The Third Eye: A Simple Tip For Helping To Activate Awakening

I begin this as I begin all posts on ways of sparking awakening, which is to caution the reader to consider that if you are not properly prepared, awakening can not go according to plan. This is a full-time commitment and it will occupy your life for years especially in the beginning and more specifically in the first three to five years of awakening until you learn how to work with, and not against the forces that are brought to bear. One thing I can say is that if you are OCD, like things a certain way, or like your life well ordered and controlled, awakening is not for you. Awakening will involve opening up the metamind, which is a fuller spectrum of mind than you are used to. It also reveals your shadow and the way at working out these wrinkles in your past is not the way we go about our business normally. If you don’t know how to surrender and let go of expectations, it is better that you learn how to cultivate that part first.

That said, a simple method that has been used both by the Hindu’s as well as the Egyptians. It is also what I was guided to do one evening as I sat for my meditation. I will also say that this method may not work magic for you right away, but for others it may be very helpful. It is best preceded by the meditation method described in my last post, which is a good way to learn how to silence the left brain (which is the part we call the part that is always “talking”). This is a shift into the nonverbal centers as recent discoveries have revealed.

There is an apocryphal story about an exchange between Pythagoras and a member of a mystery school in Egypt where he asked them what he needed to do in order to gain entry (he was said to have petitioned them many times) and the response was to focus on certain centers in the body and to fast. He did what was prescribed and returned saying they were right and that by doing so, he was changed. He said the old Pythagoras no longer existed and a new man stood before them.While we don’t know what those center were, it is very likely that they were centers like the third eye since this same method has been mentioned in passing in ancient writings. Pythagoras went on to study there for many years and eventually became a teacher there.

Sitting quietly and in meditation (breath work as prescribed as described in the previous post is helpful to drop you into greater quiet) close your eyes and then focus your physical eyes on your brow region of your forehead. Imagine that you are looking just beyond your brow region some. This will mean that your eyes may feel like they are slightly crossed. Focus your eyes and your attention on the area that we think of as where the Ajna or third eye chakra is located. Now as you do this, you can be aware that you are focusing the energy of your awareness there. You can imagine that you are sending energy to that location, because you are. Do this for moderate amounts of time, but don’t do it until you feel uneasy and find yourself disliking it. It’s important to find this fun and enjoyable because the quality of your energy will help actually to create an emotional pattern associated with this activity. It is better to do five minutes while feeling fresh than it is to do forty minutes and feeling bored to tears. Just place your attention on that spot and consider how you are filling that center with the energy of your awareness, and that your energy is going into that center.

It’s helpful if you do this without any expectation of an outcome. It is best to keep your mind as free from these things as possible. Having a blank mind is very helpful because what you are doing in this practice is stimulating the latent powers of your being. The ajna chakra is one of the least emotional centers in the energy system. It sees but the degree of emotion in seeing can be one more aligned to a kind of detachment. Certainly the state required to open up the powers of the right brain and the larger cosmic mind requires learning to understand how that focus of mind is so broad as if to seem as if it is not a focus at all, and this can escape beginners. It is like you went from wearing glasses that allowed you to see up close for most of your life and one day, you took up a set of telescopic lenses that allowed you to see so far that you didn’t realize what it was you were doing. You might even be gazing and deep empty space without realizing that this was itself a meta view (through the metamind). Because the third eye can be so free from emotion, the initial awakening can be relatively calm at first, allowing you to be more stable in those first days of new experience. Only later might the energy, the high flow of prana, begin to open up and free stuck or knotted energy in your field, after which the experience can then become more intense to the degree that you allow it to be so. There is nothing inherently wrong with its being intense, but some of it is built on appearances and on an illusion created by the ego that these things are more important than they are. The only thing important is that the body and mind is cleared of them. Some might think they have to wrestle with these things, and when someone takes a stance like this, then it seems reasonable that wrestling must be done, but this is in no way necessary at all. You can learn to drop the drama within if you are more selfless in your approach. This is a much more peaceful way of going about doing “the work.”

