Kundalini Flu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessings…

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Understanding Kundalini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kundalini & Adrenaline

Busy week!  Oh my.  But one thing I am noticing some folks searching for on my blog is the role that adrenaline plays in awakening. There are posts there, but this one adds a new chemical wrinkle to the story.

And boy, did I have an experience with adrenaline during a stage of awakening!  I also have a family friend who went through her awakening some years ago and her struggle with adrenaline was about as bad as my own.  I say “bad” because I have never in my life experienced the crucible of awakening quite like I did than during this particular period of awakening.  For years I examined, thought, and wrote about this experience.  But lately, I have come across more about the physiological and chemistry tied to what might be felt as adrenaline (hint: there is more to it!).  So quickly, let me lay it out because things are rapid paced right now in my life…

1) Buried fear can bring up strong adrenaline responses in awakening.  2)Everything is magnified in the awakened state.  This is good in one way, hard in another.  You get to see things you may not have known were there before, rising or peeking up from the subconscious that you didn’t know were even there.  3) If there is buried fear, well, the chemical compliment to this is most often thought of as adrenaline.  My friend wound up having to go to the doctor because of adrenal burn-out, so this can be pretty serious when dancing through the garden of a full kundalini awakening.  I was myself very concerned about what effect that this constant pounding of adrenaline was going to have on my body.  This is no picnic! A few moments of adrenaline is enough to quicken your senses and give you fast reaction time, but adrenaline for months at a time is simply dreadful. It’s a very real concern physiologically.

The solution for me was to find those moments in the loud clanging of adrenaline when I was not feeling adrenaline so powerfully and try to figure out what it was I was doing internally to create that moment or period of relative peace amidst the maelstrom….and slowly, by doing this,  I was able to unravel this even as I wanted to just jump out of my skin.  I found that what was driving the adrenaline was nothing more than fear.  And fear itself is nonrational.  Let me tell you, that most of what you are feeling in awakening related to fear is almost always related to something that has happened in the past. Its irrational, and its in the past.  Seems obvious, but try telling that to someone caught in the grip of the vice of adrenaline.

Fear only serves you when you are realizing that there is a clear and present danger and you do something to avert it, otherwise, most of it is simply reflecting on the past.  It is fear for the sake of fear.  And you have to purge this fear from the very cells of your being.  I am not speaking figuratively here.  Fear can be wound deep within the substratum of our bodies, down into the cellular structure where all of this chemistry begins.  This might sound like an insurmountable beast to tackle, but I am living proof that it can, and must, be done.

 

The way I was able to do this was to learn to simply change my body chemistry by how I chose to feel.  I simply chose to feel differently.  I wish I could say I hummed a mantra to make it all better, but I knew that this was all in the vicera, in the root of my being and I had to dig it out by those roots. So I had to dive deep.  I had to face whatever this thing was, and in the end, the answer for me was to change my mind.  I had to work on just changing how I operated, how I reacted, and how I was at a deep down level. I also had to keep at this and not give up. My meditation and the insight that kundalini brings into my life showed me clearly what the problem was, and in many ways it was simple, but it required a willingness to simply give something up that was very fundamental about my being and feeling state. Here is an important piece of the puzzle that has applications for any other emotion that you can get stuck in a “dark night of the soul” over, which is that this is how you erase the program that is running your mind, your emotions and your physiology or chemistry. Yes, this is a very important key; you can erase the program so that it is gone forever!

 

I knew that I had had bliss before all of this started, and I sought every avenue I could to bring that bliss back into my life.  To do this, though, I had to really calm my mind.  It was sheer will.  It was also a deep state of surrender. Surrender then signaled my body to produce more of that lovely dreamy calm-inducing dopamine. If dopamine is a calm purring cat, adrenaline is nearly it’s opposite. 

 
This creature called fear is not rational.  Fear also begets fear.  You have to realize that there is no reason anymore to fear unless you have something coming after you that is a clear and present danger.  In my case, I knew that I had so much fear because I was concerned over a spouse demonizing me for being the crazy parent.  And well, she did it anyway.  I had no control over that.  I had to let it go and let the chips fall where they may.  I was later able to talk about this with one of my children and she was able to observe that I was in fact quite sane. Truth bore out truth through simple observation.  Things have a way of working out.  But nothing like the threat of someone trying to take away or destroy the things that you care about most (like your beloved children), or some other thing that you unknowingly are holding on to.  But see, you can’t control that.  People will do crazy mean abusive things.  But truth is truth.  You have to begin living in that truth. And truth has a way of being seen.  It is the one thing that Buddha said can’t be hidden for long.  Its true.

The other side to adrenaline that I think bears mentioning is that I have written about the link to dopamine in awakening.  This does a lot of very positive things, but what is interesting is that dopamine is involved in the creation of another adrenaline like compound that might actually have as much a role in the fear cycle as adrenaline, which is something called norepinephrine.  It turns out that dopamine is used to create norepinephrine, and while dopamine is a necessity for feeling bliss, the kind of bliss that makes it possible for you to surrender deeply and physically enough for awakening to do its magic on you, it also is firing and catalyzing this other compound that, when in too large a dose, is difficult because of the fear it induces….or better yet, the association that we have made in our minds of the emotion with the compound. It’s pretty wild when you can unhitch the association that you have with fear and adrenaline…but that is a post all on its own.

 

This compound (norepinepherine) is not made in the adrenals, but is instead made throughout the body, and its effects might be felt more acutely than even adrenaline alone in some cases.  I suspect that it is possible, too, that these two chemicals might go hand in hand in the fear response.  Now all of this is troubling at first glance, but it is in truth a matter of balance and finding that balance.  This is nothing short of learning to master your own physiology (and that, dear reader is the very soul of what alchemy is all about: turning a base metal, or state of being, into gold).   If you have read about my work with dopamine and its linkage with kundalini, you will know what an important role it plays in awakening from a physiological perspective. Learning how to be even-keeled during awakening is a balance of your chemistry (which is driven by the choices being made moment by moment in consciousness).

 
The question is can you deal constructively with the norepinephrine and adrenal cycles in the body? Yes. If so, then how? You do so by realizing that you are driving this chemistry and that you have to let go of those fearful or anxious thoughts, even if they seem to be buried within you, or even if they seem beyond your control (they aren’t).  Inquire within, use your inner guru. If you are having trouble with adrenaline in awakening, then the force of it will force you into dealing with it.  You have to.  The higher self knows, but to know or touch this self, it seems you have to let go in order to assume it or sink into its presence. All the greats have said that its already in you.Letting go sounds like an irrational non-rational thing…because you will never deal with the irrational fear by coming at it with a rational strategy. Let go. To many people this sounds like giving up, or not working at it. In a way, this is exactly the point; you are giving up on feeling a certain way. The need to control has been the problem all along. 

 
In the movie Shakespeare In Love someone asks Geoffrey Rush’s character, who is the owner of the Globe Theater,  how things were going to turn out when they began to fall apart unexpectedly. He said simply, “It’s a mystery.” By letting it be, you can also soften and let it go. You just don’t need to know, or worry, how its going to play out. And that’s the healing balm that you need to turn this around. I know that what I have described to you doesn’t give you mantras to chant, but what I have given you instead is a direct glimpse deep into the physiology of the experience, and once you are able to change the mind that drives that physiology, you will likely find that you are actually learning how to master your own body chemistry at a level that you never thought was possible before.  This is liberating and empowering.  What can’t you do after such a trial as this?

Seek the balance, fellow seekers!  And be well!

More Adjustments – Coping With Kundalini

In the first years of a spontaneous awakening without a practice or even understanding of what kundalini is, there is first bewilderment, then a settling into the rhythms and peculiarities of this new life.  You begin perhaps by learning that this has a name, and once you do, you probably gobble up as much information about it as you can.  The process itself, though, shows you that a lot of change is taking place in a very short span of time.  The chakras are pierced, opening, and then much more susceptible to the stirring of pranic force now moving more forcefully in the body.  Old things bubble up and lift away one by one, the energy is impacting your bodily systems “amping” up adrenaline, cortisol, but also dopamine, sexual hormones of testosterone and estrogen, as well as endorphins in the mix.  In a period of mere months it is not unusual to feel as though you have gone through what might feel as only achievable through years of traditional talk therapy sessions.  Things heat up, the process continues, and the light body releases what seems a vast backlog of stored emotional material that makes up the karmic load for the person.  The soul enters in, samadhi is experienced, incredible states of bliss are known, and the self feels as though it is being reformed, healed, and brought to a new understanding of its place in the order, the design—now revealed—of the cosmos.  All of this is rich, rewarding, and wonderful amidst the backdrop of such great energetic intensity.

Over time, the self most often begins its struggles with the trappings of ego.  We all seem to come to it in our own way when we are ready (or not entirely ready as the came may be). This is often marked by what is termed the Dark Night of the Soul, more a period of time than a singular event which is where the “rubber meets the road” in coming to terms with how the self was ordered prior to awakening. This is due to an arrangement of the psyche where ego was once front and center, and then is slowly – perhaps painfully – pushed into the background by the sheer force and immensity that is now facing it. Ego is simply being outpaced by cosmic consciousness, and the cosmic has to move now.  As necessary as it is, most call this a death because of how traumatic it is for some people (at least while it is happening).  This is, though, a very necessary stage to reach in order to catch the “new gear” that our awakening selves require, which is loosening the ties to the part of the linear self in favor of the nonlinear holistic self. As an aside, I will say that this is only “necessary” when our ego is already so centrally focused in our awareness—not everyone will need this “death” whose ego is already not so front and center, but it will happen naturally if it is needed. This ties directly into how the brain itself carries a mirror of or for the cosmic within it that allows it to process cosmic consciousness and its sweeping vastness (which is the right brain, which I write about a lot in other parts of this blog).  When this happens successfully, cosmic consciousness is no longer  overwhelming, or a fearsome struggle. It is a shift (not a death). It just becomes the new normal. Things become easier over time, and this new gear comes into fuller use.  The mind quiets, there is a greater sense of peace and understanding that this new condition, the awakened self, involves.  I wont say that all is perfect peace, but things are much easier, especially for those who awakened spontaneously. But with it comes, perhaps, a place in experience that is what I think of as the “now what” state.

