stuff can go and new growth and healing can take its place. The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems. If you find yourself going back to an issue in your past over and over, this itself is a stuck emotion and it will almost always have its compliment in the body somewhere. It is actually pretty amazing how much we can become aware of this stuck material if you take the time to slow down, get quiet, and then begin to listen and pay attention in a meditative way to what your body is telling you. In some cases, you might not be able to get to the source of the problem yourself. You might know that there is something likely stuck in a certain spot, but you have no idea how to let it go. Despite everything that you try, it just hangs on. This is where an energy worker can often help. Whether that person does acupuncture, acupressure, reiki, cranio-sacral, or similar types of energy work, someone who is practiced in energy work often will have the intuitive abilities to get to the problem in order to provide you with relief. It is my experience that truly great energy workers are rare, so you will want to look around and ask people about their experience.

It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too. 

With practice, you can use meditation as a way to take a quick inventory of your body state and see what is coming up for you. We are human, so we are prone to holding onto things, obsessing about something that upset us or not being able to let go of something as far back as childhood. We have lost the ability that most other mammals have for “shaking off” the tension or past emotion or trauma. This is why I recommend for really sticky issues a healing modality called TRE. If you use this term to search my blog you will find a number of posts on this method. It is actually quite simple to do on your own and has been shown to relieve symptoms of PTSD, and if done more intensively, it can eliminate the trauma stored in the body for good! It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too.

As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change.

While mulling this post, a quote came up on my social media feed in a group that I am part of. It was a person describing how one day they realized that they were free to feel anyway that they wanted about themselves. They described this feeling as being able to become like a butterfly, free from being tied down to old thoughts and feelings. One day this person suddenly felt free to feel fantastic about themselves, and so his life changed after that, forever. He now lives his life considering that he is this marvelous creature with so much good in himself that this now fills him with joy and wonder instead of being hemmed in and feeling bad about himself. This is a really great way to treat yourself, which is a form of self love. If you don’t love yourself, how can anyone hope to do similarly? Plus, you will feel really great as a result of shifting this way. For some of you, you might need some practice, but go easy on yourself. As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change. Aren’t you worth it? My best of luck to you…

Sailing Through The Pandemic

Hibiscus, Kuawai, March 2020

 

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

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

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

It is useful to consider this quote:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Limit Your Social Media Exposure

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

The Power of Gratitude

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

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

Breathe

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

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

Change Your Mind

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

Eat Good Food/Sing/Listen To Great Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let It Speak To You

Awakening is like the Magic Visitor.

I am reminded today that if you have a teacher, that teacher might guide you to awakening. But if you don’t have a teacher, then awakening can come without the bells and whistles, instead being the force that brings you to it (this was how it happened to me—the force itself made it possible for me to awaken—I think it really wanted to wake me up!). Awakening, the Magical Visitor, finds the perfect way when there is a need. On a desert island? No worries; conditions will arise that will make it so you have visions. You will he tutored at night in the mysteries. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, the Magical Visitor will give you exactly what you needed in that moment. It feels so perfect because the solution has come from a place outside of time. That is why it feels so….fated…so perfect…because it comes from that place outside of our time. When you create a solution to a problem, you can see past, present, and future, so the solution will feel perfect.

Those in other traditions see this phenomenon, of course, but when you live in a country where there are yogis and yoginis, you use what you have. The Magic Visitor provides you with what fits you best for the time. But in so doing, people erroneously believe that the yogi or yogini is the Way. The Magic Visitor is much too versatile than that…

I have been told by a number of Indians that there is no way I could have awakened kundalini. They cite reasons, such as I do not have a guru, that I have not had darshan, that I did not cleanse the nadis (नाडी), that I did not do yoga, all prerequisites for even beginning to consider kundalini as making its way inside of you.

But what is kundalini?

I know that it is an abundance of life force, this thing we call prana or chi/qi. I know that in its abundance, I have felt its presence, its intelligence. I have tried speaking to it and I have quietly listened. It has spoken to me in the way that it seems to do best; imagery seen internally like dreams. To connect with it, I myself must be open to feeling, to being receptive, sensitive, intuitive. It whispers I must tap my feminine receptive side in my consciousness. It is a kind of vulnerability, it is also setting aside what I think I know. It is also embracing all the parts of who I am as my soul has created itself through many lifetimes as both man and woman. I pay heed to what my soul has sought in these lives as a way of knowing the Magic proportion necessary to bring myself to riotous creative fecundity, which is, simply, adjusting the masculine and feminine traits in my consciousness so that what is naturally in my soul can be expressed in this life, in this time. There is no better way to honor the Magic Visitor and no better way to bring forward and embody your authentic self. It means listening more than professing, at least for me. When I listen for it in nature, I know I am listening to myself. We exist in intensities cleverly hidden behind a veil of forgetting. You can pierce that veil by being receptive…

You cannot be hardheaded and do this well. I am heard-headed, but not when I hear it speak. I listen, I have made this promise to it that I want nothing more than to be more like it is….to grow into what it is, which is a visitor from the future. It doesn’t just come to me, but rather It is ready for me and waits for me to come to it, like how the feminine waits upon her suitor, using her own magical grace to make the call as It ripples through every atom on it’s way to him. What we are talking about is how intuition is able to access vast sums of information. It feels like how the feminine accesses the masculine.

