What Men Need Now

Lao Tzu once said that men, in order to know the Tao, needed to cultivate a receptive feminine quality in their minds, in their consciousness. It was this quality that open men up and allows them to relate better to the feminine principle so that they might better understand and appreciate the power that exists in yielding and receiving. It is all too easy for men to exaggerate or emphasize their masculine traits as a kind of emotional armor against which they protect themselves from what the world might seem to throw at them. Really all this ever has done is to insulate men even further from their natural selves. While seeming to protect them from the world what men might fear, what is really at work is how men have chosen to feel about the world and how that world might be at odds with their truer nature. So then the armoring really only serves to shield you against yourself, or your truer nature. A lot of this is learned behavior, so it follows that it can be unlearned as well.

A lot is thrust upon us here on earth, man and woman alike. We are taught from early ages how to be, what to like, and what we ought to believe. All of this is the product of culture, and culture is not the self, but a kind of collection of many selves that have gone before us that chose or valued things they thought were important. That is all. As a result, we take what others have fashioned and we try to make it into ourselves. The result is that some things work, and others do not. One thing that is becoming clear is that a lot of these cultural beliefs don’t suit us, not always.

I will point out that these learned behaviors are being instilled in us, supported, by men and women alike. I was once in a marriage where my wife, when hearing me express myself emotionally, would chide me saying, “This isn’t about you…” It was a quick way to express her discomfort at a quality that she believed was not a masculine trait. It is interesting because it was always okay for her to express how she felt without any pressure from me to do otherwise. But more importantly was how my son was raised up. She called him her “protector.” This is similar to calling a small boy a “little man.” We say these things often with swelling pride because we value certain qualities and want our children to take those on. We don’t understand sometimes how destructive these expectations are to children. A child does not know how to be a man, he is only three or four years of age and does not have the emotional means to handle what an adult does, nor should he. In the case of my son, when he was drafted into his protector status, when all you have everything is a nail. It turned out to be a quality that served to blind him in his life about the true nature of the relationships around him and how his Mother would later abuse his trust in her for less than noble reasons. The relationship fell apart with my then-wife when I stopped behaving in the old ways and simply was myself. Yes, it was a loss at the time, but it also meant that I gained my soul. I can’t tell you how difficult it is to pretend to be something that you aren’t. A large part of this had to do with a fundamental shift that was happening where I began to see the value in this receptive quality within myself. Not everyone is going to value it, and if they do not, they might just be the wrong kind of people to surround yourself with. It’s a hard lesson sometimes, but once learned you can do better and be with the kind of people who do value what you value as well. In fact the Law of Attraction will see to it that this happens, but only after you have changed your beliefs surrounding these programmed behaviors. You have to be aware of what is driving you if you are ever going to attract something different. We are all involved in our culture so by being aware of what we are doing to instill what anthropologists call “cultural knowledge” (or values) we can choose to do better in our raising of children (and ourselves).

For men, there is this particular idea that they have to be strong, and that means denying certain emotions or feelings. If you don’t believe this, just notice how often you ever see a man weeping over the sight of a puppy or a baby. There isn’t a lot of that kind of thing going on. You see, we have been taught as men that this is a sign of weakness. In fact, we have been taught that whatever a woman might experience or express is what a man ought never to engage in lest we become weak like women are weak. That of course is an assumption, a bias, a belief, that women are somehow weak. The problem with this way of thinking is that we know that women aren’t weak at all. The story is much bigger than that. Emotionally, women are much healthier in many ways than men are because they have permission to express and emote. Men do not, except for those emotions that are considered to be more masculine (aggressive ones usually). Now of course I am making a generalization, because not all men are like that, and the tide is indeed changing in a favorable direction currently, but there is more work to be done, and more to be aware of. I can explain this by asking the simple question: how many women in the last ten years have been involved in mass shootings? What do you think is at the root of the fact that men take guns and go out and shoot as many people as they can? Of course it is wrong to go out and kill people, it is a terrible thing to do to another human being. What I suspect is at the core of this kind of behavior is an inner rage, an inability to be seen or heard or to emote while at the same time the belief that the only way a real man can express himself is through aggressive behavior. These shootings are a manifestation of the most exaggerated qualities in male nature, but they do help to prove a point. Instead, expression is limited to violence because being tough is the only thing left for men. It doesn’t need to be this way.

Cultivating an ability to receive, to have a certain feminine quality in your awareness does not make you less of a man, it makes you more of a man. It allows you to relate to women better and it also allows you to feel your emotions instead of denying them. It is unnatural for men to deny their feelings. It is as unnatural for a man to deny his feelings as it is for a parent to call their two year old boy child their “little man” which is, of course, how these values are passed down to male boys who then grow up thinking that they have to be like men. The problem is that boy doesn’t really know how to be a man. It is unnatural. And yet, each year, there are parents all around the world who are calling their boys their “little men” and they do so with swelling pride because we have been taught, programmed, to value these qualities. So what the culture does not provide for you, you must learn to provide for yourself.

In all change, there is always the “threat” of not being accepted. We are all so programmed to value and to be triggered by certain behaviors that we see. Our bodies will respond to our inner beliefs about what manhood is when we see the programmed behaviors in others and ourselves running on automatic. We all have this programming, what it is the culture has told us masculinity and femininity is, and it all works automatically. You can change all of that, of course. You start by changing it in yourself. If you are a man, you begin by being courageous and cultivate this inner sensitivity. You learn to become a channel in your thinking. To know the greater mysteries of the universe you must receive. If you do receive, you can learn a lot and you can also appreciate the tenderness of women, the thoughtfulness of women, and the vulnerability that women can feel. Woman may be weaker than men, but it is not emotionally, but only outwardly. Weakness in this way is not a fault, not an article of shame, it is just how we are made and how we are made has a great purpose in a life so it should be respected, revered, even.

One thing that all of this does is it begins to erase in a man fears of incipient homosexuality. When this evaporates, the self is more open to acknowledge the larger truth of the self. This in turn can open you up to a still larger truth about all humans on the earth who are coming and going in this grand experiment in learning and growing here on earth. It can lead to a respect for all people and it begins to erase the divisions many people create that separate human from human.