Many people experience this state at one time or another.  With the incredible bliss comes crashes, and the yo-yo effect I mentioned in my previous post related to comping with kundalini.  Some call it “rubber-banding” or “contractions” of the self into its old familiar pattern. You have been to the summit, you have had incredible insights, the world has been turned on its head, and events now take on a different form in their creation.  You know that your own consciousness is absolutely creating so much of your life experience as evidenced by synchronicity, and other events very similarly aligned by way of their significance to what you might think of as your destiny are popping up all over the place. But in seeing behind or through the veil that is so often described as being a part of awakening (the veil that separates the different parts of the self— conscious, subconscious, as well as superconscious) you perhaps see into the very simple source code that runs all of this, the very engine of creation….the twin energies that are now alive in you that have been described in many esoteric traditions as the “Shakti and Shiva” union, the “I am one with the father and mother” described by Jesus in the so-called Gnostic texts of early Christianity. All of these traditions are simply pointing to the union of opposites within consciousness that make cosmic consciousness possible.  But in knowing this, its almost as though there is this “what now?” moment at one point or another.  You can reach a point where all of the old ways of being no longer hold their interest.  Your body, too, might have been so impacted by the intensity of the physiology of kundalini that it creates a physiological form of doldrums within you, too.

If you have a karmic draw to certain people, those engage you and keep you in the intensity, but when you begin questioning even these powerful draws, this too can fall away and you enter into this very quiet place that is increasingly so new that it feels like a land of no more turbulent storms, no more drama, only you and the Tao, the persistent Presence of the All emanating throughout creation.  You no longer have as your god the dramas of the old life.  The battle standard is put away, and the world becomes cause-less.  It is a good place to be, but it can feel like a loss sometimes. As Westerners, we are extremely unfamiliar with working with life in this way.  This is very similar to what the Zen Buddhists describe as “zero” which means neither for or against anything, a place of no agenda, a point many observe as being where you can more clearly glimpse the truth of your own life and how the world is (to the degree that we each are capable). I think that being able to reach this place is actually important for the still-deeper blocks that remain as the deeper blocks that even our own intellect or compassion is outpaced or eluded by.

This can manifest or come in as such a stillness that it puts you off, making you feel at a loss as to what to do.  When you know how things work in the world instead of thinking that you do by taking a side or an agenda, and you lose your investment in ego, the need to go on another crusade just drops away.  We are, I think, so accustomed to making life into this dramatic play that we are in (it makes us feel engaged and fully in on the game) that when it changes, it can feel like a kind of loss of sorts.  Maybe less a loss as a feeling of having won the world, you have also given it up in the way you had lived in it before. You actively lose so many things that you thought were important that had been driving you so hard and for so long, and this loss can leave you feeling like you are resting in a windless still-water world with no up or down, no “this” or “that.”

The part of you that corresponds with the super-ego, that I knew to be something I called the “watcher” (Osho uses the same term it turns out) is a higher order version of the earthbound ego, but without the restrictive qualities it places on us, helps to drive this feeling of detachment.  Its incredibly useful when learning to surrender and to let all of the old memes drop away. For some of us, detachment can be hard sometimes.  You see the drama in the world and this super-self ego says “There have been wars….there will be more wars….there will be drama, and still more dramas; they will come and go, and drama will unfold as it has done in the past….this is all a drama that repeats for those who need to work through their own junk….keep moving through it….just keep moving and be like a passerby.” And it is this state, that without bliss, can feel hollow or empty.  It can lead to depression, and it can feel as though everything you fought so long and hard for in your previous life has less and less meaning (because it is supposed to mean something, right?). The things that fulfilled you before no longer fulfill you now. This could be a crisis or it could be a remedy.

I can tell you that this is a big adjustment.  I can also say that when this took hold of me (or I took hold of it), I found that this happened after years of very intensive releases and the dropping of ego in the midst of a 24/7 awakening experience that had proceeded for five to seven years.  I had incredible insights daily, unbelievable synchronicities that would boggle the mind, as well as difficult challenges as I learned to drop more and more of my own karmic material. It felt like a very real victory to have been able to release so much material.  But it left me with a “blah” feeling as well. There was so much change and so fast!  Once I was able to reorient myself, I found that in my own experience, there was more material to work through, another layer lying deeper still in the substratum of my awareness that I could not see in the previous cycle of releases.  All of this happened when I was able to release the easiest material and had swept through all of the major chakra centers and through the five koshas, or layers, within each chakra (it is said that we have five, and my own experience has shown me that this corresponded to numerous clearings of the same chakra over and over but at different “states” of the energy).

What I found for myself was that the material that remained was much more fundamental and even primal in nature, the blocked energy that lay in the root for me that had to do with childhood nurture and my feeling safe and secure in the world in a material way.  The point I noticed was that the blocks that remained were the ones that had been the most activated and were the most fresh.  Since they were the most commonly activated, they also were he least understood or really “seen.” These were blocks that had been triggered during my very difficult divorce just a couple of years after awakening began. As a result, I observe, they were the blocks most difficult to let go of. These seemed to now lay in a substratum of my psyche that was the most irrational, most fundamental, and also the most difficult to get at.  Yes, I had had some very challenging times doing the work up until this time with blocks in the heart, throat, crown, and the solar plexus, sacral, and root. It all seemed like a mammoth effort that spanned seven years.  Now it seemed as though I reached some plateau and while I knew there was more to do (I could feel it pretty clearly in my energy body as tension, pain, or resistance), things had slowed down a good bit as I felt like I was literally chipping away at a stone now instead of these big sweeps of release. It was here that the “blahs” entered in.  I think that this is one stage where I could have gotten stuck really easily had I stopped paying so much attention to bringing in the forces of change in my body.

What I know is that this was not some end, but merely the beginning of another chapter.  I would meet friends who would be in the same place, a signal to me that life was a great mirror for me in telling me where I was.  As I sat helping a friend move through a guided meditation, I realized that the visualizations I was providing were just the ones that I needed to use in order to get deeper into my own rooted issues.

Desire is such a double-edged sword. It can drive us powerfully to discover and to find what had been a mystery only moments previously.  It can also serve to hold blocks in place, too, because desire that is not pure is being colored by our many blocks.  We wind up wanting things or being drawn through desire to our very own karmic material, which are the things that cause us trouble and are not good for us (even as we crave them).  It can feel like a trick to us that karma creates chemistry, but being double-edged, I observe that if used properly that it can also free us.  This is very much in keeping with the soul of what tantra is, the part that is about the lightening bolt of realization through using desire as the crazy wild energy that can move mountains (and no, I am not talking about using it for sex, I am talking about using it for supreme bliss).  It has to be used as honestly as possible, though. It can also burn the mountains down. Over time, I note, that desire itself transmutes as our own karma clears.  I suspect that it is an adjustment period, and desire itself is not the bad thing so many point to. For as much as the wise ones (you know…just about everyone who speaks out about spiritual matters) speaks out against desire, I do not align to those views at all. I think that we simply do not understand desire and how our karma takes it over.  While I speak as though its something being done to us, realize that all karma is based on a choice, a decision that we once made in the past, so it isn’t like we are helpless at all in the face of our own seeming karmic battles.  It isn’t that desire itself is bad, it is that desire is so pure a force from the divine that it flows through everything, even our own blocked material.  Animated in this way, old desires that we know aren’t good for us rise like phoenix’s from the ashes.  We get upset with ourselves for having fallen for what seemed like a merry-go-round (which of course it is).  Clean up the material that desire flows through and desire is free in a way that perhaps few (including his Holiness the Dalai Lama) have  yet to experience.

I know that this might seem like a u-turn on the path of having lost direction and passion for life, but I know in my heart that even the Prime Creator of the All lives in a sublime state of desire.  Its desire birthed all realities, all worlds, all possibilities.  Desire was what moved it to create in the way that it did.  Its release of us and our potential from its own dreaming was itself the orgasmic surprise just before a moment of sheer risk of losing it all, that by releasing it, it might just all float away like the children we birth who leave home and exit our lives. There is, I know, a vista ahead of us where, freed from our shame and guilt and glitches, is an experience that is beyond limits.  I know it sounds grandiose, but in truth I am talking about being bowled over by a cup of tea or a sunset, or dinner out with friends.  The simplest of moments looking out your window becomes a sheer miracle.

What I am saying is don’t turn away from desire, but examine it. If it seems as though it is causing you trouble, it is a sign that there is more material that needs clearing out.  I can’t tell you the end-point in this simply because it is new ground and we are all traveling together.  But its the next big thing, I think.

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The Big Adjustment – Coping With Awakening

Awakening can be a sudden and bewildering change that pushes a relentless process of clearing stored emotional material, ultimately with the light at the tunnel being a better more peaceful life with bliss as the centerpiece of this new level of attainment.

Right?

While the “rise” of awakening can be a very quick event, it instigates a transformative process that can be years in the making.  One of the big challenges among the many that come with awakening is how to BE in the world.  Most specifically, after awakening, how do you go on doing what you have always done?  So much is irrevocably changed within you; how you see, how you respond, how you interact with the world around you. Its a big shift that brings with it a lot of self examination about what it was you have been up to for all these years. Often you can be left feeling at odd ends about your work, your relationships, and how to move forward with awakening as the “new normal.”

Most importantly to bear in mind is that everything has changed. Trying to go back to the old way tends to repeat old patterns and methods.  This is a wonderful opportunity to be brave and leap into the breach, into the void of the future in a new way. I know as well as you do, that if you are going through awakening there is a new aspect being brought to bear.  This new “element” within the self is discovered while awakening.  It is itself the nonlinear, more feminine aspect within consciousness.  It is what I think of as a missing link in our own awareness and consciousness that sparks great change. You can see just how big a change it is because this unfolding of this part of you results in events happening differently. You are interfacing with reality in a different way, or perhaps I should say, in a much more efficient way than ever before.  Like what you think has a way of coming to pass very quickly.  We refer to this as synchronicity.  It is in fact a kind of “upgrade” to our own native ability to co-create with reality.  You create your reality. Now, though, its just a touch more seemingly magical because of this added and once missing element.