It is a cheat, a wonderful opportunity to learn, to change my present and to change the whole time line – past, present and future. It says that we all win when we let this force into our lives. This is what it tells me.

What does it say to you? If you don’t think it will speak to you, have you tried? It is interesting how if you don’t have a teacher, it will bring the events perfectly timed so that you will get just what you need. Sometimes I think that we want to hear words from someone when all along we really needed to listen to the words that are welling up within us. By not listening, that wellspring can go dry, or appear to. Imagination is where you must go to begin accessing it. It is why so many miss it because they think imagination is just for fabrication, for making things up. True, but if you step three steps deeper into the secrets that imagination hides, you will quickly realize that imagination is used as a technology for making the unseen seen, the unknowable, known. Instead of fabrication, your mind goes blank, really blank, and you do not even worry about your mind being blank. So many people think the mind is like an art gallery whose spaces must be filled with objects, but this is not so at all. When you can not let your tinges of angst get to you that your mind is emptying out (gasp!), you can begin to experience transmissions both from the infinite as well as from your higher self. This is all done simply, by letting I tuition lead, by letting the blind part of the self seek it out….it is to me like being blinded, I cannot use my physical senses, I must use my inner senses instead, be blind to physical sensory experience and let my intuition and open imagination guide me. I can tell you that the more masculine rational mind will fuck it up every time because it is not made to comprehend the infinite. The feminine aspects of consciousness do. As a man, I have had to approach all of this openly, by making myself the way I need to be to find that Oracle within me, to sense the Presence of the Magic Visitor.

I have learned so much from this energy. It has shown me how it is. It has told me what I could hear when I asked questions of it. The answers also changed over time, too, as I matured and as I changed (which is telling; we may only hear what we ourselves will allow ourselves to know or grasp consciously). Sometimes there were things I either could not know the full answer on or would not be able to hear the answer for one reason or another….but always, the energy was kind and compassionate and considerate in its answers to me.

Sometimes I think that it would be nice to be in a community of like minded people, and in many ways I remain unwaivering in that sense. But then I get around these folks and I realize that what I am doing is perfect for me right now, and that I have reached a point where I rely so much on this energy to guide me that I may well be ungovernable…maybe that is a good thing!

Listen. Ask. Wait. Be ready for the answer. It might come through an inner message, it might come in the form of an unwitting conversation with a friend or stranger. When wading into these waters, expect the miraculous.

We See What We Are

When the mirror of the self is cleansed of all pretense, bias, and belief, we are free to begin to truly see. 

More

I was not satisfied with the teaching in church….I knew there was more. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was wanting. I knew this above all else, beyond the explanations of others that I was merely “prideful” or unable to take the teaching as truth. No, there was more, I knew it beyond all else.
When I awakened I was lucky to have seen how there WERE teachings by Jesus himself which he passed on to his disciples in books that spoke directly about a process whereby one entered the kingdom. These were central teaching that acted like a key to understanding everything else Jesus was teaching in his ministry. The problem was that these teaching were demonized and anathematized by the church. These were part of this something “more.” I knew that in fact Jesus was teaching his followers about awakening and that the truth was hidden or obfuscated in numerous ways. History offered up her secrets and laid bare the many ways that contributed to our losing these central teachings. What is so amazing to me is that these teachings are actually the lynch pins in understanding all that Jesus taught about. It’s pretty incredible to look at all of this and know that this went down in the way that it did.
I once wrote about this issue and had some of my friends asking me why I was so critical about Christianity, or why I hated the church. It’s too easy to feel that way when dealing with this issue and to me, it is an easy way out of actually examining things closely and asking some very fair questions. But it’s not out of a deep hate or any of that. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I want a religion that offers the keys to self realization, of actually knowing what this kingdom is. Truth is a curious thing; we can have all levels of it and still be missing key points.

I have done the hard work of inquiring and looking. I have poured through the texts of the New Testament as well as those that were not included, from apocrypha to the Nag Hammadi. I have studied issues surrounding translation, how the contextual nature of Aramaic actually does matter when translating to any language, as well as what biblical scholars are saying that pastors dare not touch. More than this, I awakened and saw that the only books that helped describe my new state of being were the words of Jesus teaching his followers about the kingdom, which fit my experience perfectly….but also happened to have been deemed heresy. They had been cast aside and had never made it into canon.  The more that I read, the more it became clear that what we got was a version of the truth, but not the full truth.  I’m not even suggesting that this was some sort of conspiracy.  It may have been simply a conspiracy of ignorance acted upon by those who had less than the full story.  But even half the story is better than no story, and it wasn’t as if we weren’t getting truths.  We just didn’t get its heart, and this, dear readers, is the hardest one to swallow for some of us today.  It is covered over first by some 1700 years of tradition and then it includes a whole new dimension of thinking added, a great mystery that has been hidden from all of us (for whatever reason).