It isn’t that masculinity is to be distrusted or torn down, but that in our past certain qualities have been exaggerated. You don’t need to exaggerate, you need only to explore and feel as fully as you can and allow yourself to go in feeling in places where perhaps you felt you weren’t allowed. You can begin this on your own as a kind of experiment. Consider that feeling is itself not weakness, and when you do that, you might actually see how you begin to dismantle a belief that might be within you without your having realized it. What I found when I did this was that there was this truly amazing amount of energy in consciousness that was now available to me that had not been available before. It was so good that I just never went back. I told myself that if someone tried to pull the old cultural strings on me, I just would not respond, I would resist being activated by that kind of cultural value which was outmoded and which tries to keep men in the old mode. The only way they have you is if you let them shame you or trigger you. The trigger only ever has power if you give it value. Leave it alone, let it be, let it fall away as you experiment with feeling and receiving. I can tell you that it will help you in meditative work and it will help in your life in surprising ways. There is nothing to be lost in doing this kind of thing inwardly.

When we are young we are soft and supple and as we age we often grow hard and stiffened. We aren’t made to be that way, and often beliefs about ourselves will stiffen us into unnatural postures and ways of feeling. Take what Lao Tzu said to heart. In Eastern practice the power in their martial arts is the degree to which they use feminine-like principles to overcome an opponent. You literally can use the force of another against him (or her) so that their force works against them. If you know the power in such things, you can begin to learn to cultivate an appreciation for the “other” which is also who you are because we are all just one family here when you get right down to it. There is nothing to oppose, and everything to nurture and build up. Men would do well to do more of that in themselves than the other things which have kept us locked in personal and mass conflict. There is no power in control, only brutality. There is no strength in war, only destruction and theft. These are not noble qualities, they are those of lower life. The masculine can be tempered with understanding and I suspect that this is what the world needs right now. And if a woman rejects you for being sensitive, take that as a sign that she herself has been programmed into a belief system that wont serve you. Just walk away. Do you really need someone to approve of you? Do you need love so bad that you will become someone else’s puppet on a string just so you will get showered with love? What kind of love does such a thing? It is surely a very pinched and distorted form of love.

When you cultivate this inner receptivity you can begin to see just how little as a man, as a person, that you really know. It makes a person humble in such a place as this. Don’t worry about others, just tend to yourself. You aren’t here to make the world into your image, you can just let the world do what it is doing. Live by example. If more people did this, the world would change in the right way, without coercion, without force, using only inspiration as the way that change takes place. This is the softer hand at work and it gives freewill its proper voice in the world. If something is worth doing then it will become apparent, you don’t have to force it. You inspire the change, and not everyone will be so inspired by you. This is natural. If your ego needs validation so badly that you must force your ideas on another, it might be that those ideas aren’t worth adopting if they must be adopted by force.

There is no loss in masculinity in doing this kind of work, nothing at all. What we might lose is the bias that exists against others different from us. It could soften chauvinism, and a sexist outlook. This alone would make the world, at least your corner of it, a better place. It might even make you into a better version of yourself, someone the world might just be in need of.

Advertisement

Awakening The Divine Within

We are taught to look heavenward for the best in us but I have always found that the best in us resides with us here and now. Our divine nature, the source of all our seeking lies nestled within us waiting for the moment when we are ready to see it. Our limited humanness, that often reviled part in us that we have collectively felt was what we had to transcend, holds the infinite in its deep and often unknowing embrace. By awakening, the vessel yearns to know what is filling it. Rather than looking to the heavens, look to your humanity because the answers all lie in wait in all of your impulses, no matter how dysfunctional you may think they have become. You might see as I have seen that instead of our being the result of a “demiurge” or a “fall” from grace, we are in truth expertly made and have everything we need to realize the divine within us….but we have tended in the past to have loused it up a bit, and this has led to notions of our being fundamentally flawed. So I’m going to talk a little about a dynamic that has been a part of our past that we can each heal in order to turn all of this around. Thankfully, it’s already happening for many people!

This is the challenging part for so many, which is trusting that our desire is designed to bring us closer to the divine. Or that our impulses, which we have used to wreck our lives in the past,  can be used to actually save us. It means being brave and diving right into what the forbidden and the taboo is in order to liberate and heal those feelings and beliefs so that love can flow unhindered. This is what all taboos do to us when they serve to limit us. This also happens to be central to Tantra in its purest form. Before you think I am referring to s-e-x, please know that a central tenet of Tantra is how a direct realization of our true nature brings bliss and bliss heals the self of a world of shame by unhitching us from our shame and guilt, in large part because the bliss is stronger than the pain encountered in our shame. This is an experience not unlike diving straight into the briar patch of our spiritual mess or tangle. Unfortunately Tantra in the West has become synonymous with sex which is putting the cart before the horse. When we accept taboo’s without thoroughly understanding their purpose, we can become bound by a convention of behavior that distorts our authentic nature. So often a taboo does more harm than good. “Oh really?!” you might be thinking. I’m going to give you a few examples and see if you don’t see how these things twist us around. The central stumbling block of taboo is that it serves to direct behavior in an uncritical way while making it so you may not be listening to your own inner compass. It is this compass that everyone has and is in truth your very own seed or connection to the divine. When you follow a rule without fully grasping why the rule is there to begin with, you aren’t following your inner compass, you are simply taking the lazy way to being, which is a life that doesn’t understand authentically. Life becomes a shadow of what it was because your deeper connection to your inner divinity is lost, or buried. But a life that reflects vividly on this inner compass is one where one knows and acts in accord with the one true stream of guidance which is itself a river of life full of realization and boundless wonder.