So the trick, I find, is to not try to go back to the old ways. You have been changed.  Period. Let the new filter into you and as a result of it, even though you are different from the masses, you will feel a flow and freedom as well as wonder joy and awe about this new life. And the more that you are able to anchor this sense of being within, the more it surrounds you in your life.  Slowly, or even quickly, your energy body is released, cleansed, of the hundreds of hitches that has gotten caught up in the co-creative cycling that is your karma. Letting it go clears the decks and makes thing easier in direct proportion to the mass of inner material released.  You are now better able to NOT know what the future holds, willing to ride the wave of bliss and maybe even find how perfect things happen when you are in this zone.  Trusting.  Happy.  A little breathless, intense sometimes, hard at other times, too, yes, but getting better and better.

But.  Sometimes you want to take what you may still love to do and adapt it to your new life. I can tell you that in my own experience, so much changes.  If you are a business owner like I have been, being able to steer the ship in a way that supports you in basic ways as well as all of the new ways can be a daunting task.  This is where listening to the force within will guide.  I was an artist in production. Nothing got done that I did not myself do. I worked 80 hour weeks and loved it, and yet I brought to the work a lot of issues that disapeared once awakening came along. I was left lost for about a year, bereft of creative juices, new ideas, or even the drive, the old fire in the belly.  Intuitively, I knew that the fire in the belly could be supplanted by a different kind of fire.  It would attract a different kind of client just as it would support my new life. Before I went in a very linear fashion, a rather rational approach to all of this. But post awakening, I saw a world of new opportunities for collaboration and leveraging my brand as well as my own creativity by working with others with similar interests as mine.  I found that instead of being so aggressive, I simply did what I had always done; let the work speak for itself and let the chips fall where they may.  If I needed someone to help market the work, someone would come along in perfect timing.  It has always happened this way.  I don’t go looking for resources, I am now attracting them magnetically. Less about money and more about having fun and enjoying life, I have opened the door to a world of possibility.  I simply say, “bring me the highest” and for the time and the place I am in, it almost always has. All of this requires me to step back and let the universe work its magic. This involves faith I think.

Along with this change is also what I experienced as my mind entering into a persistent state of stillness and quietude.  To get there, I had to ride some pretty serious waves of bliss for extended periods. This took place over about a two to three year period that culminated not in ego death, but in what I call ego rearrangement. Its important to understand that there is no such thing as ego death. Those who use it are trying to explain what feels like might be a death, but is in truth a gentle but tragic-feeling change that asks us to allow ego to drift into the background.  Once that is done enough, the self will feel immense relief as well as a number of new benefits to consciousness and how you feel on a day to day basis.  But for a time, there is also a kind of “spacey” quality to your mind.  I forgot things very quickly.  On the one hand, the chemistry behind this was important for letting go, but try getting through a day with a long list of things that need to be done.  I have found that I make written lists so that my bliss state remains without any feelings of tension or anxiety about missing something.  I can say, though, that there were many times when I was in that “daze” of the quiet mind that I would end up being in all the right places, a little embarrassed to realize that I had forgotten an appointment even though I was there at just the right time.  I found that the more I let go, the more flawless this worked. But it didn’t work every time.  I was not always in the perfect flow, so being able to set up a note system has been a nice way to remind me when I am soaring through the day.

I was pleased to find that this state of mind was described by Zen monks as the goal of reaching samadhi.  It was a necessary precursor, they said.  This is often referred to in Buddhism and the Vedic tradition as the “empty head” or “no-head,” suggesting that the normal operations of the mind as a linear thinking rationalizing organ have been disrupted. In my own experience where I have carefully observed the chemistry at work in my body, I identified the chief compound involved in this surrender state as being primarily dopamine.  I arrived at this as a result of a lot of careful research and study into the effects of dopamine as well as opiates on the body, and all opiates have had an analogous enough effect as dopamine since the signature of bliss in the body is far more complex than any one compound- this includes hormones as well as oxytocin, and even small amounts of adrenaline in order to modify the spacey quality inherent in dopamine).J. Krishnamurti described that he went into a “declutched state” where his mind simply refused to work.  He would often forget names, would look at himself in the mirror and simply not recognize who it was that was there (this happened to me several times).  This state persisted for some time, and while it moderated later, he retained an aspect of it throughout his life. And I think that its a necessary state to have in order to deal with cosmic consciousness.  You simply cannot rationalize your way through your day and expect to get through in one piece.  Linear thought becomes the short-order cook in your life, very good for specific short-termed tasks, but terrible for the bigger stuff.  The Zen master Taisen Deshimuro explains that people who are rational and “mental” have a lot of trouble with awakening.  They have trouble just being a monk, too, but its because they  use the mind in a way that is no longer compatible with awakening. You just need to be much bigger than the narrow linear mind. You have to be bigger-hearted, more soulful, to navigate the energy in greater peace.

For as much as I like to be my own boss, awakening sparked in me an interest in working with others, so I have.  I have been able to bring to my work in teaching something that few teachers do.  School is still very much a mechanistic process.  Some of it is necessary in order to teach technique in art, for example.  You simply have to learn how to lay down paint well, or to know just how to move a tool across a surface in order to get a smooth surface in clay.  This is what dancers study for years, what ballerinas will repeat endlessly in order to train themselves to be the best they can be. Its important, but its only one side to the coin.  Along with this is the human soul that is part of our creative expression, and how we access creativity.  Instead of teaching through pressure and the fear of deadlines, I create an environment of freedom that includes personal responsibility to ones own work.  To be an artist, you cannot hope to succeed if you don’t have discipline within you as a choice instead of imposed from outside.  So doing this work, while very different from how I was trained, I have used and I have hoped that it will yield results for the hundreds of students whose lives that have transited my own through my work. As more and more students “come back” after graduation by asking to be ‘friended’ through Facebook or through other forms of social media, I see how what I do has been catching on.

Creativity goes crazy when it is stripped of fear and is instead infused with joy and wonder.  Something very special happens.  And I have been dedicated to supporting this way of teaching because I know how great it is to experience creativity in this more expansive way.  Each of us has genius inside of us.  I know you might not agree, but I have seen it when someone pokes their heads out of their own fear and desire to play it safe.

Another aspect of my teaching work has been to do group projects so that my students can realize a much broader range or scope to a finished work.  The result has been that we have made hundreds of pieces for an installation, larger-scale work that has grabbed a lot of attention by other students and faculty as well as the world at large.  By learning how to collaborate my students also learn how to work with each other in an interesting dynamic that involves give and take, as well as making choices and going with them.  They do less overthinking their choices while in the process and learn how to follow their instincts, an important non-rational aspect to creative work.  Ultimately, my hope is to empower my students so that they might develop greater confidence in themselves and use their experience with me as an example for something they want to do later in life.

Collaboration means inclusiveness.  If you find yourself hungry for working with groups of people as so many who awaken do, you might serve as an inspiring presence that suggests that while the way forward may not always be known, things have a way of working themselves out perfectly when we let go of expectation and just throw ourselves in projects with joy and enthusiasm.  It might be that your work sustains you but you find that it is not terribly rewarding.  I think you have two choices, either you find a way to work so that its more interesting, or you find something beyond your work that fills the bill for you.  Between my creative work and the five sites that I manage for it, my spiritual work and the three blogs I manage for those writings, along with my work teaching and being a father, I find that life is just packed. I am constantly tuning and fine tuning my inner work in order to harmonize with a life that continues to change and clarify.  Things change as they need to, and the timing always seems to be just right.  I know that when I say I go with the flow that it sounds like I am somehow inactive, it is less that I am inactive as I am at a deeper level very engaged in the river of my life in a way that does not involve the same level of physical manipulation needed.  I am simply not pushing the river as much, but finding ways to be “like water” (thank-you Bruce Lee) and to use the flow of my life in as harmonious a way as I can.  I’m human, so its not perfect, but in the imperfection lies an opportunity to know more about myself as long as I am willing to be honest with myself.

The answer to coping may not be in trying to do things the old way, but to navigate life in a new way.  This new way may require you to have faith, to not always know what the future holds but to find that the more you are able to suspect that a”bad” outcome one day is just setting you up for something not yet in your present. I recently had a pretty significant equipment failure, but instead of letting it get to me, I saw that there had been a series of these odd little glitches happening that made me feel like I wasn’t supposed to be doing the work I was doing.  For reasons I do not know yet, the work that I would have done had the failure not happened, probably wont be needed.  Thus, this has given me two additional days away from my production work in order to get ready for an open studio event.  I have learned that when I go with this flow, there is always something that comes along that shows me that had it gone differently, it would not have been “right” or that the flow of events were perfectly arranged in the way they were for certain other events to happen as they did.  Without the equipment failure, I would have missed something, or something important would likely not take place.  I don’t know what that is, but I have faith that everything is unfolding as it should.  In the old days, I would be banging my head against the wall.  The flow of events have been sufficient to put me where I need most to be.  And sometimes the right place is not something that I might even want or recognize as important at the time, but often winds up being significant in some important way.  So the job that you lose, which is seen as a tragedy, also means that you wind up taking off time and find yourself swimming in a pool with someone who is to be a major player in the next chapter in your life.  Had you not lost your job you would not be swimming in the pool at just that moment meeting your new contact in perfect timing. These things happen with great frequency the more we can open ourselves up to being available to them.

What you might lose, you also win.  There are compensations in this new life.  Limits tend to go out the door as you ask yourself, “What can’t I do?”  And that is just the spirit, right?

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Why?

You might think that my words on the sacred two are about tantra and are thus sexual in nature.  I have had friends make comments about my poetry and writing as being about sex.  But that would be  a mistake.