Since my experience in awakening is the same exact phenomenon as others who have awakened, and it’s all described in the same way by nearly everyone, and is being described in these cast-away texts, it begs the question; isn’t it possible that something very important was missed? And perhaps, then, might this missing piece be important to know the fullness of this man’s great insight and teaching? If you found out that the teaching of Jesus was incomplete, wouldn’t you, as a follower of Christ, want to know? I’m asking you to put your pride aside and get curious and be simple like children, ripe for hearing what might just be really big news.

Awakening, which is the kingdom, brings a renewed way of using the mind. If you can teach yourself to forgo mere rational thought, you can activate more and more of your capacity for understanding, which is truly liberating. It requires humility because there is so much to give up in order to see in this way. There is a blizzard of biases and beliefs that rage in such places, and the very religion that was created to support these teachings has essentially continued to demonize the concept of awakening in some quarters. Once these biases have been cleared, though, the mind becomes a luminous field of awareness in direct proportion to how much bias has been released. But it isn’t just that, it’s letting yourself be shown, led, taken by the presence of the indwelling divine and it’s child which is the Christ consciousness. Others call it Cosmic Consciousness, or Cosmic Mind. It is all the same and emerges in the same way in each tradition because this is what we ALL are, rather than the beliefs we hold. Remember how Jesus said the kingdom is within you? That might just be an important clue to all of us. It’s what’s inside-this does not happen outside of any of us. Where, then, do you think you will meet God?

This more asks me to continually to let go of my familiar moorings to here and as I do, new understanding floods in, mysteries become knowns, and the universe resolves into a greater and greater miracle. But no words can contain this more…you just have to go and see for yourself.

All of this is like a seed that grows into a sprout, then a plant, and then a flower. The flower opens more and more and this flower is awareness. This is how awakening proceeds; it is the smallest of seeds that grows in stages. More and more, it opens, revealing still-deeper layers of comprehension. To get there, I lay aside all rational thought and allow my mind to go blank. Yes, blank. It is here that absent thought a great and ineffable presence grows that is a love unlike any other. Everything I could ever wish to know becomes available in that “space.” If you believe you can’t, you probably won’t….but if you consider it possible, then it becomes possible. I wish this for everyone because it reveals our own foolishness and opens us to wonder and awe. The world so needs this right now.

Until next time….

The End Of Patriarchy

For the women and men traveling to protest, to have their voices and choices heard, I salute you for your fortitude and effort.

Beyond the Mall and the travel, if we want to put an end to patriarchy and misogyny, it will be because the arson that we used to burn it down was itself an inside job. Lurking in all of us are the effects of centuries of a way of thinking, and while we see our leader as exemplifying that in the worst of ways, if any of us want to see this way of being gone then it will be because we were honest in seeking it out within ourselves and made efforts to change it.

Patriarchy is about the illusory status of power. We either assume or own our power or we don’t. We stand up to the strong and stick to our convictions. We are honest about how we feel, but we also can reveal brutality through nonviokent resistance. Either we define our relationships in terms of giving that power away or we don’t. No social system is inherently controlling in its aspects, humans are. There is nothing inherently more powerful from one sex to the other, because they both are.

Patriarchy has left its mark, just look at how one-sided religions steeped in it have only one human aspect to the Godhead: male. Its religions, too, are all-male run while women are given the back seat, relegated to worker-bee status. The dark side to all of this is that some women find this enticing and interesting…or fulfilling (right along with the men, of course). But then, that’s how things are: it affects all of us as we fall under its vast thrall. It pinches our perception, our experience, and our lives. It leads us to a kind of half life and no one bothers to ask why. But this century has shown a real shift in that kind of brittleness and it has revealed a truth that we are far more flexible and amenable to change than we may have previously dreamed. To continue, we need to look closely into all of ourselves to root out what no longer serves. To do this requires honesty.

When men speak about women and think of them as mere objects, that is misogyny. When women cannot get paid the same as men, that is what patriarchy has brought us. But it comes in other subtle ways when mothers call their sons “little man” or “my protector.” When mothers support old images of male power they imprint patriarchy and possibly even misogyny on the hearts and minds of their children, male or female. When fathers show preferences toward a son over his daughter, or treat the daughter as fundamentally different from his son, if not done carefully, can lead to patriarchy. There are myriad ways that we repeat, unconsciously, the program that is patriarchy or misogyny. Sometimes, we don’t know any better and just need a new or good model. And sometimes we do it knowingly.