There are so many of these taboos and they are almost always made as a result of fear and often out of ignorance. It was in many cultures, at various times in our history, taboo for a woman to show her body. Some cultures still hold to this way of being that involves covering the entire body of a woman. Have you asked yourself why this is so? Or maybe how it was a taboo for a man to show his emotions beyond anger and aggression? When we created these restrictions we act surprised that men became physically aggressive instead of emotionally tender or sensitive? Women, on the other end of our dysfunctional past have given up their natural aggressive nature’s and have chosen a different route. Instead of brute force women learned how to manipulate their environment by way of subtler means: through emotion.  In Renaissance Europe, arguably a hotbed of liberal thinking, women were expected to go to church and to the market; it was unseemly to be seen hanging out with friends in the city square. As for middle eastern countries, it got much more repressive. If you think about it, human kind has been in this arrangement for a long time all because we have worshipped fear over freedom. Every one of us have been affected by this, and every one of us can choose to no longer be affected, too. Change is coming fast now and we have seen a lot of change over the last 100 years, but there is still more that we can do that favors listening to our inner compass instead of a rule that was created perhaps thousands of years in our past when our ancestors were at a very different place in their spiritual and cultural evolution.
The deeper truth about our divine nature is that we are not divided but contain within us aspects of both the feminine and masculine. We have each lived lives, whether we remember them or not, as women and men. Inwardly, we are composed of both and we carry a capacity of both. You can’t know your inner compass without first knowing this important truth. By reaching peace within on this one point, you can know a greater peace in your life because it grants you a more direct access to that golden compass where anything can be known.

The elephant in the room is how the masculine and feminine is in all of us. We have somehow forgotten this.  Our sexes even show how divided we appear to be. Our behavior belies a fear of being the “other.”
For women who have exaggerated beliefs about femininity and the taboos that have been in place surrounding how they feel they need to behave (often responded to as what society expects of them), one predictable outcome is that their natural traits of aggression have been conditioned out of them. More accurately, they are repressed. Women have for a long time feared using their innate masculine power for fear of reprisal and a concern that it would make them seem less feminine. In the past, great value was placed on being female and this resulted in exaggerated beliefs that then served to shape the body. Just look at how values have changed and you can see how doggedly we as a species have stuck to a narrative for all women.
In the Victorian era, women were their most fertile when they had some weight to them. In fact, skinny undernourished women skip periods, don’t conceive readily, and have trouble taking a baby to term. So naturally the “Rubenesque” woman was prized by all of human kind during a large swath of our history.  If you fast forward to the turn of the century, you see women active in fighting for, and obtaining rights like voting, as well as being able to free themselves from being baby making machines through the advent of birth control. This, and a growing awareness and desire for greater rights helped to bring a change that resulted in the evolution of the perception of the feminine form away from the voluptuous and chunky earth goddess to a thin and more svelte version of herself. I am not suggesting that all of this was good, just that this change came with a swing of the pendulum and that we are working through the value of it. The change of the idealized female form has in large part been driven by the fashion industry, but it takes a public to buy onto this look in order for it to take hold, and take hold it did. Whether thick or thin, the changing face of femininity is drawn along by our own changes brought about by each of us individually and en masse. In either case, the value placed on women being submissive and tender remained even as how the physical image began to change. The change that women fought for, which was for better equality was itself an expression of women’s more aggressive nature, and only came about because women were willing to tap this nature that was and is always within them. Women in this way began stepping out of the shadows.

The same is also true for men, of course, but in opposite fashion. Men remain hard and stoic because of conditioning and taboo’s about men showing emotion. What is true, at the core of all of this behavior, is that men suppress their feminine sides because they fear that when the feminine energy is joined consciously to their masculine that they will lose themselves, which of course is true.
Women were also doing exactly the same thing out of a fear that they too would appear less feminine. But it is only the fear of this unknown state that men once projected onto women and sought to control and limit them as has happened in our past. It’s more than just men fearing women’s power to nurture new life, it’s that men fundamentally were uneasy with what this kind of creativity involved on a spiritual or energetic level within themselves. This fear was then projected outward onto women. Any time anyone is unable to deal with an inner fault they project it onto another person. This tendency has been widely observed by psychologists such as Freud and Jung. In this  case, the fear that they could not face was projected onto women. The same is also true for women, and both sexes have done their part in keeping the sexes divided inwardly and outwardly. This type of division no longer serves us, and we are seeing a much greater flexibility in sexual roles and identity as a result. None of this has destroyed what it means to be male or female, it has enhanced it.
While you might wonder what I am getting at, I am not suggesting an end to male and female identity. I am suggesting that our roles don’t serve us as humans as they once did, which was a more limited perspective in our past. I am for the change that happens when the curtain is pulled back and we can be really honest about who we are deeper down. I am for being aware of our compass, which leads us to our divine nature here and now. This isn’t about wrecking the past and destroying our future, but getting honest about who we really are. When we do this, in the words of the ancients, we do not taste death but know life in abundance. We are, in truth, emancipated from our prisons of belief.

I’m about to take a leap, here, and I want you to bear with me…

 