Most often, when I write about the “two” I am actually writing about the twin forces contained within awakening.  This was what Jesus spoke about when he said “I am one with the father and the mother.”  Problem is, mainstream Christian dogma wrote the “mother” part out so that the religious experience became an all-male club.  The Hindu, though, along with the Taosists, recorded it rightly: kundalini, or life force, the Tao, is known as twin forces that move through the body and awareness as a potentiating force of both healing and radical change.  To show how powerful this force is, it is possible to do more healing work in ten minutes with this force alive in your than in ten years of standard talk therapy.  Part of the energy is said to be sexual.  And here is what is so important, right along with the twin-thing; the force of awakening is like a carefully controlled stream of water being so carefully tended, is allowed to overflow its tight bounds and allows for other water and other new bounds to enter in.  The flow grows, the flow breaks down old barriers.  It is sexual, yes, but it is creative, it is mental, it is physical, it is emotional, it is ego, it is intellect, it is all that we ARE. By allowing our energy to flow as one varied current, we can actually catch a glimpse of what we can be if we become less compartmentalized and controlled.  We return to a primordial state which I describe as a return to the Garden.  This is us, you see….

All that we ARE.  So my poetry?  It is about THIS. And yes, it is cast in the form of pure adoration.  This is significant and important because the “two” are not themselves really separate.  They are in truth ONE, when you experience them within your awareness, but they pull apart to form what seems to be two in the etheric body structure of the Ida and Pengala channels, and in so doing, they become a powerful creative force.  This force exists in every single person on the planet.  So when this force is liberated deep within ourselves, the twin force of kundalini releases, it is said, the Shakti and Shiva currents through the body.

Like a plug into the cosmic, we plug into the universe with a blast up the spine. Never are we ever the same after this.  And I make them adore one another like lovers because of HOW closely they work with each other in the body when you become aware of them. You cannot have one without the other.  I found that I could allow the “two” to grow in strength by allowing them to come closer and closer to one another through nothing except my own focus and awareness on my own process of energetic flow through my body and upward through the chakras and my spine.  Out of these two, there is birthed an even finer form of energy that is the core of the Christ, or Cosmic Consciousness.  Awakening is akin to conception, what the early Christians mention as “begetting” as a spiritual practice (the only remnants we have of this teaching are extant in the gnostic writings of the Nag Hammadi).  For the bulk of Christianity, the subtlety of what Jesus had to say was largely lost where his core apex teachings were concerned.  He was a man who spoke in pictures and parables to people who were drop-dead literal in their understanding and approach.  But you think I feel the Christ?  I feel what HE felt in his life and what he sought to get his followers to know.  This is also the same force that all yogis and pilgrims have felt down through time.  This is a HUMAN experience, you see, not religious or dogmatic.

I pay homage to these things.  I pray, I look, I long, I breath, and I find healing through them.  Always always, as they turn turn around the other.  And yes, I am here to state emphatically that you cannot have God the Father without Goddess The Mother.  Anything less is ignoring the truth that will one day stare straight at you like looking down the barrel of a cosmic gun ready to shoot you through and through with truth, murdering your lies and your false belief.  We all hold lies in ourselves, and most of us do not know they are lies.

Strong words, I know.  But I am through pussy-footing around.

Time to bring back the Her to the Him.  And that is what I am doing.  My words. they are about the She as much as the He.  they are at once religious in feeling but shunning dogma and false belief.  They are also fanciful, playful, fun, and passionate.  Just like every good love story should be.  So there you go.  Sexual energy, along with the REST of your energy is healing.  Subsume or hide your sexual energy out of some feeling of shame or guilt and you lose a strand of your own healing.  And what does that get you?  More repression and sickness.

So why did we strip the man-god from his woman?  Why do you think we did that? I mean, really, what do you think was beneath all of that? Fear? Short-sightedness?  There may be many reasons, but in a moment we can change all of that by choosing differently.

The Goddess joins with her God right here inside of me.  It informs me, heals, and innervates.  It is for me the way Home.  And what is this?  It is merely a joining of all the opposite ends of things in the universe using a glorious and beautiful form of cosmic short-hand.  ALL opposites are thus strung along the invisible string of the Creator….IN OUR AWARENESS.  And that is the core of all religious feeling.  So back to the poetry….

Working Through The Centers

NOTE:  I know….another long post.  Sorry about that, really. But I am asking you on an adventure and we can’t do that with a bunch of bulletted text, can we? So here goes the long version that asks you take a cup of tea and a cookie or something and just soak into it…

Imagine that overlaid on your body is an extremely fine webwork of energy lines, fine as spiders thread which create a vast jungle of pathways that align to organs and centers in your body that are physical that these lines help to feed the necessary nutrient of life force or prana to. You can’t see or touch these lines, but you can feel them.  In fact, there are people, like myself, who can see the energy radiating off of them which can tell you all about where that person is physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It sounds a little wild to some people, but really, its only because you have never heard of it or experienced it directly for yourself.  But when you do, it is a game changer.  But you don’t have to see this energy in order to work with it.  There is a lot that you can do with it that is healthy and beneficial.

These lines that make up the energy body begin so small that they are difficult to see.  They go down in scale to subatomic since the energy force literally does feed right into and out of the subatomic.  Its a very very detailed system for carrying energy.  Most systems for understanding this only show the seven chakras that go up the core of the body.  In the same way that your vascular system goes from extremely small structures that feed into organs and cells, they get bigger and bigger like the branches of a tree.  Finally they go up a central main trunk, which is where the most obvious centers of vortex energy reside.  We call these “chakras” which mean “wheel” or “disc” in the Sanskrit.

You don’t need to know anything about esoteric traditions to know and understand what a chakra is or what your energy is.  I can tell you that by becoming sensitive to energy fields that are in others around you and by feeling your own energy, you can learn right away FROM the energy itself to know how it behaves and how incredibly complex but beautiful it is. By learning directly with the energy, you can allow your own natural intuitiveness to bloom.  Most people feel they have to learn this from another person, but I say that you literally have the capacity within you to decode the information for yourself because it is what you are.  But absent that, a few very basic guidelines about how to reach a place where the energy of the infinite can move through you with calm and peace.

Blocks As Solid (Ideas and Emotions)

We like to think of energy as something that is not solid, but I want to propose to you that at the level of energy itself, the energy body has amazing structure and a kind of “solidity” to it that makes the lines that run through it that the Chinese have charted as “meridians” as incredibly consistent from one person to the next.  Far from being just a current or amorphous flow of energy, the energy that makes up our consciousness is amazingly structured.  It is out of this “solidity” that energetic objects can get stuck in the system that is our light body.  In the same way that food can get stuck in your throat, energy can be stuck, sometimes for years, lifetimes even, in your energy body.  The result of removing the block is that perception and awareness changes and the person feels much more peaceful and happy.

But we are a cluster of thousands of these blocks.  These blocks are always emotions that were not fully felt in one way or another. Do you fear your rage? Do you find yourself putting it away or stuffing it down?  That breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend where you pulled yourself together and stopped crying because you were afraid you were going to just fall apart? Its possible that you were stuffing something down. Or how about that moment when you feared something that you did not understand…a feeling that just hung there like dirty laundry on the clothesline?  Afraid, we leave it alone…..and we shove it down.  By not fully processing any form of emotion, we literally create a kind of bottled knot of whatever that emotion is that gets stored in the energy body.

The Body Thinks

There is a lot of evidence that I am finding that shows HOW the energy body and the physical body work together to either store or to release these blocks.  It has to do with the nervous system, the brain, as well as the current of prana and how it is polarized in the life force field itself.

The light body is made up of two fields of energy that are joined and that replenish each other. They aren’t really even “two” but two ends of a spectrum of energy that represents a kind of cosmic totality that makes it possible for you to then connect into the totality that exists beyond you.  This is the way this energy works, and is why you can feel the rush of the universe move through you in moments of nondual awareness (or as a continual awareness depending on the extent of your experience).  Two-in-one (energies) who then birth a transcendent third energy.  You see? All of this activity is felt as taking place not in the head but all through the body.

What I am getting at is that there is already evidence to support that the body “thinks” and stores memory.  Now this stands in direct opposition to what we all have been taught, but what we have learned about our capacity to store memory is simply lacking.  Consider that the tissues in your body contain neurons, enough neurons in your gut for the brain of the average cat.  THAT is a lot of processing power.  What do you think our gut is doing with all of that?  What does your gut tell you? 🙂 So you see, the body has this capacity for dealing with memory, yes, and there is also a way to use somatics (body knowledge) to aid in releasing these memories.  Unlike the brain, the body seems to be more selective in the memories it stores.  It seems at this point in time, to be storing memories that it has had trouble with.  These can now be released once the individual is ready to release them.  And doing so is a saving grace because whatever the short coming was, or the fault or hurt or fear or rage, it all evaporates after releasing these blocks.

In the work I was doing with my friend Alison who is herself awakened and a gifted intuitive, we found that even matter itself has a propensity to hold blocked energy.  I one experience that unfolded that I write about in my book, I describe how we unlocked an energy that had been blocked at a physical site that involved the murder of a man who had been drowned in a lake.  At the time, we did not know that a body had been found in the lake that we saw in our inner vision, but it had been discovered as the waters receded in what was then a dry lake bed (and his body was discovered along with some of his belongings enough to identify him).  We were able to describe a scenario that had a group of friends going out on the lake in the middle of the night with one of their friends not returning.  By simply recognizing the truth of this event, we were able to release it.  Six months after our encounter our local newspaper printed a story about the man who had died in the lake!  It was pretty amazing that events in the physical world would be so closely tied to our own encounter.  The newspaper story told the story of the four friends who took this man out onto the lake.  What we saw was that he was murdered for an elicit love affair with the wife or girlfriend of his friend. It was perhaps the reason why the blocked energy could be released….because someone was able to see what really happened on that night.  No one else would have been able to really see the events as they took place.  While we had testimony from his friends as part of the historical record, it is interesting how no one seemed to even entertain the idea of foul play at all.  Basically, it came down to four people all saying that their friend drowned. As long as everyone sticks to their story, then no one is the wiser.