For men and women ARE different, but it should not be the reason to exclude or divide or lessen one sex in its potential or capabilities.  Different, yes, but all equivalent. Not the same, no, but both equivalent. 

Let’s be nuanced in our approach and see the good in all instead of the bad. By encouraging the best in all of us, we might just get it.
Be clear where your power springs. Don’t give your power over out of fear or desire for approval. Don’t give it because you think it’s marketable. Keep it so that you might inspire others to keep it also so that this flame might burn in everyone. 

I look forward to even bigger changes in the upcoming year. You might be sick to death of Trump, but he IS a symptom of our own collective self which we often find too uncomfortable to even look at it. Too often, we project our own shortcomings on to others with disastrous results. I have been able to see how I projected onto others and how they projected on to me. It was always a reverse condition even though no one could see it. These things are much too hard to acknowledge, until they are. 

This isn’t about being comfortable facing an ugly truth, but it does lead to comfort once the old demon in us is gone. And because of how much our unexamined beliefs run us, it’s a life-changer when we can make that change. In ourselves. Otherwise, we continue to point it out in others whilst ignoring the beam in our eye, and I don’t have to tell you what an endless merry-go-round that is!

So acknowledge that we have more to do and consider what a great opportunity it is to be brought to this awareness by our big orange buffoon. Like it or not, he is our buffoon, and we could really clear our inner decks of so much that we all say we don’t like or are against. The only war we will wage will be a war about how we choose to react and feel about people and the world. You aren’t going to change Trump, but you can make yourself better. That great tide will be the force that won’t eradicate Trump, but ALL of the Trump’s that might have followed after him in the world. By being aware, you won’t add to the patriarchy, but add to equality or sexual equivalence and personal relevance regardless of your sex, your orientation or color or creed. What a wonderful world that would be.
I have seen how angry people are with the rioting that took place out there just before the inauguration. If only we could take that energy and burn down the patriarchy in our own inner hearts and souls, we would really be on to something.

Good luck, travel safe, and stay dry and warm, marching or not…and stay aware out there…

Trauma Release & Awakening

Last month, I promised readers that I would share methods that I have found effective in releasing stored trauma. To do this will mean that I will have to break the larger method up into smaller bite-sized chunks since the overall system is enough to fill a book. For now, these are the basics of one important method for you to use in your own work at home.

First Things First

By now you probably know that you not only have a body, but you also have an energetic template that meshes perfectly with your body that allows your consciousness to focus itself in the physical body.
The soul, which is beyond the time construct, lives in time as a focus courtesy of the projection it creates that allows it to mesh with the physical body. This projection is like a series of nonphysical bodies that allow for a broad range of experience and expression to occur. These bodies are in truth aspects of a still larger awareness, bodies that each deal with different aspects of experience.  The ancients described these bodies as the mental body, the emotional body, the karmic body, the pranic of light body, and so on.

The light body is one important interface between the physical and nonphysical. It is itself not physical, but can manipulate and create with energy that also happens to stimulate and guide the endocrine system, which are the glands that help stimulate healing and govern emotional well being.  This energy changes form depending on how it’s needed. Most of the time we are all so enmeshed in what’s happening that this reality escapes us. In the body this energy is most often experienced as prana or chi (qi) and we are most aware of it during contemplation and healing work. This is but one state of the energy because energy can become anything when consciousness is in the process of creating with it. So that’s the baseline.

The big challenge for most who slumber, unawakened, and even those who are awake, is how this template,  that is a projection that focuses us in the body, can become cluttered with thought forms. These serve to disrupt a clearer flow of awareness from soul to body and from soul to all the different parts of the self (intellect, reason, id, ego, emotions, feelings/beliefs, etc.).
Clearing the blocks that exist serves to bring us closer to the light of our souls and the kingdom that is within each of us. Maybe that sounds like woo-woo to you, but is precisely what it does. Welcome to the next world, folks.  When you can dissolve these blocks, which are made up of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings that serve to, in some way,  limit and divide you from yourself, the pathway or channel to the awakened state can more easily emerge. This is precisely what kundalini yoga, pranayama yoga, and all other yogas seek to do, which is to help clear the light body of these old conflicts expressed as blocked energy. They are called blocks because if you do not clear them before awakening, when the energy of prana (kundalini) does move, it is like bringing your baggage into a wind tunnel.

The act of awakening, itself, is a substantive union of opposites in consciousness, which IS this energetic flow. It is being triggered naturally in many people who often unwittingly remove enough divisive psychological material so that the energy appears to “rise.” There are numerous ways that this union of self begins, but it always revolves around an act or event that catalyzes a reduction in inner division of one kind or another.