The Role Of Bliss In Healing The Rift

We call orgasm “petite morte” because it involves a deep letting go of control of the self. This is what we do when we die, it is the same. Of course, we don’t really die, we merely shed the body.  It isn’t a conditional letting go, it is a deep release and a subsequent encounter with the larger self and all that it’s connected to (all that is). In Tantra, for example, work often leads to losing fear of death for the simple reason that one stares in the face of it so often when experiencing the bliss that can be found in such a deep state of letting go.  Many teachings discuss how those who are not ready to let go in this way suffer through death and often wind up as ghosts, stuck in an “in-between” realm for various reasons.  This bliss also just happens to be an energetic state that accompanies awakenings (once you can get the hang of it), and bliss is a powerful way of allowing our emotional armoring to fall away so that the inner self can shine forth. This is what is central to Tantra as a way to heal very quickly (if you are ready and honest in your approach). It is here that I give you The Man, whose channel to his own bliss has been so incredibly attenuated….
Men have learned to be controlled in order to survive. It may have served a purpose once in the past but it no longer serves us now. But this kind of death is what men are uneasy about. When men come close to women, they can behave badly for the very reason that they have become so estranged from that part within themselves that could give them, moment by moment, the same thing they feel when they behold or are near a woman: death. This death, for those who live in it is known as orgasmic bliss. In an awakened man, this bliss can be constant, but in everyman who is not awakened, it is experienced as a brief explosive event that he can only get with a woman, and it is much more physically encountered. In truth, he can and does get it alone (sometimes multiple times in a day in his younger years!). The desire for something when it’s forbidden only makes the desire riotously  powerful. Add to this a man so estranged from his feminine side that the only way to feel it is to be in the full embrace of a woman, and you can perhaps see just how all of this has conspired to create an unhealthy situation for all involved. Pile onto this the double standard of women needing to be chaste and virtuous and you can begin to see how hilariously messed up that we have all become! Men sow their wild oats and women are to be virtuous and chaste! Pray tell me; how is this supposed to work?
Once a man awakens, he gets the briefing from the energy which shows him that this energy has arisen in him because of the forces of opposites now merged. I’m joking here because there is no “brief” as such, just a self that comes to the truth of the matter, which is a significant event in a man’s life. Orgasmic bliss is now no longer limited to those fevered moments beneath the sheets, but now pours all through the body in a continuous stream as a direct result of the union of opposites which is the source of the power of kundalini or awakening. As long as we don’t try to fiddle with the cosmic switches inside, we will feel a continual flow of this energy.
Women will experience much the same, but from the opposite end of the social/sexual spectrum. To awaken is to join the masculine and feminine currents in consciousness together, which will bring bliss. This is nature’s way of rewarding you for taking one more step closer to being a full person, a more whole being!

In fact, all traditions that have awakening as an understood experience (nearly all), you will find a balancing effect as a result of of its activation.  In the Hindu tradition the awakened person is shown as equal parts Shakti and Shiva, merged right down the middle of the body.  The Taoists more obliquely refer to this in the Yin and Yang.  In the early Christian texts this is called a syzygy.  This is an equal part male and female person who has awakened the sleeping energy of transformation.  They were known as androgynous in a spiritual sense.  During awakening the lines between these two aspects blur and they merge more and more as the awakening unfolds.  This does not confuse sexuality, but rather informs it in a deep and substantive way if the person so affected allows for this to creep into their awareness.

This is a moment by moment experience of bliss pouring through all parts of the body, it is not a singular event like a physical orgasm. It is a “standing wave” that does not crash, does not subside. It endures. And the reason for this is because those who know this experience are in varying degrees learning to awaken and merge their twin energies of both their masculine and feminine in their bodies and in their consciousness. Men, though, have been fearful of even going there. Taboo. They had to be strong. They had to provide by using muscle to hunt and create from the land. They believed there was no way they could survive and let that feminine flow into them. Men who were seen as effeminate were picked on. Gay men were known to be lynched, tied to fences to die, or beaten up in alleys outside of gay bars. The fear and programming went hand in hand. Somehow, we each have persevered through all of this. And what men refused in themselves they refused in their world. The way they created themselves was how they created their world. The pressures placed on women were no less restrictive than their male counterparts. Both were taught to hide their opposites while expecting the house to stand. The way we have managed this traditionally has been for the man and the woman separately but together to hold each other up. While this has had asocial function it has extremely limited use spiritually and personally.

Our society in the last 15 years has been going through a sea change as it relates to greater and greater equality for people from all walks of life. Women have become more assertive and are beginning to see greater equity in the work place than a hundred years ago (we have more to go!) has I think been concurrent with men realizing they don’t need to be the sole breadwinners but can be a stay at home Dad. Men are learning that they can be more sensitive and nurturing while still retaining their masculinity. Gays are not beaten in the streets or killed, and we are experiencing an opening, a flowering which is in its early stages still, but will help to push society to a much more egalitarian place. What it will do is it will fuel more and more awakenings for the simple reason that we won’t fear touching the opposite in our nature’s. Men won’t lose their masculinity anymore than a woman will lose her femininity by embracing the opposites within themselves. They will open the channels so that bliss will pour through.
This is to my mind the briar patch we should dive into, not fearing it or what it will do to us. This will happen when we stop listening to what the collective has created on a mass scale and begin listening to our own inner compass. When you are a woman and feel attracted to a man, what man is moving in you? Is it the man in front of you, or is it the man within you? No man makes you feel, you alone must participate and become moved by your own innate understanding of what this glorious energy is about and be willing not to make the man in front of you into the man who is really the one you feel that is inside of you. If you do this, you risk projecting onto the man before you the image and presence that is not with him but that is with you. In the same way, men must be careful not to put onto the woman before him the woman who is inside him, lest the two  not fit well, or will be forced together in a hopeful effort made by both people with the likely result that no peace and union can hope to endure. A woman, just like a man, will feel innately the force of your expectation that they should be something that they are not. Why make chameleons of ourselves? Are we not perfect within? Are we really afraid of seeing our gloriously human and divine selves in their truest light?
This is precisely what is brought to bear in so-called “twin” unions. The energy is often so strong because of the subconscious (now more conscious) desire to merge with an inner unrecognized aspect of the self (our opposite) that is projected outward to another person. While these can work, they will always labor under whatever karma and inner issues that remain and they will be felt more keenly. This is good for people willing to engage in rapid healing, but such change can mean that each are left without a common point of reference once the karmic glitches are healed. The reality is that twins DO NOT heal in perfect synchronization.It isn’t that love goes away, it is more that the change when one heals a glitch can be so profound that the foundation for that love can change faster than what most people can keep up with. One twin can, and most often does, move more quickly than the other, resulting in one feeling left behind in one way or the other. In the myth, the two live happily ever after, but in the reality they are having to deal with every emotion highlighted and amplified. Every challenge can then be so much more of a challenge. In a world such as this, there is often a gulf between the real and infinite potential. We often mistake the potential as being what is real in our world, which isn’t. We must work to create in such a way that this potential manifests itself, and this can only happen through radical self honesty. In the end, the true twin resides within each of us as a misperceived other that we seek to project onto a loved one.
Perhaps, for now, the wise approach might be to honor and see ourselves as we are and see others as they are and begin to learn a new way which is to appreciate each other’s wholeness as precious and love based on that instead of our yearning to touch the opposite that resides within. Perhaps  we then merge our individual yearnings  together in what might be an utterly new arrangement with regard for our true selves instead of allowing societal rules and taboo’s to guide us in a unknowing and unnatural way. When we follow our compass fully, we become innocent and cease being contrived by our ideas about how we think the world wants us to be.