And of course, this lead the skeptical to suggest that I saw something that was not there, or that I was making it up or seeing a real event bu interpreting it to fit my own life where I felt as though I had been drowned. And I will concede that this is certainly a real possibility.  What suggests to me that we were seeing real events was because both Alison and I were picking up on all the same information, information that was in line with the story when it came out in the newspapers.

And this is where the second lesson in doing this kind of work comes in.  When we went up to this lake, we were simply going to see the sun setting.  But what unfolded was an event not unlike one that had taken place in my own life. There was something eerily similar to what had happened to me and to our friend who drowned in the lake.  While my life was not taken from me, my experience in my marriage was that I was being held underwater to be drowned before my own children.  It was itself a really painful experience that happened to me, something that people in the psychiatric community call ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome.”  One parent tries to destroy the other parent in the eyes of the children.  When it happens to you, it feels like the life is being sucked out of your body.  it feels like you are drowning.  It was appropriate that I would pick up on this eerie energy that was skulking about in those hills.  It was scary at first….sinister….but as we worked through the memory, I found that I was touching on a whole host of feelings that were in me as well.  By working with one block we were able to clear the other block.

But what took place in the wake of this experience is also very telling.  In the same way that clearing a block in your body leads to a world of new possibilities, the area where this drowning took place also underwent a lot of changes in the years following our event.  Renovations were called for in the main buildings, a new arts initiative was called for with new people with progressive ideas coming onto the scene.  It was as though a new window opened for the people who lived and worked around this location.  To date, a slew of new initiatives have been undertaken on the part of the owners of the property where this lake is.  Its interesting to see how a location can be stuck for years only to see how it becomes unstuck, with a flow of new people, new ideas, and new possibilities entering the scene.  The same happens to you when you release these blocks, too!

Complimentary Blocks And The Law Of Attraction

Until a block is cleared, the block can be the basis of an attraction by others who are either similarly blocked or complimentary blocked.  What this means is that you either have someone who has had the same KIND of experience or someone who compliments the experience as in the case of someone who has a fear of being pushed, say, and you attract a person who seems to like to push you a lot!  THAT would be an example of a complimentary attraction.  A positive complimentary attraction would be somethign similar but in the positive, not negative.  In either case, however, the two people feel the similarities even if they are opposites, and these dynamics open up the flow of energy within us. They fill a role be it positive or negative.  These aspects of the other person can lay dormant for decades before expressing themselves, or they can be playing in the background all the time.  However, when you release this material, you release any possibility for this same kind of blocked material to ever be of any consequence to you in the future.  it is gone like a poof of smoke.  And this is why this kind of work is so important and life changing; you can change your whole life based on one big critical pivotal move in clearing your blocks in your body.  The result is that you NEVER feel energized by behaviors that would have effected you before.  It’s as though your mind has been completely rewired when it comes to whatever hot button issue this block represented to you in the past.  There is a lot to suggest that this event does literally have the power to rewire the brain in seconds flat!  How’s that for a speedy transformation?

It really is that fast and that easy.  When you have enough of these you realize that you can actually become a free person in ways you have never experienced before.

Ways Of Clearing Blocks

The best way to work through blocks is to pay attention to the ones that come up the most for you.  This is one most obvious way.  But these blocks may also be the hardest to clear away.  I am of the observed opinion that clearing smaller blocks is the way to go since it can loosen up material surrounding one block only to result in a kind of energetic avalanche with other blocks going at about the same time.

You can identify blocks in your body by simply observing when you feel a sense of resistance or even pain in your body when you move a certain way.  Your energy body changes frequency from one end of the field to the other.  As a result, different emotions are stored at different places along this “column” in the body.  This is why some issues are stored in the root chakra than in the crown. The root chakra deals with nurture, abundance, and safety of self, for example.  When you feel a sense of resistance or even pain from tightness in a given area, you can gain a good bit of understanding about the block in general by thinking about where that block is located.  If its between two chakras, then it will contain aspects of BOTH chakras in some way.

If you can identify the spot where the hurt or twinge keeps happening, you can point it out to a therapists who can work on that spot for you.  The types of therapists who can do this work will be people who do both energy work and body manipulations such as deep tissue massage.  Acupressure, acupuncture, reiki, and deep tissue are all methods that can help.  In pranayama yoga there is a lot of attention given to moving certain parts of the body, something called “locks” that help to move blocked material.  All of these involve vigorous movement of the part of the body where the chakra is located and, presumably, the blocked material.  Even placing your attention on the spot and holding it there through the day is one way that you can help loosen up a block in your body.  If it gets enough aware energy, it can trigger the release of the block sometimes.

Chakra Clearing VS. Meridian Clearing

This is especially true for the chakras.  When a block is in a meridian line and not in a chakra, it seems to be harder to release it unless you are using acupressure or reiki, systems that actively move energy through the meridians of the energy body.  The chakras, conversely,  have a churning effect on blocks so that if you can use the chakras in meditation to swirl and move around a block, this can be very helpful because unlike clearig one small block in a meridian, a whole cluster of blocks can often be released all at once when its associated to chakra movement.  This is achieved by simply visualizing it and allowing the chakras to open fully and begin their movements, which often feel like you are moving or floating or even flying sometimes.  By placing your intent to clear the blocked material in a given chakra, the energy can begin to melt away the block.

Clearing along a meridian line is more exact and may only clear one block.  It can also lead to other blocks letting go, though, and these blocks can be worked through by acupuncture, acupressure, and deep tissue most often.  The larger blocks can be “swirled” away through vigorous chakra movement and can sweep away lots of blocks at once, leaving a person feeling as though they are a changed person.  Many people who have these types of clearings describe feeling as though their body was being purged by a wave or by a force that sent a whole series of bubbles or shots of energy up along their spine and out their body.  Fundamental to all of this work is intent (willingness) and willingness to surrender at a deep level even into the body.  By reaching this deep state of vulnerability, you will also be reaching a deep state of awareness somatically about your body and your own body of feeling, too. Trust me, when the moment comes, it will be like suddenly seeing things in a very different way, the way perhaps that things really are instead of the way you have chosen to see them through the colorings of the particular block that you have.  Be ready to see things in a very different way, or to feel them very differently.  And remember; this is nothing at all to do with reason.  This is NOT about working through your emotional backlog rationally.  To try to do so is a trap.  Yes, reason can keep you OUT of the thick hot stew of your feelings and can help you to calmly identify what needs to be released.  However, you need to actually jump in the water with no fear or resistance to what you will find since this is a necessary state of mind and heart that you will need in order to clear the block. If you turn away, you are effectively saying to your body that its okay to keep the block in place.

Some blocks go quickly.  Some take months, even years to dissolve.  A good rule of thumb is that if you have a strong investment in a given block, the harder it will be to rid yourself of it.  The more ego focuses on it, the harder it will be for the block to simply dissolve.

Part of prana is the energy body that expresses itself as a vortex, a kind of doughnut-shaped field of energy that is common to most anything that has an electromagnetic field around it.  It is this field that carries your consciousness and also the energy that feeds into your cells. When the energy is blocked, illness and neurosis can result. Life force is literally being squeezed out of you when it should be more abundant.

When you remove these blocks you can realize stronger energy, a more peaceful state of mind and greater bliss that is not at the whim of whatever blocks are turning in you at the time.

Until you are able to release a block, the block itself will be energized by prana in your body and it will remain active.  It can cause any number of problems, all of which will revolve around some kind of meme that is less than who you really are as a divine creature in earthly robes.  These blocks can cause no end of trouble for you.  There is little else work that is as important as this is.

There are numerous ways to clear away blocks in the body.  One method is through energy work like White Crane Chi Gung.  This method of blending movement with energy work will aid in the removal of blocks throughout the body.  In order for it to work, it requires patience and persistence.  By working at it for weeks and months at a time, you can begin to see results.  Deep tissue massage by a practitioner who knows or understands about blocks is helpful.  Also, body movement is key.  The very act of shaking or massaging or moving the part of the body that is blocked can aid in removing material from it.

Until you have cleared one chakra region, you will be dealing with what blocks remain in that region.  You will likely find that less obvious blocks come to the fore in your awareness now after having one bigger more obvious block removed.  Your attention can become much more highly tuned in this way to detect blocks in your system.  As this happens, you can also become much more sensitive to the presence in blocks in yourself and others if you are interested in learning a healing art.  I have dug so deep into myself that I have had some practitioners unable to detect the blocks.  One actually scolded me, saying I should not try to CREATE problems when there were were not problems there.  This practitioner was not able to pick up on this material, and I went on to have a number of clearings surrounding this region, so yes, there was more there, but not all of us will be as good about picking up on it.  While I have done the bulk of the clearing on my own, I have used a variety of methods to assist in clearing my system, and these have all worked well for me when they came along in my awakening journey (almost as if they were perfectly suited for the blocks kundalini was churning away on at the time!).  In many ways, I have been very gifted to have found a certain modality at a given time, as though the timing was perfect.  I was talking with my latest therapist about doing more work in the Fall recently as she expressed some surprise with the level of release I was experiencing with her work. I had to explain that while my being able to release blocks was different from her experience, it wasn’t from my experience.  For many people, it seems they get a deep tissue massage and maybe loosen up some material a bit.  For me, I am headed into the final stage of releasing material, a process that has taken years of steady daily attention and work, and I am having flashes of past lives, of deeply held traumas from my ancient past. It seems the deeper I go into it, the harder it is, the deeper the shadows.

So don’t be afraid of the shadow, I say.  That you get down into such shadows is cause for celebration.  Who on the planet has managed to get this deeply into themselves….to overcome the world?

This is why clearing blocks is so important; it is all about overcoming the world.  Would you like to see with new eyes?  With clear bodies, we can build a clear world.  And that is why I am writing to you today.  Pass it along!

~P.