Additionally, it is possible that other centers of energy might be stimulated that could stir the depths and bring on awakening, however, it is my sense that everyone needs to be careful when doing this since if you activate a center that has a lot of stuck emotional material, you could be seeing your experience through a lens that is now amplifying that emotional material, which is like being cast into the vat sea of awakening but in choppy seas right from the start. There is, though, real benefit in simply meditating and feeling your energy, sitting with it and keeping your mind open without preconceptions about what it is or what you might experience. By sitting in the present, by being present, you are beginning to utilize the right brain which has the goods in regards to cosmic mind. In my last post I spoke to this as being a quality that we have identified as being located in the right brain. This part of the brain is specialized in a certain range of perception and feeling, and it is very different from the more dominant left brain. Knowing that it is the right brain doing this doesn’t really tell us much, so all of this is a direct experience. Just knowing that you have this bicameral brain with two ranges of experience and perceptual ability is enough to put you on the scent so that you can remind yourself to emphasize one a little more than the other. Contractions of consciousness, which are often about fear and which can contain pain body, something that is both a noun and a verb, can be experienced and then the self can learn how to keep those contractions down to a minimum which results in keeping a broader more open-hearted state at play. This is why work of this kind seems best done in a gradual fashion since it allows you to slowly walk into the waters gradually and to get used to how to navigate it and not fall for fear or anxiety or to lapse into the pain body or contracted states, which are a hallmark of the left brain.

We are also at this unique place in our development as a species where awakening is happening in ways that have never happened before. It is a hopeful sign in some ways and I think that it also shows that this is very much needed if we are to progress as a species here on the planet. We need bigger thinkers, we need more compassionate thinkers, too. We need the soul of what the Buddhists call bodhichitta, which is a motivation that is based on wanting to expand our understanding of ourselves while at the same time, wanting to be of service to others. It is a more selfless way of being, and is not about grasping for approval or for being happy because we made someone else happy. It is like giving something precious away and not holding onto it. I leave a hundred dollar bill near a park bench and someone who i do not know picks it up and is thrilled because moments before they worried how they were going to pay a bill, or maybe it is just that the note left which says “blessings to you” was enough to clue them in that all of this was intentional but selfless.

The boddhichitta is also that part of you that has made you a seeker and has kept you on the path of wanting to know more, to reach whatever that elusive thing was that might have been eluding you for so long. There are some who say that seeking is itself an illusory act, but I am of the mind that we are first seekers before we find that which rewards us so greatly. The essence of the bodhi, or Buddha nature, is one where the heart opens and where there is less grasping. It is in such a state where all that we need naturally comes, like a blessing upon our heads like the rain that makes everything grow. The universe is not one of punishing or rewarding. The way of the bodhi is in part the removing of obstacles. This is why so many who awaken experience such coincidental or synchronistic events in their lives. Miracles, small ones, sometimes daily, remind us that we have stopped the struggle and are now open to the divine plan and cosmos, which is one of abundance if we can live in that feeling state. The reverse is certainly also possible where everything seems to be going wrong. Examine your thoughts and your beliefs.

If you feel a struggle or resistance within you, then whatever you are feeling will serve to attract things like it. If you feel that there is something wrong with helping others because you think that it is somehow selfish or self serving, then examine your feelings more. If you are living transactionally in your life, you might be missing an important element that is holding you back. If you give openly with a full heart, more of that openness will come to you in your life, bringing you greater joy and fulfillment. If you instead want happiness, you will tend to be more happy and by serving this light in you, you will shine it out onto others in a shower that they also cannot help but sense at some level. This is some of the more positive motivations that can serve to guide you in your inner work.

So by focusing your awareness on the third eye, you feed more energy into that one center. As you do this, it slowly fills with the light of your awareness and your attention. Perhaps think of it as some unknown reservoir that can contain energy and by turning the light of your mind inward, you are no longer expending it through the physical sensory world. At first this might be a challenge, but the mind can be trained, and you can make this part of a practice with the highest intentions at heart. Don’t worry about when that reservoir will fill up enough for something to happen, instead be patient since we are each unique and this may take some time, some more than others. This isn’t a race and achieving this is like finding a pearl that is hidden in the mud. Imagine yourself filling up with your attention and keeping turned inward. This practice is very similar to what is called the Golden Flower, which is in Taoism. The secret of this flower is known when we turn the “lantern of your attention inward” so that the inner world is filled with light and may respond in time.