The Great Wheel Has Come Full Turn

When I was eighteen I had a spontaneous memory of a past life as a native american man who was sitting having a vision of the Thunder Beings in the grassy meadows atop a hill in western California at a time when some of the first encounters with White Europeans were taking place.  The experience was extreme for me in that it was as though I had been placed into a culture completely foreign to me in some ways.  I felt familiar, yes, but it was hard to understand what was happening.  I was being told about the future, about a life when I would be reborn as a new person.  The being in the storm explained that I would know when all of these things would come to pass because I would remember the vision in this future life.  That future life is this life, now.  The being spoke of earth changes, about a need for the earth to cleans herself.  I was shown a form of cleansing enacted by the Thunder Bird, something that involved its merging with me in my body so that I became one with this bird.  The heavens or sky was connected to the earth by way of a thunderbolt. This merging of heaven and earth changed the energy of the earth.  The earth lit up with a supernaturally bright light; the light of the lightening bolt.  The earth was then cleansed.  I was told that the Great Wheel would come full turn in this day.  I had absolutely no idea what that meant.  I spent years reading up on native culture and customs and belief.  I found that I only discovered the tribe when I gave up looking.  I also found that the vision was itself a story about how, in our age, in OUR day, we would witness a fundamental shift in our world energetically and that we would see a return of the feminine in each of our lives.  This is itself the balance that the Hopi speak about, a balance that has been lost in the Western world, that has been systematically destroyed in the aboriginal cultures.  It may have been nearly wiped away, but it is not gone.  This ancient knowing and reverence for the Two-As-One remains.  And I am here to tell you, remind you, how important it is.

Its really simple, and yet, it has been forgotten and shoved under the rug for so long.

It is the return of the divine feminine.

The return of the divine feminine is something that will be on offer to all of us.  Her presence in each life, not just a woman’s life, will be potentially life changing.  Men are softening.  Women are noticing this.  Women are reclaiming their power, discovering their deep current of feminine energy and presence.  As we all do this, as we all soften and are changed by the presence of Her on the planet, we will continue to learn and see more through those eyes than ever before.  Not to worry; her presence does not make a man any less of a man. In fact, it makes a man far more sensitive to what a woman needs and how she feels.  Its just that as a collective, we are now ready for her after centuries and centuries of not having her all that present.  IN the warming days that face us, she will offer up new discoveries about what we are and what we can become.  She will have a humanizing effect upon us.  She already has.  We have a long way to go, but I tell you that this movement of the wheel is so strong that while you can resist, the most natural current will be to follow it.  It will be like fighting an undeniable current.  And she will teach you how to flow.

The presence of the divine feminine will teach you how to surrender, to allow, to receive, and to let go. She will be a presence whereby she can take any spiritual poison into her and transmute it through the power of her womb, through her natural ability to receive and treat all things in her own uniquely alchemical fashion.  For ages woman has often been forces to take poison into her womb and her heart, but the tables will turn and she will discover what she can do when she is in full possession of her powers individually an en masse.

The one experience with the divine feminine that I had most recently was how she moved down all around me and then said “let go.  Let all of it flow into me; this is what I am—a great engine of transmutation….just let go…” and in that moment, tears streaming down my face, I felt Her all around me, like this giant presence, a womb of the world and instead of holding on to this ancient poison in my soul, I let it go.  It streamed out of me and rippled out all through her.  It was as though it was nothing for her; snake bit turned to gnat bite.  I felt nothing but love.  Within my own heart I feel the dual current of kundalini and She resides within one of them.  She exists as the divine template, literally the feminine guru within.  I don’t need a teacher to tell me how she needs most to be, she dwells in me.  Touching another with Her in my touch reminds them without words of what they have been missing, craving.

She has been away for a very long time. She is gonna come back with a vengeance (but without vengeance).  How will it play out? What will it look like world wide? This, I cannot say.  But what I know is that it will help soften us.  What we do with it will be up to us.  Perhaps this is the universe’s way of planting a seed for us, amongst us.  Or it is us, yearning so much for this worldwide that She is returning.  The Mother of the World.  Certainly the Father as God has been locked up in that cloudy heaven for far too long!  I mean, who wouldn’t be an angry father god in a place like that!  Mother and Father deserve to be next to each other (I think it would be a lot more peaceful, too!).  So let’s give them some space in our own lives.  You have nothing to lose!

The Power To Manifest

So this is a bit long, but it begins to lay out issues related to manifesting and the physiological and psychological basis for how this will work for you.  Understanding the root of it can help you in knowing how to resolve issues later on down the line by applying these basic principles. All of this has been the result of direct experience, not from other sources.

Sometimes the idea of being able to manifest what you want in life seems like so much woo-woo, right?  The rational mind cannot see how any of this is possible.  There is a reason for this.  In a world where we really have leaned so heavily on the rational left-brained side of our awareness and consciousness, it can be hard for us to realize there might actually be a different way.  After all, stories of natives in the jungles dancing to bring rain just sounds like so much silly superstition, right? In an earlier post I wrote about how the medicine man Rolling Thunder was often observed harvesting plants that were not available at the time when he was harvesting them.  People would observe how he would need a flowering plant for a healing only to go out and find it along the path he was walking.  In my life my daughter has been able to observe this phenomenon as she wishes for a desk that is the same height as her bed only to find one the next day, set out by the dumpster, in perfect condition with a chair that is brand new AND at the exact height of her bed.  She has seen how when something was needed, it was found within a day.  The last time this happened, I had wished for a jewelry case for my gallery.  These are normally a couple hundred dollars used.  I walked into my local thrift store, saw a jewelry case up ahead but didn’t have a price on it.  With a ratty table for over a hundred dollars sitting next to it, I breathed deep and wished for the case to be fifty fifty dollars after the attendant went into the back to ask what the price was for the case.  They came out and put $50.00 on it.  Perfect, you see.  Even though I knew that the few cases they had in their store were at least a hundred dollars or more, I did not let this affect me.  I breathed deep and knew I could have it for less.  I simply used a tool located within the feeling self to make it happen.  I know it may sound like magic, and perhaps for now we can just call it that, or we can call it the power we all have to manifest things through unordinary methods.