Until

I sit and speak with the light.   It is opening up to this great love that lives inside of me.  It has been the one thing that has driven me forward in my process of healing the barrage of blocks, the breaking of old patterns, the dissolving of karma. It is at once the force of awakening as well as my own love.  it is interesting and lovely how my purpose can be a part of it, to learn from it, to heal with it.   It is nestled into each of us….a part of us. It can BE us and we can BE it.  It can also come, probably like Moses saw it, as a burning bush.  Part of it, I know, are aspects of my higher self.  But I also know that in all of that, this extension of consciousness, that I am reaching something more….something else.  It is the thing that granted me my individuality.  it is funny because if I told you how I experience it, I don’t think you would believe me.  It lies utterly silent, but aware within the core of everything.  I can feel what it feels as the interior of all things and I can also see it on the FACE of everything through the sentient universe.  But to get there I find that I have to use my imagination.  I think that most people think that when they are using their imagination that what they come up with is a fabrication….a creation….itself only real for the creator. What I have found is that what we call the imagination is like a path that we only go down but so deep with.  It goes deeper, though, and will birth phenomenon while the higher self becomes engaged.  It becomes like a way for information to be projected from the so-called higher self to the so-called lower self and also as a way to create, to birth what has been waiting in the wings.

All of this is what interest me, teaching me about the nature of creativity, the dance of opposites, tantra as a creative and healing art, and the nature of time, as well as our relationship to higher order consciousness.  reaching the zero point, what the zen monks call “zero” is also a big part of all of this.  In fact, you  could say it underpins all of this.  It is what I write about over and over and over…..which is a return tot his zero, something that I have engaged passionately in since awakening took place.  In fact, it is this one thing that has been the core of my work all this time.

If you had something in your brain that made you think you saw enemies when they were actually your friends, would you be concerned and go to the doctor to see if there was a way to fix it? That sounds pretty troublesome, right?  Well, in fact, we are all afflicted with this tendency. We see others as for or against us in ways that wind up being off the mark.  I have had this happen in my life several times since the rising of kundalini.  Some had been in place years before.  I have been able to observe in others as well as myself how these lenses blind us completely or partially.  In either case, the result is chaos and pain.  Who needs that, right?  What is it that has made us so messed up that we would cleave to that even as something inside of us says “boy this sure is crazy.”  As if we are possessed.  Except, there we are, making the choice ourselves.  Why?  When you turn from something as perfect as this love that the divine is, it can make a person mad.  Plus we are a kind of crazy crowd, us humans.  Crazy and beautiful all at once. What a trip, right?

Until we heal these rifts in us, we will think we see outside of us what is actually inside of us.  We will see as one person saw, nothing but enemies.  Another person saw reasons to be fearful.  I saw threats to my ability to love and I responded over and over and over by pulling away.  Suspended, not fully present, I learned to protect my own soul castle by not fully engaging.  This sense of being “out there” was certainly part of who I am.  I am so Pisces (believe it…I said it…), but this lovely ability to flow in the etheric realm has also meant that I have a means to escape. I have sought to do so in healthy pursuits for the most part, but I can admit that it meant in some cases that I would pull back from the stings and arrows others have shot my way in the hopes that I might never feel the sting of such hurt again.  Sometimes I think that I am to learn to take every single arrow with bravery and realize not a one can hurt me.  None.  So shoot me.  Kill me.  Hang me.  It has been done a thousand times anyway on this planet, so why am I so concerned about someone who is just being a little human?  THAT becomes the corpus of my own “stuff” which I must heal.  Until then, being able to see into the divine realm will be limited.  I might be able to lay down at night or in quiet moments, yes, but I wont be able to feel it in the moment when someone is cutting me off in traffic or someone is yelling at me because, well, they are in some way hurting.  Until we can be unmoved by the suffering as others as THEIRS we continually seek to grab onto others’ stories to somehow make them our own through a host of suppositions based less on what is true as it is how we are deep down.

The writer Anais Nin said that we see the world as we are, not as it is.  And it is so true.  But we CAN see the world AS IT IS by removing these lenses, these old beliefs, what the easterners call illusions, but what I like to call creations (we created them, we can create something different and new).  As I am able to remove this material, it has resulted in being able to see more clearly.  Truly.

For me, the way this has all gone is most of my issues lies in my ability to create.  As a result, a LOT of material that has been stuck has been stuck in a place between root and sacral.  It literally feels in my body as a sore womb is slowly being chipped away at and released from its prison.  It means also that my masculine character goes through changes as this happens as the feminine character in my awareness also goes through some changes.  How I feel, how I respond, all change incrementally as incremental things are healed.

Right now the project feels more like dredging an ancient canal.  the methods I have used to release this material have been wide ranging.  I write about them in my book which I am hoping to submit for publishing in the next year.  The “methods” if you want to call them that, include a broad range that turn out being the same things that the ancients have used for centuries, but it also includes some new ones. Until this is done the energy field of a person remains susceptible to the very forces that mirror the junk that has yet to be removed.  It is not uncommon, then, for most people to have energetic entities attached to them in one way or another.  These range from small inconsequential to much more human like and very likely form the stories of vampires and succubi/incubi.  Early in my awakening I dealt with removing these beings, but no more.  My work deals with getting myself right first.  Everyone actually has the means to rid themselves of these forces when they are ready.  And not everyone is ready.  Following ones readiness is also a great way to bring healing in a more perfect way.  In this way, we can be the doctors to our souls. We really do know best deeper down.  It might not seem that way sometimes, but there is intelligence that we are each a part of that is way beyond anything you could imagine or believe.  But it is the core of what each of us is.  Beyond time.  Beyond belief.  🙂

This isn’t about changing how you think or changing your habits.  Yes, you can bring change into your life this way, but what I am pointing to is an alchemy of the soul that results in instantaneous change.  It is a way where we can actually throw off massive amounts of junk in a relatively short period of time.  It is what modern psychotherapy has largely missed (with the exception of a few notable examples).   By doing this we can each reach this seemingly elusive “zero” point that so many seek, including me.

This is not about being cool and hip, doing yoga and all the newest methods.  It isn’t even about having a fit body or a nice house or anything else.  You can build your life with all of these things around you, but until you fix what is at the core of you that is off, the rest will always be problematic in one way or another.  The great job will bring you angst….the fancy car will be in the shop more often than it needs to be.  Something you thought was awesome winds up being riddled with problems.   That lovely house wont make you happy because you are not happy.  In seeking happiness in things, we each have forgotten the core of what happiness is about. It is not in another person, or in a different life.  It exists right here with you and it is waiting for you to LIVE it.  Like me, it is waiting for me.  I am seeking to grab hold of it as I can, as I can manifest it.  This is the love that waits for you, me, and everyone else.  It is waiting for each of us to learn of its existence.  Until we can feel this love in our own selves, we will each be a near-miss in our lives.  It is a self love that we allow ourselves.  When we ALLOW it for ourselves, we can allow it IN our lives with others.  Its really pretty cool and awesome.  So let’s get to it, shall we?

What is waiting for you?  Here’s hoping that you find your bliss and the greatest love there is!

Kundalini & Adrenaline

It was one of the hardest parts of my awakening experience.  All of a sudden, awakening turned a corner and went into high gear.  As if it wasn’t high enough!  With it came a sudden influx of….adrenaline.  But this was no ordinary adrenaline rush.  Oh no.  This was a constant flow of adrenaline as if some unknown button had gotten stuck in the on position.  To say it was excruciating was a mild way to put it.  I had days where I could not escape the rush that went on for days, weeks, months.  It was awful, and I was very worried that if I didn’t do something about it, it could do some permanent damage.  I would sit in the most comfortable chair I had where I could relax the most without falling asleep and try to get control over this crazy thing that was happening inside of me.  Tears streamed down my face.  I wanted to leave, exit, be done.  It was no fun.  I felt driven by this constant drumming of this chemical soup in my body.  I wanted to leap out of my skin.  Please let it be over, I thought.

I did a lot of physical exercise which did help some.  This, though, was only temporary.  As soon as I got off my bicycle or stopped my vigorous walk/run, it would all be back, pounding out its painful rhythm again.  You see, it is entirely possible to wind up in a state of adrenal failure some call adrenal burn-out.  A family friend who went through kundalini a few years ago described her harrowing experience with it and how she was able to break the spiral down into who knows what.  For her, she simply surrendered.  In the middle of the night, unable to take it anymore, she just asked the universe what it was she needed to do.  And then it came….a deep sense of release and calm began to settle all around her.  She had gotten out of the briar patch.  She also had adrenal collapse or burn-out and had to take adrenal gland treatments to get it functioning properly again.  Word to the wise.  Don’t let this go on for too long.  And if it does, be ready to talk to a doctor or other practicioner like a naturpath.

For me, I wish it had been so simple.  However, my experience showed me how to balance on a very specific wave of awareness that involved tuning my body chemistry in just the right way.  I don’t know if anyone going through this will relate, I can only say what it was I observed, which was that I was hyper aware of every little thing going on inside of me.  I could feel each drop of adrenaline being released.  I mean, I really mean, I could feel it.  It was located near my kidneys.  At first, I didn’t know what it was, but with a quick anatomy lesson, located the adrenals right over top the kidneys.  I could then feel the drops of adrenaline, for they were now like drops instead of the steady flow they were in the months past, and could trace each one upward as it moved into my heart muscle and affected it.  I could FEEL this.  It was not imaginary.  I learned, over hours and days and weeks, how to identify it because it was so persistent and strong.  When you see enough of something like this, you learn a lot about it.  So I tuned in, and I found that over time, the bliss response is actually a complex cocktail of different body chemicals.

