Breathing The Leopard – A Follow Up from Last Time

This post is what was promised from my last post about the core of methods of practices….

I was flush deep in the roiling seas of kundalini.  It was 2009.  I had been moving a lot of blocked energy and with each release I could feel how the prana impacted my body in the turbulent state, energetically, that I was in.  It had an effect on my system that included a lot of nausea.  Every few days I would come against not just one, but a series of blocks.  this is good, but it also made things intense and a little much to take physically.  But it was in the midst of this that I was shown a vision of a desert cat.

The whole scene was meant to illustrate how we shift out of our “dry” left brains into the fluid flowing world of our right brain, the kundalini shakti, the flowing feminine side of our consciousness.  To feel this flow meant removing blocks and still more blocks.  I was shown this leopard and I watched it breath.  I could feel its breath, which was actually a panting breath.  Because I was seeing and feeling the content of this vision, I immediately was able to feel what it was I was supposed to feel.  So I began to breath like this cat was breathing.  I thought about being this cat.  I don’t know why, but cats seem to put me in touch with a sensual aspect of my masculine energy.

It is in truth I think a blending of aspect of both feminine and masculine.  And when you do this in awakening, it brings peace and bliss because two aspects of the self are held so closely within awareness without any division.  So for me, the cat was a good image for my own turn of mind.  Strong, rippling in strength this cat was sleek and sensual.  I felt bliss move all through me as a result.  I was taken, seduced by the bliss of prana.

I panted; the energy moved very strong as my stomach lurched and turned.  I kept at it, and within a day I had moved through the nausea and the block was gone.  There were more blocks to deal with, and many were taken care of with this panting breath which I found moved a lot of energy for the very fact that the image and the breathing helped to support an openess within me that allowed energy to flow.  Since your consciousness IS energy, it isn’t that difficult to understand that the character of your consciousness will help focus and even determine the nature of the energy that flows through you.  The more open and trusting you are of the natural universe, the more direct a connection you will have without any prejudices or biases coloring your perceptions.

But the thing I want to point out is that the important thing in this was the image inside of me, which just “did it” and opened me up.  It was less the breath than this image.  Yes, breath did stimulate my body in certain ways, and breath IS coincident with prana or chi, but it is NOT chi.  Sorry.  It just isn’t.  Breathing CAN stimulate the flow of chi, though.  But as you will see, so can your pure feeling….which is the coolest part….because when you consider that in spirit, in All-Time, you exist without a body.  HOW do you breath?  You breath in your awareness.  If you can get that the breath of your body mirrors the breath of your soul, oh my goodness, the worlds that this can open for you conceptually as a creator of great methods, new methods for people to use that help bring in new aspects of awareness that just weren’t possible a century ago but are now just at our fingertips! Yell it at the top of your heart, your soul, for this is true; amazing things await us….and the boundlessness of creativity will bring it to you if you will but OPEN to it.

I was opened, seduced by the flow of this very sensual of energies, this pranic flow. It was so strong that it almost made me sick.  I got over it, and I would in the following days  use the panting breath as a way to tap this state.  But for it to work, the image must be there.  I have to know what I am reaching for.  I am taking breath into me the way one would say yes to a lover.  Prana is this. YOGA is UNION.  Yoga means just this.  So?

Now, I will say that up to this time, I was not familiar with a breathing method, a well-known one in pranayama and kundalini yoga which is called “breath of fire.”  It is this type of breathing that is supposed to aid in the stimulation of kundalini. When I finally saw a demonstration of breath of fire, I saw that there wasn’t a big difference between what I had been shown to do from my own inner guidance and this method that has been in use for thousands of years.  The question I have for you by way of teaching you about this feeling part that I think is so central, IS central, is how does breathing like this make you feel?  What does it conjure?  If it does not conjure any feeling in you, if it leaves you flat, relatively unmoved, you may not be getting an arousal of prana in the body.  In this case, I would suggest that you let your imagination move you.  Whatever you find is most natural to you will work because prana is bid by how we feel, how we think.  When we are stressed, we are often shutting down these channels of energy and it is this that leaves us, often, feeling tired or worn out.  Feeling a warm thick fluid moving up through you, or the movement of water, or alternating currents of cool and warm air…..if you can put your imagination there, what you conjure by using images like this can lead to moving energy if the stimulating effects of just breathing don’t do it.

So consider trying to pant as a method for moving energy.  In fact, letting your tongue extend slightly out of your mouth might get your feeling this energy. Prana is not just electricity….it is an energy full of feeling.  It is what we feel when we feel bliss.  We release a blockage in our bodies, the energy body, and suddenly things feel clearer, lighter, but there is also a surge of bliss, too.  There is a reason for this, and it has everything to do with what prana IS.  You are matter made conscious, now able to observe itself as the cosmic moves through you.