The left brain, seat of much of the processing power for linear object-based understanding is a machine that excels at identifying things.  It has been an important part of our toolkit for physical survival.  See the threat, and take care of it!  Done. Nice left brain.  Did the job, brought home the bacon, pat, pat on the head. We have come to enshrine the left brain to a great degree, and I think we have done so at the cost of the other side of our brains and our being.   If you know anything about the energy system of the light body, you will know that the right side of the body has been seen as the part of the larger energy system that carries the masculine energy up the nonphysical template of the nadis or etheric energy channels.  You may also know that in the physical body the brain and body do a little switch so that the right and left sides of the brain control the opposite side of the body.  What you might not know is that the etheric energy also does a cross in the brain or near the crown so that masculine energy goes up into the left brain while the feminine current that moves up the left side of the body runs up into the right side of the brain.  This crossing that takes place energetically is the way nature and the cosmos has chosen to assure that your own body and light body have access to the necessary union for a fuller realization of what it is capable of, which is a subtle and overt blending of two different polarities within the body. This happens etherically, and it also happens physically.  It serves as a template for allowing a broad range of experience to happen all within our very small frames.   We may not have developed a device to show all you left-brainers out there that this energy exists, but we do have systems that utilize an understanding of those current channels such as acupuncture as well as movement disciplines such as Thai Chi, Chi Gung, and even the martial arts of Judo and Karate, just to name a few.  Once you realize how movement assists in the flow of energy, then these seemingly woo-woo movements stop being so and take on a broader context.  Movement is an important aspect in releasing karmic knots or energy blocks in the body, both energetic and physical.  So in the same way that a masculine current runs up one side, a feminine runs up the other.  This is energy 101.  These energies merge and are used in your awareness to build what you are.  You are literally drawing off an infinite source of energy, whether you know it or not, to focus your own awareness and consciousness in the world.  This means that one half of the equation, the yin or feminine, has a voice in all of this.  You determine how much of each you use based on a slew of factors, some which have to do with your own personality and habits, as well as what feels “right” to you.  The only thing keeping you from a full awareness of that point of union of both the feminine and masculine which exists in everyone is AWARENESS.  Simply that.  No switches, no knobs to turn, no mantras or methods.  You were born with it.  Anyone can experience huge loads of the feminine energy flowing through them, even if they are male.  All you have to do is allow it to happen.  The same is true for the masculine.  The only thing that is keeping you from feeling them is your own choice and filtering process that is in place. Your own subconscious decisions are all made and you do not even know they have been made, but you can drift away from your normal mode of doing things easier than you might realize in order to experience these energies more powerfully or differently.  I know because I have done it ad it has never once resulted in my feeling estranged from who I am, but in many ways helped to clarify what I am and how I feel.  The secret is in ALLOWING it, and this allowance is achieved through feeling. This allowing is the right brain, the feminine, the yielding aspect of your personality.  If you have a great capacity to yield, you might well find that you have a greater ability to bring in the powers of the right brain into your life

All the gurus who speak of divine union speak of this not being a thing of the mind.  It is far larger than anything the mind itself could come up with or hope to mirror.  When I say mind, I do not mean brain.  Mind is a construct within the brain or within our awareness (which some scientists are saying is actually not all located IN the brain but appears now to be all throughout the body…imagine that!)

The part of your mind that is incessantly talking and rambling, even right now, is the part of your brain that processes language and does so in a highly organized and linear way. This is simply how language and verbal communication is most often.  So the left brain is set up to deal with most of this processing.  But while it can identify and choose individual words, it falls flat in being able to take in the forest of words.  It is not so good at broad concepts or ideas that are of a more transcendental nature.  This is why people who try to shoe-horn the rational into transcendental experiences  fail miserably.  The zen master Taishen Deshimuru observed that monks who were overly mental in their personalities had the hardest time with reaching a state of transcendent awareness. They were simply using their left brains far too much.  But like anything, how we are is based partly in habit and you can change those habits to let in a broader range of experience.

I know it is not 800 words and I have not even mentioned manifestation, but I just need to lay this foundation, so hang on there….

When you shift into the right mind, it is such a different part of your being, you might not even recognize it at first.  For as good at the left brain is in organizing, the right brain does something very different.  And this right brain also mirrors a nonphysical character to your soul, too, just as the left brain does.  Two brain hemispheres are thus merged through a large nerve bundle called the corpus callosum, and in the physical this is the point of union for them, something that also happens in a similar place with the etheric energy streaming in. Allowing the two to speak to each other is where inspired states take place.  Recognizing right brain activity is the first step in giving it more leeway in your awareness. There is a lot of truth to the sense that the right brain  is highly sensual, free, and fluid. The right brain has excelled in bringing us great discoveries and imagining the impossible simply because it is quite simply able to conceive of the inconceivable.  This means the right brain can lead you to very revolutionary states of feeling and being, ones that never even existed before.  The right brain, also,  has the capacity of conceiving the infinite because of how it has developed. It also has a curious ability to not be oriented along lines of boundaries and old repetitive patterns.  We like to think of this as a kind of radical out-there woo-woo artsy mind-set, but this is only a result of the fact that so few people actually utilize their right brain in an aware and awake way.