I first identified something that served to bond me to things and people.  I didn’t know what it was, but it was real.  This chemical was stronger than many others.  This was what I call the first step into bliss.  This can also be accompanied by sexual feelings, or a leaning into bliss.  But I was not fully there.  As I slowly learned, there were other feelings that were matched in physiology, and there were two that were obvious to me.  Once all of these different compounds were surrogate through my feelings, they were matched in my body through its chemistry.  See?  Feeling does it.  But you have to WANT it so bad, you will do anything for it….and this is strong enough to counter what adrenaline is doing in your body.  Again, this was what I did.  Later, I did some research to see if there was anything out there to match what it was I was feeling with the first compound.  I found the compound; oxytocin.  This is the bonding hormone.  It goes up when women are pregnant, specifically their last trimester and continues through until after the birth.  It is present in both men and women and it is what makes us feel the rush of being head over heels in love with someone.  Oxytocin is interesting because it is also a neurotransmitter!  Wowza, huh?  Yes, so it is not just important to how we feel, it is involved in transmitting important signals in the brain.  Love signals perchance?  I think it is most certainly likely.  Then along cam what I suspect was either dopamine or endorphins.  I am less sure about these, but I know they were involved.  I learned this balance by hook and crook over a period of some months.  Once I got the first step, the other steps became much more rapid and the process began to fall together much easier with each step taken.

It was like listening to a chorus in my body.  I would FEEL the bonding hormone.  Just FEEL it.  Then something else was needed to balance that and broaden it, too.  THAT would then be felt.  Another voice was joined and suddenly I would find I was atop this wave.  I felt BETTER!  And I will tell you, it was not easy STAYING on that wave.  I fell off LOTS>  But I would get back up and get back on and each time, I got better at it.  this simply goes on and on until I can return to it with less and less effort.  The truth I will tell you, in MY experience, was that none of this actually countered adrenaline.  Nope!  This is what is so amazing to me.  Adrenaline was like….my enemy for a while.  this giant gorilla of a thing ready to clobber me….and did.  Many times!  I have the bruises and a couple of T-shirts.  I am happy to give you one of them if you want.  I joke, but what is no joke is that once all of the compounds were balanced, adrenaline was an important part of the overall chemical chorus in my body.  Yep!  adrenaline was STILL there, but it was now no longer the ONLY juice running my body!  Now, all of the chemistry was tuned to this new condition I found myself. Pretty wild.  Adrenaline helps to create bliss…..but it has to be in the right proportion.

We associate adrenaline with fear.  We can, however begin to associate very different things with it if we just let ourselves.  For me, adrenaline now has a different role to play.  This is alchemy, my friends, pure and simple.  What once was horrible, turned golden.  Kundalini makes it so that you can see all of this under a microscope.  So use that microscope to your own best advantage!  Let what might have blown everything out of proportion be the force that now gives you an up-close view of your physiology!  Brilliant!

Just settle in and relax as best as you can and then think of something that would make you feel really good.  In fact, I often found I didn’t have to think of anything from memory, I just KNEW how to feel different.  But why hadn’t I felt different before?  My sense is that we have latent fear in us that is being swirled around, is getting ready to flee our bodies, but before it does so, it gets mixed up, kind of like silt in a river clouds the river for a while.  the body is simply responding to a somewhat over-blown effect that is now working overtime.  the other side to all of this is adrenaline kind of forces you to learn how to be…..different.  Can you do it by just surrendering?  I suspect you can.  Maybe that way is the simplest and best.  For me, I am curious about how everything works.  I am the kid who took things apart.  That is how I am .  Curious.  For you, who knows?  But the bottom line is to go with what you feel is right.  And who knows, you might find that you do something completely different.  You know, if you ask, it will come to you.  In one way or another, through dream, direct cognition, a voice in your head or heart, or someone dropping off an article without ever knowing what you are going through, it will come.

Okay, just felt the need to put this all down for the just in case column.  I hope it helps someone out there!

 

 

UPDATE 3/17/2014:  I was watching a presentation being made by a man who has done research into brain function and he explains something that I have experienced quite clearly and offer it here for your consideration as it relates to getting a grip on your body/mind and brain connection.  He explains that there are substances called neuro-peptides that are compounds that turn thought/feeling into a physical representation of that energetic quotient in consciousness into a very real physical response in the brain/body.  For every thought you have, there is a specific orchestration and tuning of neuro-peptides in the brain in order to create a unique and very specific representation of that feeling (which I am assuming is consciousness/energy and thus not entirely physical in the way we normally think of it…although it iS energy) in the body.  This then gives each feeling, thought, and emotion, its own fingerprint. Imagine the body taking what it is your consciousness decides to feel and making a chemical representation of that feeling in the body.  Imagine the brain as like a kitchen and it is getting signals on the nanosecond-scale….trillions of these signals from all parts of you, including your own consciousness (not merely feeling physical sensation only through the nerve endings), and in this kitchen, the brain is putting together unique recipes, like a short order cook, but each order that comes in is itself highly unique, custom-made even.  One recipe asks for no salt, but extra mayo, or some barley, and in another the veggies should be steamed, not stir-fried. There is an amazing level of detail involved in all of this and the brain is engaged in helping to create a physical representation of what it is you are feeling.  One the one side, the brain does take in sensations from the gross body, but there is another level where the feeling parts of the self feed into all of this also.  Its amazing, but it also points to how you yourself can choose, were you to want to, to shift and change the character of your feelings so that your body will output a different result, a different message.  I experienced this deep and detailed level of signal processing in awakening and I know that if I can become aware of it, it is in all of us to be do.  What I experienced was merely a larger flow of conscious energy in my awareness, which I think aided in being able to detect these seemingly miniscule changes taking place in my mind/brain/body/consciousness. In the case of adrenaline, something was happening to keep adrenaline pouring in as if I had no control. This was itself the result of kundalini serving to highlight ever little thing happening in my body, a good thing on one side, but a bad thing when I still had latent fear/trauma in my conscious energy field.  The body was merely doing what it had always done, which was to generate the signals to release the chemistry that my consciousness was sending to it.  When I learned how to feel different, my body began, immediately, to respond to those new signals, those new feelings.

 

At a site managed by the National Institute of Health it described neuropeptides this way:

“The discovery of neuropeptides is founded on groundbreaking research in physiology, endocrinology, and biochemistry during the last century and has been built on three seminal notions: (1) peptide hormones are chemical signals in the endocrine system; (2) neurosecretion of peptides is a general principle in the nervous system; and (3) the nervous system is responsive to peptide signals. These historical lines have contributed to how neuropeptides can be defined today: “Neuropeptides are small proteinaceous substances produced and released by neurons through the regulated secretory route and acting on neural substrates.” Thus, neuropeptides are the most diverse class of signaling molecules in the brain engaged in many physiological functions.”

Source:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21922398

Now that is a more generic description, but since neuropeptides have only recently been discovered (last 40 years) what is the more current understanding of these compounds in the body?

Larry Young, in his video on neuropeptides explains:

“So the brain has multiple different kinds of chemical communicators or transmitters; one of those is neuropeptides. A neuropeptides is a chain of amino acids that is released either into the blood where it activates receptors in our body, or directly into the brain where it can activate receptors in our brain. When a neuropeptide is released it binds to the receptor and that activates a series of events inside the cell, inside the neuron, and then that causes that neuron to become active. If that neuron is placed within a particular circuit, it can activate that circuit. So now you can begin to see how you can have a single molecule released from one neuron activating another neuron, and then activating a circuit and then a circuit can change an emotion and a behavior.”

Source:  http://www.dnalc.org/view/2388-Neuropeptides-can-Change-Emotions-.html

Based on how Young is describing it, you can begin to see how if a neuron is itself activating a circuit in the electrical/neurological system connected to the brain, this is essentially also what the energy of consciousness is doing.  This is what I have observed.  I am not a researcher, and do not wish to be, I am offering you my insight and you can take it or leave it.  But I do and have experienced energy as made up of a series of switches, which are actually activated by feeling that will themselves serve to allow the flow of universal energy into consciousness.  the body, in this description is doing the same thing.  This description is one I made as a result of my own experience in earlier blog entries.  We tend to think of energy as nonphysical, but I experience it as another state of matter, which of course it is.  As we know in physics, all matter is composed of energy!  Within our own consciousness lies a switching mechanism that is actually composed of our own thoughts.  We let in certain things and exclude others.  We do this selectively and based on what we believe is important.  We do this in regards to day to day experience and we also do it down to the micro-level, and the body responds perfectly by putting out the chemistry that those feelings and thoughts represent. Getting a grip on what is within you, your beliefs and biases, etc., is THE way to shift your body and brain chemistry for the better.  This is itself a form of freedom.  And really, the great things is the body is this amazing tool, and like a computer, we  do not have to get down into the source code, down to the actual calculations being made each fraction of a second in order to appreciate and experience the changes as they happen.  But it may be that if you understand that this is not something that you are a slave to, but CAN change, then knowing how your choice to feel differently can actually begin to dismantling an older means of being and feeling that did not serve you as well as a less cluttered and more direct way of feeling and knowing.   ~P.

Getting Caught Up In Others’ Energy When Kundalini Awakens

 

Someone recently wrote to me and described a harrowing process he is going through in awakening.  No doubt, he is caught in this tight vice of an experience and is having trouble getting to the other side of it.  And yet, the process he is locked in is what kundalini does to us.  It rewires us, remakes us. It really does. Its easy for me to forget what it was like before awakening. Its getting easy now for me to forget what it was like that first year when I felt awakening stirring in me. It was so obvious how I had changed.  I write in my book, which is based on many journal entries during the awakening that it was as though I woke up one day speaking a different language.  From another planet. Just like that.  Boom.  Transformation underway.  Bye-bye Kansas!  But what my friend helped to remind me about is how we can get caught up in others’ feelings without realizing its them that we are feeling.

There is a curious capacity we develop when we awaken which is the ability to feel a person’s emotions and feelings so strongly that they feel like they are our own.  It is disorienting sometimes to have this happen, but the key to coping with this part of the experience is with awareness. Having the ability to stop and ask yourself a few simple questions is all that you will need to begin to discern between what is truly yours and what is someone else’s. Or perhaps, your engagement with another’s energy whether conscious or not….