What I have developed is a master method (made up of a series of methods used together) which is at its root similar to the same goals that yogic traditions such as pranayam and kundalini yoga have which is clearing the nonphysical pathways (called and nadi and also meridians in the Indian and Chinese systems, respectively) to make the presence of awakening easier or smoother.

The first method that I will describe to you appears to be much more effective at cleansing the light body of blocks than the eastern methods have been, at least for the average person. Those currently using this method do not know that this can be an important first step to awakening (which is as it should be). This is one case where a contemporary method trumps a thousands’ year set of yogic methods or tradition. If you haven’t caught on to it yet, my hope in developing this system is to provide an effective and efficient means to clear stored material that is holding the majority of humanity in a certain level of consciousness.

The idea that awakening is only for the special chosen few sounds preposterous and the height of arrogance to me. This is each of our birth right to know this level of awareness, and it’s emergence in this time is critical for our survival.. Further, the race needs this as a whole if we are to keep a balance with the pace that technology is taking in its development. We must, I feel, learn to extend our reach and improve our grasp as humans so that neither exceeds the capacity of the other (thank-you, Nicola Tesla).

Understand that when you are dealing with old systems from other cultures, you can wind up with inefficiencies as well as cultural biases and beliefs that can limit experience for all who follow them. To start with, many gurus in India operate under the belief that you cannot awaken without a guru or that anything you try without a guru will be wrong (I’m paraphrasing an Indian guru who writes on WordPress, so this is not an exaggeration). Obviously, we know that this is not correct because of the thousands of us who have awakened without yoga or a practice, let alone a guru. Having others more experienced around you is helpful, but it’s not a must. You simply have to be clear enough to hear your own soul communicating to you amidst the remaining static from the “baggage” remaining.

One class of blockage that occurs in the light body is stored trauma. This can be just about anything. Your birth may have been traumatic. Someone disciplining you for the first time as a child using a stern voice may have felt traumatic. Whenever we encounter something that causes us to resist feeling it, this becomes a stored experience. In fact, the experience doesn’t need to be that bad; if there is enough belief that it’s terrible or bad, the block is stored. This, by the way, is what many people wind up experiencing in awakenings where they might struggle for days, weeks, or even years (yes years!) with a stored block only to find that it was itself built entirely on a misperception or belief about how they viewed an event in the past. These are what I call, in my own work, “the mouse that roars.” That is, it was never so big than it was in our own belief or thoughts about it.

The effect of releasing this stored material is that you can see the world as it really is to the degree that you release this overburden of material within.

Without it, life is being viewed in much the same way as my pinhole camera picture only reveals a limited and distorted view of what we each think we are and what our existence is. I have had a front row seat to see how this lack of awareness manifests in people through an inability to see how their actions bring drama and cause harm, or how their inability to be honest limits their lives and hurts those they claim to love. So blinded are these people they cannot see that they are hurting others…and they wonder why their lives are a mess. It winds up being the fault of others so long as these people remain in the trap of their own trauma, unable to look at themselves honestly and have that “come to Jesus” moment which is so important for undoing years of junk. What I’m proposing will help to release this burden immediately and can be put into use on a daily or weekly basis to eliminate the material that blinds and binds us.

The wonderful thing about this work is that you have a “get out of jail free” card that comes in the form of a series of somatic exercises that allows you to bypass the trauma and effectively toss it to the curb without so much as dirtying your hands. While there may be a few instances where encountering a block directly could prove effective in its release, the vast majority can simply be let go. Your conscious mind does not always need to know the contents of your subconscious in order to let things go; it only needs to be willing to participate in letting it all go so that it can set its sights on a future that is brighter and not bearing the limits that these blocks put on the self and it’s awareness of the soul.

That said; a background on the method….

Most mammals share a triadic coping mechanism for dealing with stress and trauma. Humans, however, do not share this mechanism in the same way as animals in the wild do. When animals experience severe trauma their nervous system instigates a coping mechanism that takes the form of nervous shaking immediately following a traumatic experience. Researchers have found that this helps release the emotional energy and keeps it from being stored.

Normally the coping mechanisms humans have are fight, flee, or freeze when a traumatic experience comes our way. Most often we freeze. When we do this, we are actively storing the energy we are feeling, and this energy is not stored in the brain, it’s shoved aside, annexed, to reside in the body.

That last statement is something of a stumbling block for some people because as Westerners, we have been taught to believe that all past experience resides in the brain. But what the ancients have observed for thousands of years, modern psychological and neuroanatomy research is only just beginning to recognize. What we are slowly catching on to is that the body has a capacity for storing memory, and thus far, it appears to be emotionally-based memory.

My research has led me to find, based on the urgings of my higher self in meditation, the clues about how this is so. When I was writing a section in my manuscript about methods for assisting the clarifying effect that awakenings have in regards to these blocks, I had a series of synchronicity events where an important method fell into my lap three times over the span of two days. This unusual discovery led me on a hunt to find supporting evidence for why we store memory in this way, and how we can release it.