I was speaking with a Chemistry professor who teaches at the same university that I do about this issue.  I said it was too bad that we do not teach students how to be creative.  By this I did not mean artistically creative, but just creative thinkers.  She said “That is what everyone here calls the”he’s smoking weed” mentality!” ”  What she meant by this was the sense that when we shift out of the rational mind and into the right brain mode, it is seen as a whole lot of airy-fairy silliness.  Or smoking weed.  Out there, man! You get the idea.  But this is unfortunate, which both she and I agreed because its the incredible power of the right brain that can bring you discoveries that do not always come from the daily grind of testing compounds in order to find just the right one.  This method works great, but it is incredibly time consuming. It does not occur to most people that there might be a different way, a way that is the territory of the right brain.  We don’t know that much about it simply because we spend so little time working effectively with the right brain to even know its capacities.  I will say, though that we DO use it, we just are not used to a more balanced approach.  We are kind of holding the dam back in a sense, the little dutch boys of our world. What would happen if we just let that flow move on through? Maybe be brave and bold and not be concerned if people around us started saying “Oh, she is on weed….”

During my awakening process, I reached a place where I was surrendering more and more  my old ways of being and thinking.  As I let ego go more and more, I found that it curiously sparked my creativity in a pretty big way.  I had ideas just springing out all over the place.  Books, new designs for work.  All of it was almost too much to keep up with.  I have a backlog of work right now all based on that activity. I have shifted awareness somewhat simply because it begins to get a little ridiculous for me to have so many ideas and not enough years to make them in. But as I let go of the old way, I relaxed into a very sensual mode where I felt more expansive.  I was not as hemmed in mentally.  I was more easy, more fluid.  I saw that ideas were just pouring in.  The tap in my consciousness where ideas came from went from sudden bursts to a steady flow.  It became a flow of ENERGY in my body and at any time I could convert it into ideas.  All I had to do was turn my attention in that direction and there they would be.  I was, in truth, in a state of near-constant inspiration.  The right brain allows, the left brain focuses. So let yourself ALLOW this state to be in your awareness and body!

One way to know that you are getting there is you feel a sense of drift. You do not focus on doing this, you ALLOW yourself, and this is important in order to KEEP this going.  Where the rational left brain focuses, the right allows.  It does not grasp.  Left brain does that. The right brain steps back and just sees.  It is not making judgements, it is taking it all in.  This is important to being able to be a great innovator because in this state you let all of your hidden biases go at least for the time being. These biases govern how you think and behave whether you know it or not.  As a result, things that you could not anticipate come to you effortlessly. In fact, they can seem accidental because it was so effortless. This should help you to anticipate the great power hidden in this part of you.  Meditation can often lead you there, but one of the most effective means is learning how to either quiet the monkey mind that likes to chatter, or to do what some do which is to not mind that the mind is chattering and to develop a kind of middle focus where you hear the chatter but it no longer bothers you.  It is like a train going down a track.  You tend to tune it out after a while, or you might wind up just listening to the patterns without paying attention to what is being said.  But you tune that out.  What you are tuning in is the holy grail of all enlightened states, and I will tell you right here and right now that it is assisted by waking up and using the right brain.  ONce you get that part in on the game, you can bring the two hemispheres into balanced action.  And all of this enlightenment talk is itself something that is firmly planted in physiology.  It is NOT a spiritual energetic off in the ether thing only.  The body HAS to register it in order to recognize it.

The double benefit from bringing this on is an acceleration of a force that has the most unusual tendency of bringing things to you at the perfect time.  This story is symbolized, whether it happened or not, by Buddha awakening and realizing that he was hungry.  Just then someone came by who offered him a bowl of rice to eat. When you begin to utilize this part of the mind the blending of the two vibrations has an uncanny effect of bringing you just what you need in the moment. This is along the lines of dancing for rain, yes.  And yes, it works.  The more you ALLOW the better it works. This means that you learn to become expert at making a clear wish that has no hurdles within you in feeling or belief that would keep it from happening, and you let it go and not dwell on it. This is important for some reason I have not fully understood, but it feels a lot like writing down your order on a piece of paper and then sending it to the kitchen where the staff work on it until it is done.  IN this case, it is the universe working on it. This is the part that seems like magic, and I suppose if you want to use that term, then fine.  Perhaps, using that same logic, this has been why we even HAVE the term magic to begin with, which is that we have observed over a long time period that some people just seem to have a knack for getting what they need or want.  Some people have the uncanny knack of getting it in the most miraculous of ways.  So we call it magic because we do not understand it.  But I am not describing something that a magician like Randi might employ, but rather something else that we are taught does not exist even though we see its presence in our lives or in our friends’ lives from time to time…

The idea that you can manifest things in your life may seem like magical thinking until you actually try it. I have found that all the things I needed or wished for I have gotten. I also ask for big things, things that I feel will help me in the major movements of my life.  This wishing made it possible for me to go to both undergraduate and graduate school without owing a penny in loans.  I simply asked for a way where I would be able to pay for it, to afford something that given my meager means I could somehow swing.  I had no idea what that would look like, but in one case it meant being admitted to a school where my tuition was waived the entire time I was there while also being paid a modest amount of money each month. In another case, I had another tuition waiver and also worked my way through school as part of this waiver. As an artist, I did not want to have to pay a mortgage each month, so I asked for a way to have a home without the mortgage payment.  I was able to pay for a home in total, no mortgage.  These are just a few of the things that I wished for and found coming to my door. In some cases, these were things that I had little or no say in, they just happened.  It seems that the less control I have over them, the better able they are to happen in the right way.

In your mind, you must allow the right brain to flow.  This is not doing, but allowing.  It is not trying to cause the water to break into a wave in your awareness but in standing back sufficiently  to let the flow develop and grow.  This wave of energy will build as long as you keep your awareness out of the rational left brain.  The energy of the left breaks all wave phenomenon. Period.  The way you observe all of this will need to change, too. This was the “focus” I learned when awakening came and I have since observed that it is a focus that monks and those who reach higher states use. It means turning off the talking mind.  It also means allowing yourself to naturally float into a kind of nowhere place that can take you into sleep if you are not careful.  It also involves turning off your need to identify phenomenon while observing it. THIS is very hard to do and seems to be something that takes a while to develop. However, it can be done. It is the very same type of focus that brings on dream imagery as you slowly drift into sleep.  Have you ever laid down to sleep and found yourself drifting and beginning to dream and something inside of you asks “Hey, where am I?”  And bam!  You are awake.  The dream stops.  The wave of phenomenon ceases.  For anyone who has had out of body experiences, similar things have happened.  You go into an “altered” state (right brain) and find yourself floating, perhaps standing by a window.  You stop and ask yourself how you got over to the window and as quick as can be, you are back in your body.  THIS is the same type of drift I am talking about.  It is nothing and something all at once.  You are kind of dropping into this place within you that is like a vast sea of possibility and as you allow your awareness to let the waves develop, they do, until you bring in the rational mind and ego consciousness, which just breaks everything down into discrete particles and the wave ceases.