People whom I know who have had this happen to them, most often speak of it as though it is now what they must do, that they are now suddenly more empathic.  But this is not correct.  It isn’t. If you are feeling others’ feelings around you, I want you to try an experiment in awareness and next time it happens, I want you to stop for a moment and ask yourself if you are feeling EVERYONE’S energy in that moment or if it is just one or two people in the room or the place where this is happening.  I have spoken with people who have observed decades worth of experience who have had the ability to really question as well as observe what has been happening to them and what I have found is that we attract what we are at the time.  For example, I know a therapist who has noticed that the issues she has in regards to ghosts, she will have clients coming to her in large numbers who will have similar issues.  Another person who has a major glitch from his past finds that he keeps attracting people in his work that has the exact same issue that he is still dealing with in his life from childhood.  I do the same thing and have attracted people into my life who have similar traits to people I have never gotten over.  What is interesting is when you clear the issues, and I mean really clear them, the ties can release from these people.  It is also possible that you both reach a place of healing and begin a new chapter in each of your lives (in the case of close connections in personal and intimate relationships).

You see, the experience of feeling this is so powerful and often overwhelming that it distracts us from what is actually happening, which is that we aren’t feeling EVERYONE, we are just feeling certain people.  And there is a reason for this, and it goes straight to the work that kundalini does in us, that is, if you are ready for this level of awareness to come into your experience.  What I am talking about is that in every case, we feel another early on in the kundalini process because we share something in common with them.  We are harmonized along a specific range of experience or karma.  Our energy is the same, but most often, it is about the things that remain in us that (we hope) kundalini will help to purify or release in us.  I actually had a family friend react incredibly harshly to my suggestion that she wasn’t just channeling everyone she was around as she thought she was, but that she was in fact, in each moment, channeling those people’s energy who shared something in common with her on an energy and karmic level.  When I felt her begin to pull on me energetically and I remained unmoved, she quickly got angry and shut me out in a pretty stark and hard manner.

I discuss this here because I went through the exact same thing and I now know, I was not channeling everyone in the room.  I was channeling one person only.  It was when I identified this fact that I was able to take this experience from being one where I had no control to one where I did have control or a choice.  Not only that, but after my decisive experience with examining what was at work and being honest with myself, I not longer was “captured’ by the experience like this again.  This was an experience that was different from that of the karmically joined “twin” experience, whatever you choose to call it (twin flame, twin soul, etc.) which can have a more enduring aspect and appears to also be karmic but with a sense of mission and self-work involved where feeling others randomly in public can be just…weird or off-putting.

In awakening you go through a whole range of new sensory experiences.  If you think that it’s all in your head, you will need to realize that this is simply not so.  It IS in your head, but it’s also in all things.  And the power that is now alive in your head now has the capacity to move the power latent in all things….which is to say that by connecting into the energy in all things you can more effectively get things done that need doing. this is a radically different approach to anything most people know about.  It touches on the idea of manifesting but it’s also different in how immediate and strong that it is.

Jesus, the so-called Gnostic Jesus, described this phenomenon.  He said that “once you are destroyed [ego death], when you say mountain move, it will move.” [Gospel of Phillip]  These are the siddhis or abilities/powers written about in the old Vedic texts that come about as a result of spiritual development or awakening (siddhis are one symptom of awakening).  It is also what many say should be ignored, lest they seduce you.  Well, yes, you do need to be careful with this stuff, but if you can approach it all with the innocence of a child, you can direct this power in the same way you direct an arm or your voice in order to get what you want or need.  I suppose that some feel its wrong or bad because it is an unfair advantage, but really all it is, is what you gain when you finally grow up, go through this spiritual puberty we call awakening.  Thus, everyone can inherit it. It is an ability that is of a higher order, and so with this power comes great responsibility, most certainly.  I have always asked for what I needed the most and most often in the eleventh hour.

One of the experiences is how you can feel others around you, near you emotionally, or who are connected to you spiritually, or people who are complete strangers who happen to mirror something in you.  Some of these senses are so strong that the experience is that you are yourself experiencing something as though it was your own when in fact it is from someone else.  Let me explain that for a time I would pass people on the street and I would feel their buried sense of sadness, broken-hearted feeling, their depression, their sorrow, their anxiety.  I would walk by someone on the street and I would double over from the heart pain.  Why?  Because I was more sensitive.  I was a vibrating tuning fork.  There was also another reason why I was feeling some things over others; I was not yet finished with something that was present also in these people. So for example, a man who had been injured by his spouse in his heart I would feel because he and I had the same pain in us.  I didn’t JUST feel EVERYONE.  I felt certain people. There was a rhyme and reason.  It was about mirroring. Why hadn’t I felt the lady who was walking down the street with her kids, why hadn’t I felt the old man who was walking with his wife?  Why hadn’t I felt the college student’s energy?  I had to realize I was not feeling EVERYONE.  Just certain people.  Sure, I may have had the potential to feel or read everyone the same way I read auras, but I would not ever read or feel them as deeply or as closely as what this kundalini conferred.  The events in our lives are no accidents. They follow an inner directive from us.  And if that seems impossible to you, consider that I have watched and observed this and have seen so many correlations with this that I can no longer dismiss it.  This is not a need for me to dwell in magical thinking.  It is a realization that either the world is chaos rendered into order by way of natural forces and its all just chemistry and nothing else, or everything is here because of consciousness and that everything IS consciousness.  This would be on par with what some have called this world; A Dream. It also suggests that consciousness is engaged in our physics and our world in helping to bring about certain events in our lives.  Accidental or miracle?

So it came to pass that I was at a dinner party. As I was talking with some new people I had met I began to be seized by a feeling of desperate anxiety.  I have been anxious before like this in the past.  I knew what that felt like.  It felt entirely as though it were my own.  I was feeling an energy within my own cocoon of awareness, within my own etheric sheath or auric field. It was mine, no?  Something in me said that maybe this wasn’t mine.  I thought about it.  It made no sense that it would be mine.  For one, there was no reason why I should be feeling so incredibly anxious. None. So I let my reasoning mind take some rope and try to lasso this thing some.  This is one instance where the rational does well!  So  I sat there and took stock of myself. Instead of JUST reacting.   If this wasn’t mine, then whose was it?  I asked the energy in me to show me the way.  And by golly, it did.  In a room with about seven people, the energy in me pointed me toward a man who was sitting in a chair off to the side.  He had been talking to my mother and he wasn’t someone I knew.  I decided to just be bold and speak to the man about this.

“Excuse me, but do you have a problem with feeling anxiety?”  The man pulled back in his chair, like a turtle pulling in its head. He was entirely taken off guard by my very forward question.  He had stiffened.  But as I looked at him, it was clear that I did not mean it in a hard or mean way.  I was more like a kid.  His face softened and he replied, “Well, yes, I have had some issues with anxiety.”  We both paused for a moment and he looked at me, something clearly on his mind.  He added, “In fact, I have had so much of a problem with anxiety that I have gone to therapy for it and have taken medication.”  He stopped for a third time and did the same thing; he looked at me like he was pondering something else and he said the magic words: “In fact, I was feeling very anxious the moment that you asked me about it!”  I smiled and thanked him.  I explained that I seemed to be picking up on stuff like this for some reason.  This interaction was the first case where I began the process of discerning between what was mine and what was others’ feelings.

After that incidence, the tendency to feel people like this waned somewhat. Part of it was that I tended to limit my focus more.  For some reason I had to be as open as a parking lot I think in order to begin a process of clearing, which began in earnest around that time.  As I Have cleared these old blocks, the things that I have mirrored or attracted have also changed substantially.  I once had students that were of a certain character and they have, largely, changed.  My behavior has also changed.  This results in a different kind of day and life for me. It’s an incremental process, this, but worth it because what it does is it gives me an energetic vehicle that I am in command of instead of being in command of a mass of karmic blocks and knots in my energy field….serving to distort the energy coming into me and also distorting the events that get manifested because of all those competing knots that send out bits of competing code signals to the universe.  They are me, but they are parts of me I wish I was not….but that I have not fully released.

When people say things like “She is haunted by her demons” you can know now that they are old blocks that are doing it.  These blocks act like subroutines in your psyche causing you to behave in ways you really wish you hadn’t.  Some people are entirely governed by these things. In the Gospel of Philip in the Nag Hammadi, this is what Philip describes as being the evil that must be pulled out entirely by the roots if it is to be freed from our being. It is also said in the same gospel that It is [the evil] that keeps us from doing what we want to do and it makes us do what we do not want to do. Substitute “evil” for karma, and I think you can begin to understand not just the root of evil, but also how to remove it. which requires going deep down into the very source of it.  “You say I have to go deep within myself to root this all out, but how do I do this?”  Everyone wants a method, right?  Everyone wants a way to just do it, maybe an incantation or something.  In everything I say here on this blog, it is the same; learn to feel deeply within yourself.  When you can feel deeply, you have actually begun to activate your inner sensory awareness.  Got that?  You need this awareness and you will find that the deeper you go inside of yourself, the more this sensory awareness will open up.  It is in truth, the axiom that the Greeks used to say in the temples: “Know thyself.”

You may not believe it, but once you learn how to look beyond the curtain of your own denied emotion, you will be given power over all your demons (or you will gain this to the degree that you are able to face which means that once the door is open, it is open and you don’t go back where you came from but you may only have incremental releases until it completes itself…it being a matter of time but the point being that it does not happen all at once, it can also happen incrementally).  Until you are able to adopt this childlike sense, you will be tempted by them.  Until you are the master and no longer the slave.   If you want to know about releasing blocks from your own field, I suggest you search this blog using those terms.  A lot has been written about it here. It is, in every case, based in learning how to feel deeply.  The reason why this is so important is because the deeper you can feel, the more aware you are of the occulted or hidden emotion that has been shoved down.  It is this emotion that forms the basis of so much of our karma, our difficulty in relationships, as well as our reactions an even our personal (non-religious) belief systems. With something that has such widespread influence over you, you would think that people would want to get a better handle on it, right?  One of the hardest things that we as humans do, is to be honest about those things that we have shoved down and do not want to face.  Carl Jung once famously said in effect that the self will run from facing the source of its own pain and resist changing it at the same time.  In this way, so many people become like graveyards for their cast-offs.  Search this blog using “healing blocks” and you will get many posts on this topic, from exercises that can help release stored material (like TRE for example) to ways to meditate using breathwork as the entry into the field.