Every tradition has its prescriptions, some say to practice for forty days, others don’t put a time limit on it, and this I think is the wisest way to approach this. What I can say is that imagination is the gateway through which we can know a hitherto unknown thing. At first when you get results, you will think you are just making it all up, but deeper still is a part of you that naturally knows what or how to imagine in order to get there. By being quiet and calm and learning how to calm yourself with breath work, you can begin to bump up against these forgotten realms of the mind. Remaining inquisitive and like a child is best. I have found that I was able to learn much by not leaning on a teacher, for it is in us to know these things if we resist the desire to ask someone who surely must know more than we do. If a teacher is needed, that teacher will come like the blessed rain that I described as coming to the bodhi earlier. If you resist trying to figure it all out in a mental way or trying to force things, the universe will provide you with exactly what you need for that moment. Its pretty amazing that I was able to have people who had exactly what I needed who lived within walking distance of my home in these mountains. One was a Qi Gung master of sorts, someone who had studied in China to learn White Crane Qi Gung, which is the same energy practice that the Shaolin monks learned, a man who gave classes just around the corner from me, about three blocks away from my home. Then there was a healer from New Zealand who was almost the same distance from my home, who was there just in time to help me with some later work in my process. Only months after seeing her, she moved to another part of the States, so all of this had the feeling of happening in what we often call “divine timing.” In each case, I didn’t ask for these things, but I was open to the possibilities. All of this comes when there is this shift or acceleration in our energetic awareness where we seem to be interfacing very differently with the world. These are all signs that we are moving into a different perceptual and field of consciousness. Remaining humble and serving the light within seems to keep us on the right keel and in a state of grace, which I observe is an important thing for us. Don’t expect to be perfect at every moment, but instead learn as you go, for surely this is how we improve. Awakening is a great gift, but it is just the beginning, a kind of entry into the garden. You might wind up slipping on some of your own shit from time to time, so go easy on yourself. This is not a race, and there is no one out there who is going to bonk you on your head for messing up (you will probably do enough of that in the beginning all on your own).

Using this method along with the meditation that was outlined in my last post can be a very useful way of stirring the depths. Consider the meditation method first and then after a period of some weeks as you get used to the method, bring in the third eye meditation later.

Serving the Light,

~Parker

Advertisement

A Beginners Guide To Awakening

I can tell you as someone who did not follow a teacher or guru and didn’t know much about any of the methods involved in awakening that the central core of the event of nonduality and the enlightened state involves a union within the self with its many parts.

In many methods this takes the form of silent meditation, or “just sitting” and being quiet. This, though, is not always enough, and I think our understanding about enlightened states has progressed enough that we can begin speaking to this process in a more updated way.

There is this quality of mind that must be allowed to take center stage and without it, most of all methods will relax you and might provide you with some interesting effects and some insight into your consciousness, but it wont lead to a more illuminated or enlightened state. You could meditate for years and never find this thing we call awakening.

What I can tell you, if you are trying to find it, is that this capability is already in you. It is in every person. In Buddhism they rightly describe this as the Buddha within. We all have Buddha nature. This is not a man or any person, but in our innocence we might tend to think it is. No, you are the one who has it….but you need to learn how to discover it. The way this is done is by allowing instead of doing, and this runs counter to how many people think things in life should be done. To do this, to allow, involves meditation, but this meditation is best when it silences the left brain, the part that is most active in people all across the world.

We have developed this way and it has resulted in a silencing of the left brain. What you want is a practice that will help to keep the left brain occupied with something. Give it something to do. It is like a man in a way; he always likes to solve problems and thinks this is the way of the world, making things right again. It is also the verbal part of your brain and is thus the part that chatters on and on. You hear a lot about this as being a challenge to many who are seeking to meditate. But meditation itself involves hours of practice punctuated by brief moments of success. This success involves silencing the left brain so that the power of the right brain can come forward. You see, for as capable as the left brain thinks it is, it is really only designed to deal with linear tasks, point A to point B kinds of things. It does not have the sense of the ineffable that is in your nature. To do that, the left brain needs to be trained to be quiet for longer and longer periods. This is hard to do. However, the brain is open to being trained and you can train your brain to do certain things. By having a meditation method that keeps your left brain doing something, which is really keeping it quiet and not nattering on about all the things you need to do, you begin to open up the brain so that the right brain powers can begin to come forward. It is important to note that the right brain is the part that focuses on the present while the left brain focuses on the past and the future. Together, they make for a good marriage, but until awakening, the marriage is very one sided, you see. What you want to do is to silence the left while letting the right come into focus more. The experience of enlightened states is marked by this sense of an expanding present. There is a reason for this, and it is all physiological at its root, but the body serves the consciousness that drives the whole experience. In order to know that higher consciousness you need to have both online and functioning together. This is what awakening is. Many say it is just the feminine or Shakti (right brain) but the two parts were made to work as one and the right brain has a very hard time navigating a physical world of symbols like words and numbers that are used to communicate externally (while it can communicate psychically).