You do the same thing with creating events in your life.  The nature of all energy is that it attracts more oft itself.  If you do not have any impediments in feeling within you, the energy of the wish is free to move out and attract itself in the physical. I see it as a circular motion where the wish is conceived, it moves through your being like a ripple and then begins to affect the world around you.

“But hang on there, chief.  You say that I can manifest things in my life.  I wished to win the lottery, and that was twenty years ago and I am still playing the lottery without a single win!”

What I would tell you is that you have to be very clear about your feelings.  Yes, you may be VERY excited at the prospect of winning hundreds of millions of dollars.  Who wouldn’t, right?  But very likely, lurking in there, is some competing belief or feeling that disrupts the flow of this energy.  Otherwise, you would have had some kind of win within a reasonable amount of time.  This does not mean everyone wins the lottery, but it does not bar that possibility either. We just believe it is not possible for everyone to win all at once. So that does not and will not happen. So how do you feel about money? Do you feel like it is something of a curse?  How do you feel about other people who DO have money? Do you feel like its unfair that some have it and some do not?  Or how about having money leading to greed or lack of caring?  Do you wish you had more money but somehow feel like you are not deserving of it?  You have to be able to be very honest with yourself when it comes to this part, and if there is anything standing in the way, then it will certainly affect the power of your wish.  Even a sliver of a doubt can have a countervailing effect.  You want this to be a wish that has nothing standing in its way.  Knowing that this is all a matter of clearing up your own insides can lead you to doing the interior work necessary for making manifesting more possible in your life.

Not convinced?

During awakening, I had the stirring of a desire to teach more.  My studio was to yet at a point where I felt comfortable having the public coming in even though the space was certainly adequate for having large groups in.  I had the thought how nice it would be to be able to teach at the college level. I even looked at job offerings with the thought that maybe for a while I might even move somewhere where I could teach.  It was about a month after this that I was called by a local community college and asked if I would be willing to teach their sculpture class.  I was called at 1:15 in the afternoon and the deal was I had to be there at three to start the first class! No interview, no paperwork.  I got that all done in the weeks that followed. I was also told by someone in the community that a position at another school would be opening up for a sculpture professor.  I interviewed for it and got the job.  I wasn’t really ready to be full-time, but rather preferred to be able to dip my toes into it while still being able to run my studio business.  The job was itself part-time.  Perfect.  This has worked out very well.

So there you go.  But it also gets more interesting as you get into the semesters I have been teaching….

When I began, I still had some issues I had to work through that were still very much pressing down on me, which namely had to do with blocks related to authority and personal power.  I was a bit of a mess during those days.  I was simply not in my own power.  The students I had also tended to reflect this, too.  I had students who were dishonest and who sought to shift blame for their own shortcomings onto me.  I had to look at this issue squarely and learned it had to do with how I was to owning my own personal power.  When I was able to do this more and more, I found that the quality of my students changed dramatically. Partly this was due to my behavior having changed.  There was no sense that I was a push-over anymore but held everyone accountable which was a direct result of my holding myself more accountable.  I wasn’t a hard ass, no, I simply had a better mix of  qualities that helped me to keep my classes on a more even keel.  The group dynamic changed and students enjoyed the classes more less based on what I was offering and more on the chemistry present amongst the students themselves.  This has now led to our doing a group project in glass that will involve my students creating an installation of glass sculptures in a garden space on campus.  As I have been able to stand up for what is correct instead of being a push-over as I was due to fear issues, I have found a much better way to be.  This does not mean that I have to act aggressively, but to be firm and follow what is true.  Those who cannot or will not fall into that type of alignment tend to weed themselves out of my life pretty quickly through their own actions or behaviors. I no longer see this as a loss but a gain.  But as long as I allow bad behavior to continue, I am giving it a pass.  All of this has changed how things work for me both on an overt day-to-day way as well as on a more subtle level.  This has had huge ripple effects, far larger than I could have even imagined, but in the end I know that while I may not see how any given event will work out, it always works out for the very best. I am simply no longer caught in the old way of doing things.  And life can get simpler.  I am still working on this, there are more layers to peel back and resolve, but it is the kind of thing that I can live with!  The more you own your life, the more you own your feelings, the more you work on yourself, the more the world will mirror these same qualities. And this can happen on a dime.  It is broad, too.  It can affect not just one corner, but all corners of your life.

So what do you say?  Want to give this principle a run for its money? I will begin by saying that you have actually been using this principle all along except that you have had some competing material standing in the way.  This material is both emotional, belief, and karmically based.  It is YOU, but it is the part of you that is not fully resolved.  When you resolve it in feeling, you literally clear a path for the energy to run unimpeded.  And this is very much what happens with a kundalini awakening within your body. You work with it to clear these blocks. Most of them may resolve without your even knowing what they were or where they emerged from, you don’t NEED to know. You can just let them go in favor of a better way of feeling. The degree to which you are not invested in the old way is the degree to which you can let it go.  The less mental you are in your approach, the faster it can be.  The more you tell yourself there is “work” to do is the degree to which you delay the work being done….which isn’t work at all. It is a simple realization of what you are beyond what some call “illusion” and what I call “creation.” Because all of this is what we have created.  You can call it false beliefs, but I find that too off the mark. They are real, but they do not serve you.  they only serve a broken sense of being that you have taken on in your belief system.

Now is the time to start changing it, and the way is knowing that you can!