Prana is your saying yes to life, yes to allowing the bliss of the union of your body with the sustaining life that is the breath of the Tao. So then the breathing movement of the cat breath was what I needed.  But I will let you in on one important secret; once I had the breath work anchored in me, I was able to move energy simply by thinking or visualizing the method without actually doing it.  As a result of this, I was taken deeper into the core of what all breath work is about.  I discovered a form of pranayama that has no use of breath. How do you think you control the flow of energy in your body without breath? You control it through feeling!  BUT.  To do this, you have to have control over your feeling states. It is simple, primal.  Other parts require more practice. All of it is built on an image and this image either does it for you or it does not.  But the core of all of this is caught in feeling.  I know I keep hammering away at this, but this is important.  It is important because the “body” of the universe does not respond to the touch of rational thought, no.  It responds to the touch of the feeling thought.  When you can master feeling, you can bid the universe open to you in ways that it had been closed to you. I can’t begin to suggest how wonderful this can be for us all here.

It emerges from that. It is just that when I say feeling, most people are stuck because that does not give them much to go on.  They start fidgeting and they want the safety of their yoga mat.  I get it.  Its so simple, this.  But the work, the great work of this age, is going to be about people returning to their humanity.  To what it means to be humans, instead of the barbarians we have all collectively been for so long.  Time for healing, cleaning, and this will be the age where humans will get deeper and deeper connected into their feeling states.  And you want to know what this looks like?  Each and every block removed, things just get simpler and simpler. Like how joy is simple.  But it cannot be faked.  You have to reach this authenticity, and it is just as Jesus exhorted his followers: be like children. It is the feeling part of you that is the conduit through which all prana will flow.

It will not flow through your reason. No.  It is not some dry feeling-less thing.  It lives for bliss and joy and creativity.  Match an inner image with this level of boundless joy and wonder and you begin to anchor a whole new feeling within.  The joy I feel is like joy distilled into star light (really).  I cannot begin to even describe it very well….except to say that if you can match an image to a practice, you can use the practice as the anchor.  See? THIS is what so much yoga is about.  And really, folks, there is not a lot of magic in the movements.  Some of them are about helping you to dissolve a block or to open up flow in the body.  But sometimes it is to help just anchor a feeling. Your yoga can be about giving yourself in wild abandon to this thing that is all around and within everything……and after that, anything that anchors that feeling in you will be a practice worth its weight in gold because you know what the practice is intending for you to feel.  So make your own.  Let them flow effortlessly through you and ask yourself….”what does this FEEL like?”  or “If I were a painter of methods, what scene would this feeling wind up being?  How do I instill the same feeling in others?”  That is just what you are seeking to do.  Anything that stimulates the flow works. So maybe the brush of a feather against your neck will give you chills and a sudden warm flow up your leg and into your side and into your head.  Boom.  Pranic flow enabled.  What does this tell you?  it tells you that your body, the flesh, will itself respond to triggers as the energy currents are excited in the body along its surface to trigger a deeper flow of energy.  This then leads to feeling differently in your consciousness.  A perfect example of how working with the body can bring about a change in your consciousness.  Because they are all connected, this makes perfectly good sense.

So not to belabor the point.  Once you get to this place, if you are a creative person, you could come up with dozens of new methods, then spend years honing them in order to bring into them aspects of reflexive elements or trigger points or any number of other supportive moves or methods for what it is that you want to accomplish with your newly minted method.

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Through A New Lens

There is no doubt about it; the experience that has come to be known the twin soul, twin ray, and even soulmate stands as a singular type of experience in our lives.  It becomes very easy to want to think of it as fated for this one reason. Add to it the ability to communicate from a distance, odd synchronicities, and the bliss that accompanies such an experience and it gets hard not see it as anything except exceptional and perhaps a little supernatural.

I would suggest, though, that you lay aside your belief and consider that all of this is pointing to an evolution of our awareness here on the planet and that it doesn’t mean…..anything.  No fate, except those choices that we each make that have led us to this point, this time, this place.  For a very long time we have quite simply kept the switch for the other side of our capacities as humans to feel and embody not just bliss on earth, but also the curious tendency for events to just form around our lives.  Yes, its magic.  In fact, I argue that the flow of the kundalini Shakti as it is called, is what is driving this, a sudden merging within each of us of the yin and yang.  Within this union that first begins IN us, we now have the expanded capacity to feel and know things from a distance.  There are reasons for this I wont go into that have to do with the quantum universe and the waveform as being capable to be everywhere.  Every point in the universe touches every other point.  All points are connected in a way that is hard to wrap your head around.  It is hard because its not really about space.  This something more, this extra element, the kundalini Shakti is what makes all the difference.  For a long time we as humans have allowed ourselves to be limited by our very left brained, and we say, masculine sides of our brains.  This has served to keep us bound in a sense of a limited self and it has kept the magic at bay.  The magic is nothing less than the magic that is the presence of the feminine, the goddess principle in our atoms, in our whole world.  That might sound like a big claim, but I say this based on careful observation.  I outline this in my book Waking The Infinite that I continue to edit, edit, edit…..