This hunt led me to two important clues to the body’s connection with memory, which is that the body has neurons located all through it (and you thought neurons were just in the brain!) as well as research that shows that memory is stored in organs such as the liver, kidney, and heart.

The research that is being done in the arena of organs storing memory has to do with the curious capacity donor organs have to transfer memory and personality traits to those receiving the donated organ. Bear in mind that nearly all organ donation is done anonymously so as to protect the family members of the donor from unwanted intrusion from strangers receiving the organs.

Notable cases involve a murder that was solved because the child who received the organ began having dreams that revealed the last things the donor saw before their death (which included the name and description of the murderer). One recipient was able to locate her donor’s obituary, and another had both her sexual orientation change to the choice of her donor as well as her food preferences (going from lesbian to straight, and vegetarian to meat-eating).The research in this area is fascinating, and I feel is helping to show how it is that emotional memory is being stored.
This research has become a substantive body of work which I wrote about on this blog several years ago and will add the link to at the end of this article so you can see for yourself.

By finding the most effective way of mimicking what the animals do to release trauma, you can begin digging down into your own body to release this overburden that every human on the earth lives with but is largely unaware of.

The Method

Position yourself on a comfortable surface such as a yoga mat or firm flat futon, lying on your back. You can support the base of your spine by rolling up a towel or firm pillow to raise you bottom up into the air about four to eight inches if you want. Begin to relax by breathing slowly and deeply in through your nose and out through your mouth until you find yourself feeling like you have made the transition to a more relaxed state. This step is necessary for all that follows.
Let yourself sink into a relaxed and quiet state where your busy mind slows down. Imagine floating down a lazy river with the warm sun beating down on your skin; you feel like you don’t have a worry in the world. Keep breathing nice and deep so you can relax deeply, too.

Now, with your feet flat on the floor, raise your buttocks upwards so that your feet and legs are supporting most of the weight of your body on them. Your feet might curve to rest more on the balls of your feet for support. You only need to lift your body up a few inches. Support yourself in this way until you begin to feel your legs shaking. This is essentially an effort to fatique muscles so you shake. This may take some time to achieve. Also, you can induce mild trembling to strong shaking, and this works just as well.
Most often, you will feel like you should reposition yourself in order to stop shaking, but with this method you need to stay with the shaking for enough time that it can do its work, which is to begin to release stored material.If you center weight on your legs, you can eleviate any stress to the lower back muscles in the event that you have a history with lower back problems.

Do this exercise for as long as you are comfortable, with repetitions of a few minutes each, with up to three to five minutes being optimal if you can do it for this length of time.  Fifteen minutes at a time is optimal. Once the shaking begins, it is enough to stir you and begin to release material.

You want to avoid physical strain and remain in the “sweet spot” of shaking for at least several minutes at a time or as long as you are physically comfortable doing so. Mammals in the wild shake an average of fifteen minutes.Just follow your own comfort level. The shaking is the thing.

As you do this, increasingly find your breathing going into your lower diaphragm and begin to open the lower solar plexus up by breathing this way. As you are shaking, you might feel emotions rising to the surface. When you breathe, give those emotions a voice in simple ways. It could be gutteral, it could be something different, but let whatever emotion rises be given a voice. Instead of going deep into the emotion, you are helping to release it, to let it express and then go. Don’t let yourself feel self-conscious if you can help it; this is a path to positive self care, so let yourself explore this area. Don’t censor yourself; this is all about acknowledging the feeling in order to let it go. This is different from marinating in the feeling.
To get deep into how trauma is stored, it’s useful to understand some of the muscles involved and their proximity to the more emotionally charged energy centers of solar plexus, sacral, and root chakras.

The set of muscles you are using that causes most of she shaking are the legs and an area of the pelvis that is situated in your hips The interesting thing here is that it is this region of the body where a lot of our earliest trauma can be stored from childhood.this is where the solar plexus ends, the sacral begins, and the root is close by. This exercise helps to clear this region most effectively and is being used to treat PTSD.

Another posture is possible if lying on your back doesn’t work for you. This position is done while standing.

Position yourself so that your back is against a wall, and then slide down from a standing position to one that is just above the position that you have when sitting in a chair. This posture is meant to fatigue your legs and hips so that you begin to shake or tremble. When you do both of these methods correctly, you will feel like you are getting a real work out both physically and emotionally!

One big plus for doing release work of this kind is that your physiological reactions to stress and anxiety can change significantly for the better by removing the root cause of the stress, anxiety, or depression to begin with. If you have been on antianxiety medication, this could be a great way to finally reduce the load of stress or anxiety so that the medication might not be needed (since it is possible to release the store trauma that may have been causing the condition to begin with).

Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone with you whom you trust who can sit with your head in their lap as they cradle your head and help to let you know that everything is going to be okay. You have been suppressing these emotions and it’s not unusual to feel vulnerable when they bubble up. Very often, you won’t know what these emotions are tied to, but letting them bubble up releases them for all time.