The right brain, which is the center for awareness of the infinite in us, is the nonverbal part of the brain. It does not think the same way as the left, so when you have it working in the beginning, you might not even be aware that it is operational. Its focus is so broad that it can be present and it can feel as though you are standing in a vast emptiness. It can be there and you wont even know it sometimes. You have to spend time in this nothingness long enough to learn how this part of the brain works. The problem is that we are so used to thinking with our left brains that the moment something happens that is right brained phenomenon, we shut it off just by engaging the left brain. I know how this sounds. I know it may sound preposterous to you that it works like this, but in the beginning it does. You are slowly letting the “woman” in you to come out and express herself. “She” is truly the genie in the bottle. She is vast and when you first feel her it can be scary. She has another form of ego which is truly a cosmic sense of self which is very different from the ego mind the exists in the left brain. But it is with “her” that you will be able to begin perceiving thins more as they are in a broader context, and that context is what is often referred to as cosmic mind. Her focus will be so broad that it wont seem like it is a focus at all, but you will need to let that part of you express itself. If you can allow this part of the brain to express itself through any number of phenomenon that it can produce without dragging in the left brain, you will be well on your way to developing a greater balance in your consciousness and how it was always made to operate.

I found that by putting my hands together in a prayer position and placing my (left brained) attention on my hands and where they touched, that this was enough to begin giving that other part of my mind time to come forward. Now these things happen incrementally, so having dream like phenomenon happen at first may not be the final destination, but it is a good place to start because big things come from small things. You can imagine or pretend that you see that all divisions begin to drop within you, and whatever you imagine that feels most natural is fine, no matter what it is. What you want is something that YOU can relate to. Having your hands in this posture also establishes a circuit of energy in the body that helps with establishing greater unity between the left and right brain. Have you ever wondered why so many cultures all across the world will use this posture of hands together in prayer or meditation? It is because it works, it helps to center your energy and it helps to establish a cross current between the left and right brain. Think of it as a way of bridging the gap that exists between the two hemispheres, except this is being done with your hands. This is in truth what the Hindu call a mudra (of sorts). By doing this you allow your mind to be focused on this very simple thing, which is your hands together. If your mind wanders, just put it back with your hands together. The point here is you are learning to still your mind, which is no easy task. To this end, breathing can help. We know that by breathing in slow deliberate breaths, you can send a signal to your body that you are calm. This is one of the most potent ways of getting into the autonomous nervous system portion of the brain. Breathing is the one action that the body does that we have control over, so by using slow breathing in and out with pauses at the top and bottom of each breath will help you to further relax. The trick is not to fall asleep, and yet being so relaxed that you could fall asleep is a very good place to be. The more you practice, the better you will be at not falling asleep. The mind thus learns through repetition. By repeating this daily, you can get your brain in the habit of this exercise. You will find with time that instead of taking ten minutes to get fully relaxed that you can sit down and in a few moments be at a place that might have taken you much longer in the past. This is progress!

We aren’t used to doing nothing, but this is what you need to do. Focus your mind on your hands. If not that, then be silent and be comfortable. There is no magic in holding a yogic pose, I can promise you. There is no honor in making yourself feel pain or discomfort, this will only forestall reaching your goal.

To help to explain what I mean when I ssy that the left brain is so dominant to the point of acting as a brake against the right brain, it is helpful to watch the TED Talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Her talk is about what happened when she had a stroke in her left hemisphere one morning while getting ready to go to work. As the stroke spread and shut down her left hemisphere, she list her ability to communicate verbally and to read words and even the keypad on her phone. What happened next was that she began to experience a sense of expansiveness, a feeling came if how everything was interconnected. She entered into a state of sammadhi. She understood, as a neuroanatomist, that the right brain handled the perception of our cosmic nature. It was a huge breakthrough for her and for me, I was able to confirm that the sense that I had that awakening was tied to the right brain in consort with the left now working together in greater balance. It took a stroke for Dr. Taylor to see this, but you don’t need to induce a stroke to help bring this part of your awareness forward. You just need a meditation technique that can busy the left brain just enough so that it is stilled. I know how this sounds. It sounds contradictory. In truth you are giving your busy bee left brain a very simple task that tricks it to become as quiet as possible long enough for the quiter nonverbal mind to have room to experience itself in your waking consciousness. By activating it in this way, which is allowing waking consciousness to use it, you are able to provide a means for you to use your mind more fully. You are rewiring your brain so it can be used much more efficiently. Her video follows.