When I began trying to understand why it was that I could know and feel the thoughts of someone I hadn’t even met who lived another country away, I found a community of people who were all experiencing this phenomenon.  I felt like I had in a way come home.  I was not crazy after all!  It was helpful at first to realize that I was not alone in what I and my “twin” were experiencing.  But what I found rather quickly was that many of the things that were said about the twin phenomenon didn’t make sense.  They weren’t…..true.  They all sounded like feel-good stuff and the reality is that while we were all being bowled over by bliss, people were having tantrums, and behaving badly.  They also said that you ONLY have ONE twin.  But I would experience connections to three other people that were all very similar in some respects.  How could this be?  I am not that different, am I?  I came to learn a few things.  Here they are for what it is worth…

Take kundalini awakening and karma with another person who is someone who is a compliment to you and you have the makings of a connection that sets your world ablaze.  Unbound by the linear aspect of your being, awareness spreads outward.  What you experience is an expansion of self, the beginning of releases of old stored emotional material, and bliss.  But this karma is merely an energy that is the same or similar.  Add to that some past experiences with this person and a pairing might happen. I know; I have several people that I all came here to release the past so that we might know ourselves in a new way…..in an authentic fashion.  Waking up is about waking up to your potential, which is without limit in the world.  We have, afterall, magic in our side.  🙂

But does this mean that anything is fated?  No.  You see, what I found was that beyond the bliss of a connection is a wonderful opportunity to see where we match these connections and then set about cleaning up the match because beyond the bliss is a deepening of the experience.  It does not get less, it gets more.  But awakening with a twin in the beginning is intense and can become chaotic.  So much is happening so quickly.  Your whole world view is shifted.  You now step upon the earth with new feet, new eyes! Yes, bliss…..yes yes yes to all of that. But what exists beyond this bliss?  Have you asked yourself this?  You see, the problem I found with this community of twin souls was that they had been at this connection for decades, some twenty years or more and didn’t seem to be anywhere different.  Not all, but many.  They were happily stuck!  Any you know, that is just fine.  Really.  We are only ready to move to the next step when we are ready. Beyond this lies more.  I promise you.  The spiral of our evolution continues to expand outward and “upward.”  Aren’t you the least bit interested in what lies out there?  To see it means removing more and more of the lenses that have served to distort your perception.  You don’t know what you are missing.  And all you really need to do is to ask the question.  Ask guidance from the universe to know more and you will.  Events, as you know, will naturally form around your life so that all the right people and events happen to you to help you to the next step.  Sound like magic?  Well it is!

I find the concept of the twin to be a myth.  I do.  I think it is a belief-based concept that does not bear much on reality.  Many of the things attributed to it are coincidental but this does not mean that the things that happen in such twinnings is fate or any of the things that the community of twins say it is.  There is no harm, I think, in being critical and seeing if the old theories stand up to scrutiny.  I am not advocating a scientific strain of mentality, but you know, some good careful observation might not be a bad thing.  I mean, have you ever considered where all the things we say about twins comes from?  They were made up based on…..what?  They were created in order to explain a phenomenon.  But is the twin the other side of your soul?  If that is so, why did  I have more than one?  Does that mean that my soul have more than one side?  You see, this is where people will tend to dismiss me because I present a problem to them where I just don’t fit into the neat paradigm.  A paradigm is a cognitive map, a way to explain how something works.  It is a way of understanding the universe or something in it.  There was once a time when we thought the earth was flat.  We though this based on very real observation.  But that observation was incorrect because people kept at the question and kept observing until they amassed a greater amount of information that showed that the world was in fact a sphere turning in space.  We arrived at this realization not because it FELT good or right or appealed to our sensibilities, but because it cohered over and over to observable phenomenon.

What I am asking you to do is to become a witness to your own process.  There is SO much that we get wrong or are off on.  I was amazed as I spoke to a friend about an issue today that she had completely misunderstood for the simple reason that her world was so defined by a particular way of feeling and being that she could not concieve that the world could be any different…..and actually conveniently ignored anything to the contrary.  SO I say; be a careful witness.  We lose nothing and can win a lot!  I once thought that the bliss that I felt was the result of my twin but over time I found that no, actually, it was more how I reacted to her that made the difference.  These seemingly inconsequential things began to pile up as I saw that no, I did not always pick up on what she was thinking.  When I looked carefully at what was happening, I learned a lot. The other side is that in a twin relationship we can wind up feeling tied or bound by what the other person is saying or feeling or doing.  The truth is, no, actually , we do not.  All of this is a choice.  It might feel fated, but our fate is, as I have said, the accumulation of many choices, actions, over a long period of time.  All of this, all of it, can be corrected, healed, altered, or changed.  THIS is the really cool thing about our lives and our world.  We can actually HAVE a very different world….and we are building it RIGHT NOW! The power or force behind this, love, is what prana is.  It is a big idea!  And its quite beautiful.

Come be a witness!