Another benefit to this method is that once you release something, you will feel a measure of relief and clarity. If it’s a block that is central to many of your problems that you have in life, the bad feelings surrounding this will go away and you will feel like a new person where this old issue is concerned. I describe this experience as erasing an old program in my subconscious that has been running on its own on auto pilot for years, giving me all kinds of grief. Once it’s gone, the fear or anger or stuck feeling is gone as well. Just like that.

This method is the least invasive of any method I can think of for releasing stored emotional material. It is important to not resist whatever comes up. It was resistance that stored the material in the first place, and no matter how bad you think a feeling might be, your acceptance will always be the key that allows you to cope with just about anything. Once you do, it will be gone, and it will only be a dim memory within a matter of days. You will have shifted your own probable time line. Sounds like a big deal, but we do this with every decision that we make.

It is worth mentioning that other methods that achieve the same result often work with moving the body. In the practice of pranayam, pumping the stomach is a method that gets close to the shaking in the body that this method achieves. Chi Gong is a body movement method that works with the human energy field by using energy and body movement together to stir and release blocks. But for sheer speed and efficiency, the leg shaking method can’t be beat.

If you find that you can’t do the leg shaking method I have just described, I will be including more of the methods that go to make up  the “master method” which are a constellation of exercises and therapies designed to clear blocked material fast.

One very simple way to feel whether you are healed in a given issue or area is to simply gauge how you  feel about something. Are you resisting it?  When you feel yourself needing to pull away from something to keep from feeling it, there is something not yet healed. The Zen concept of “Zero” which is often called today as the “Zero Point” is what happens when pent up material is released. Healing happens when you reach neutrality, which is a deep state of balance which is achieved block by released block.
Now I have an admission to make: I was not altogether truthful about the number of coping mechanisms that we have available to us. I recalled that they were fight, flight, and freeze. To be truthful, there is another “f” word and it’s central to never building trauma to begin with. I promise that I’ll cover this important coping state in my very next post.

So begin trying this method and let me know what your experience is with it. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Until next time,  light-bearers…
Link:
http://www.paulpearsall.com/info/press/3.html

You Live This Life Once

This world has the openness that allows us to choose how we see it. In my life I have seen how a seemingly ordinary world transformed itself into a sheer miracle of a place. What gives?

The truth was, the world had always been this way. It was I who had shuttered my perception, not letting in enough of the light. I could not see it for how I felt.

This is, though, how all of our lives are. We each have a choice-to own ourselves and our feelings, or not. But when we choose to not fully own what is ours, a very curious thing happens.Psychologist call this projection.

Projection can happen in a variety of ways, but the effects from doing it are always the same. When we don’t fully own our feelings, we project those feelings onto things. Anything will do; people, places, and things. We will see a person as having the very troubles that lie within our own hearts and minds. Carl Jung, the noted psychologist explained that when it comes to projection, the person who is projecting swears that the fault lies in the Other….be it their neighbor, friend, or family member.
The thing to understand is that as long as we are engaged in projecting, we don’t realize we are the ones who are doing it.

One really good example of mass projection played out on a national scale when Germans believed that Jews were a problem back before Germany invaded Poland. As we all know, the Jewish people weren’t the problem at all. The real problem that gripped so much of Germany was a deep seated dislike of something within themselves. There was a fear of this self, over how it might not be controllable, and this was projected as loathing for the Jewish people. As we can see, the Jews became the first column in a larger effort that was conceived in madness. Liberal, educated, and lovers of culture and art, the Jews were what the Germans, many of them, believed they were not, or perhaps more accurately, feared they were but could not allow themselves to be. The irony in this story is that Hitler sought to steal art work from the Jews and from the countries that he invaded. Hitler was a failed art student who had been deemed unworthy of schooling by a….Jewish teacher when he was younger. You might think this was just about a twisted form of “payback,” but it goes deeper than that. Unable to deal constructively with his own creative drive, Adolph turned his creativity on its head so that it became aggression instead of what creativity otherwise does when used in a positive way, which is that it unifies. We all know how that turned out. The hate within was turned outward onto an innocent people and one man’s madness enlivened the splinters in a large part of his nation so that they became extremely exxagerated. The nation really did believe that the problem were the Jews. They believed this so much that they went to extraordinary lengths to justify their own projections. What the Germans hated in the Jews was actually what they hated about themselves. This had nothing to do with the Jews…but by projecting, the Jews became the skapegoat. Sad, isn’t it?

We see this tendency everywhere when we observe how one person doesn’t “get” another person. They misperceive things about them, or interpret what another person does based less on what is true for that person and more on an inner script that is playing in the mind of the person who is doing the projecting.

To learn how to stop projecting is quite easy. You simply learn to own your life and your feelings. You can stop projecting by bringing awareness into your life because projection always happens when there is a lack of it.