If you study kundalini you will see that the ancients imagined it as a twin energy that rises, establishing itself along the spine and into the brain, moving through and piercing each of the seven major chakras as it goes up (and sometimes down) the spine. What we see is a demonstration of both energy currents in the body and the nervous system being impacted by this new “wiring up” of the system. It happens automatically, you allow it to take place. It results in establishing a “new mind” state. These two currents of energy, called Ida and Pengali are called the Shakti and Shiva, but they correspnd to these two different hemispheres that feel like opposites so that many, including myself, think of them as like female and male. While there is no real gender in the brain, this often opens people up to being aware of their greater being beyond the body and in the physical, as having been both female and male in other incarnations. This awakening thus can open you up to a greater awareness of who you are and who you have been. It is courtesy of allowing the right brain to become more active not in a shallow surface way, but in a much deeper way that is as cosmic as it is physical. The yogis if the past just didn’t have our understanding of neuroanatomy or someone who could make the connections that this is about the brain until now. What I am describing is a way to experience whole brain thinking, feeling, and being. It is best to find yourself in an environment that will support you in this change because it can result in symptoms that can be missidentified as mania and psychosis. If you are an overly mental, rational, and controlling person, I would strongly suggest that you not try to awaken this but instead work on softening your reliance on your linear modes of thinking because the energy is so strong that it can unsteady you. I have personally seen people awaken who should have done more soul searching and preperation before awakening.

Doing this is the first step. It is possible to awaken very quickly, it is also possible that it will take some time. The conundrum is that if you think you know what you are looking for then your preconception can color your experience and it will derail your efforts because this is something you haven’t experienced before. Having a clear mind is best, but it also means not knowing. That’s tricky: how do I know what I am looking for if I don’t know what it is?

It isn’t so hopeless because what you seek is so fundamental, so basic, that it’s in everyone. It isn’t like I am asking you to find the lost grail, I’m pointing out that the grail is in everyone! What this meditation does, or can do, is it acknowledges that cosmic mind is the result of a continuity, a circuit that has been created, where before the circuit was disconnected. This technique joins the opposite wires in your brain and brings them together in such a way that a powerful and enduring union, a completed circuit, exists. Once done, other disconnected parts of you begin to come online. You experience an immediate connection with and an awareness of the body that hasn’t existed before, a sense and awareness of your energetic inventory. The energy that is being produced in awakening automatically begins shedding trauma and releases stuck emotion (if you don’t resist its energetic program). Things might seem hard at first, but this is the healing from your own insanity, your neurosis. You can feel sick at first, but this is like stirring up the toxins before they are cleared away (and it’s a good thing). In time, things get easier as the mind returns more fully to its natural state. Allow this energy to do its work.

It is also possible that you have a much calmer simpler form of awakening, which usually involves a deep awareness of how everything is connected and one, without the more fiery shedding and healing energies of kundalini. My observation is that some people come with more baggage while others may have already done this work in a prior life, which results in a calmer simpler process. The fiery power of kundalini helps to move the baggage, setting it free from the body and mind. Your system will automatically respond in such a way that one of these two polarities enters the scene (and this is along a spectrum so there are a range of possibilities or combinations of these two).

If the idea of something working in you whose will feels stronger than your own upsets you are scares you, this path isn’t yet for you. If you can learn to cultivate surrender and the faith that everything works out in the end, then this is the mindset most needed for the journey into awakening. Again, being overly rational, mental, or always wanting thinfs known or figured out, are all warning signs that more work needs to be done.

Remember, you are providing space for a new arrangement to flower. Like planting a seed, you need only water it (meditation) daily. This is, afterall, superconsciousness we are talking about. It knows what its doing. 🙂

>>> Check out for the next post where I give you an incredibly simple tip that has the power to bring forward your greater awareness quickly as part of waking up.