When you feel that twinge inside of you that tells you that the fault is in another, this is the moment that you should ask yourself if this is really true. There is something in each of us that I call The Watcher that gives us the means to step back and examine what is happening, in a dispassionate way, that can unlock the doors of our native perception. You just need to reflect within, gently and quietly, in that moment and then feel deeply within yourself for the truth about where your feelings are coming from.

The truth is that our feelings come from us. We each are choosing to react to any given moment in our lives. Look for any feeling that reveals a sense of resistance, tension, or tightness, in either your mind, heart, or body. If you feel this tightness, then you are resisting seeing and acknowledging a deeper truth about what is happening in the moment. I can tell you that were you to know the truth about why you are resisting and getting ready to think it’s all the problem of another person, the reason fully known to you simply would erase your feelings of resistance. It is always this way. Always.

The resistance happens because  our mind thinks one thing and our soul know another. Since the mind is like the surface of a lake and the soul is its depths, the mind can forget what the other part actually knows. But being so focused in our minds, we don’t realize that there is another side to the story. There is always another side to the story!

Ceasing to project means listening carefully to what is being said to you by that knowing self within so that you can hear what is being said to you by others. When we “read into” people’s words, all we are doing is actively projecting onto them our own inner script.

Everyone has their own story….and deep down we actually DO know the story, were it not for all the surface static that our minds create.

This static comes from our beliefs about a host of things. “People are just rude and uncaring” might be one. This belief will cause your mind to leap to conclusions that lead to all sorts of problems. So that person who cut you off in traffic? They might have not even seen you, or maybe they needed to pee so bad that they were just trying to get home or to the gas station across the street. We interject this material all the time, often without even realizing it. We just aren’t being aware enough.

I have found that people who engage in finger pointing are most often hiding the fault, or a very similar one within themselves. I was once married to a person who did this a lot. What I was able to see was that the fault she falsely tried to seed into the minds of my children wound up being the very fault that she was exercising in that moment. Deep down, by saying to my children that I didn’t love them, she was revealing her own inability to love in a big hearted way….a way that I had always had loved them. If her live had been big like mine had been, she probably would not have said such ridiculous things like she did. But suspecting or perhaps fearing that she didn’t love them in a big hearted way, but also being unable to consciously admit this to herself, she saw a “truth” that resided outside of herself in another person.

What this woman actually saw was a man who felt alienated by her behavior and the pain that it caused. It wasn’t a lack of love, but because it had been so abundant and had gotten crushed. THAT was the true story, and as long as her script was running in her head, it has kept her from being able to see what was real.

Projections can come from the most broken part of ourselves. It can blind us to what is happening in front of us. I have seen how I have done this….jumping to conclusions that had nothing to do with what was there, or seeing events in such a way that they mirrored what was going on inside of me instead of the way they actually were. And because the soul can feel this, the people around me can pick up on this and they respond, at least in part, with that soul-knowing…along with their own interperative scripts.

Step back and feel into the source of the resistance. Do you feel angry? Most often, this is a script from your past that is about a hurt you never got over. This is a perfect moment to begin healing it by letting yourself to drift deep into the feeling like drifting in the water of a deep lake. Just relax and stay neutral. Tell yourself that you are not your feelings. Your feelings are based in choices you make about how you want to feel. Drift into them and let yourself feel deeply into whatever the feeling is. Pretend you are a visitor to the lands of your subconscious and ask yourself what the root of that feeling is. Don’t let yourself fall into resistance. Fall into yourself and let the Watcher learn to see. Use your intuition, which is tied to feeling but isn’t the emotions.

Feeling deeply like this, you can begin to access the nonlinear feeling self that knows. If you find yourself feeling defensive, this is a sign that you need to let go more. Then, just let whatever cones to mind surface…no matter how easy it might seem or how quickly you might want to discount it. “Oh, it couldn’t be that” we often tell ourselves. For this moment, let anything come without trying to mediate it in a judging way. Let yourself be willing to free associate. It’s very likely that you grasped something that your rational mind could not.

The key in all of this is when you feel the tightness. This is not the world doing this, it’s you. By owning it, you can gain significant awareness necessary to begin healing or erasing this pattern from your mind. When you see the world as it is, your body does not resist. Yes, there are terrible things that happen in our world, but when you can see the truth behind the horror, the soul always floods in and the heart opens because they both know that the horror is there only because of a stored hurt in another that just needs a little more love to heal. The soul flows in moments like these because it knows that the answer is NEVER resistance, but surrender. Our souls know it because every soul is a spark from a still larger flame. The soul does this because at a deeper level it knows that we are all one.

Doing this work frees and liberates. It is freedom. It lies in true compassion, which requires us to be willing to see beyond our own inner scripts in order to bridge the gulf between all of us.

Nemasté.