Awakening – A Primer

I have heard it said that you cannot cause awakening to happen. Most often those who say this are ascribing in some way an agency beyond yourself when trying to push this idea. They do this I think because they do not understand the inner workings of awakening themselves. “It comes from the grace of the creator” one insists.

I will agree that it seems mysterious, and as humans we tend to want to fill in that gap of understanding with something that sounds good, that sounds like it makes sense. It could be only when you have released a certain amount of karma, or eating in the right way, or following a prescribed path or belief system. These, though, are all coincidental elements since what we are talking about amounts to a light switch situated in consciousness and your physiology (the brain and nervous system), that gets switched on when the conditions are right. I know how simple that sounds, but despite the explanations from august teachers and Hindu saints, the reality is that all of this is incredibly simple. Our ignorance about it makes it appear complicated. I know it is hard to believe that something so elusive could be so simple but I will offer an explanation by way of a myth told in India to illustrate the point. The gods and goddesses were talking one day about how to hide the keys to understanding the universe from humans. One goddess suggested that they hide the keys in a deep underwater cavern where it couldn’t be found. Another god suggested hiding it in a cave on a high mountain top. Another said, “Why not hide it in the heart of humans, they will never think to look there!” And that is what they did. The answer to all of this is much closer than we ever thought possible.

I have said before and I will say it again that when I awakened I was very lucky that I was not held by a belief system. This helped me to very closely examine with little bias or expectation about what was happening to me. The reason why this was so helpful was that had I been engaged in trying to awaken by reading books written about or by people who had already awakened, I would have very likely been trapped in a system that ascribed causes to a phenomenon that may in fact have been a case of missatribution. To give you an example, I will cite Ramana Maharshi, who was one of the great men of the last century who attained enlightenment. He explained to his followers that he ascribed his condition to a “pure diet” which involved being vegetarian. He went on to explain that this diet made it easier for him to allow the knots to be released that stood in the way of his new state.

If you study closely teachers like this you will find a lot of very important information, and most of it is very much spot-on. When it comes to what made it work for them, though, you tend to see them passing along what it is they felt did it for them. This is to be expected, but the old saw of “proximity isn’t causation” is operative here. For example, someone attains enlightenment while bathing in the Ganges, or the Jordan river, for instance. This fuels countless people to immerse themselves because the great teacher did so, thinking there was something to it. There was something to it, which had more to do with getting that one person to a place where they were able to bring about the necessary state of mind critical to awakening. In yoga for instance, you have to master many postures if you are to become enlightened. The eyes must be focused in just the right way, tongue on the roof of the mouth, for instance. There are endless prescriptions, and many are mentioned because they were present at the scene when someone, who becomes a teacher, awakened.

I am here to tell you that I did none of the prescribed things often mentioned as critical to awakening. In fact, today, many people are showing that there is something deeper to all of this as thousands, perhaps millions now, are awakening in greater numbers than ever before. Most, not all, did not have a practice, teacher, or guru of any kind prior to awakening. What’s more, I observed in my own awakening and those who I have been interviewing in preperation for a book on the subject, that the lack of a system actually played to peoples’ favor when they began to awaken. When you don’t have someone to rely on, you rely on your own inner resources, which in these cases were not informed by a system of belief to “guide” them. I will also say that having information from those familiar with the phenomenon can be helpful, there is also the risk that the experienced individual can pass along their own beliefs about the subject which can be swallowed hook line and sinker by the innexperienced person. This has bred numerous ideas based on little to no real evidence for why they are true. As is often the case, proximity being seized upon as causality can wind up distorting understanding in little and big ways. The idea that once you awaken you are suddenly endowed with superior inner knowledge, while partly true, can be entirely trumped by the willingness on the part of the awakened to buy into notions or beliefs that simply do not hold water. Those beliefs can powerfully misdirect a person’s awareness. Buyer beware. It is much better in my experience to observe closely what us happening to you, like a scientist, resisting the desire to ascribe a meaning to what is happening to you. If you do, and keep your mind open to all possibilities, I have found that the pieces fall into place not by way of belief, but through repeated experience, which is a superior method to simply theorizing, as this can lead to grasping for a cause that may have only a coincidental role in the process. Be ready to rethink what it is that you think is happening at any time in the process because understanding often becomes prey to belief, often resulting in a perceptual cul-de-sac.

Someone once said that providing techniques for awakening is like giving a loaded gun to a child. I think in truth, we should enter the world awake and not go through this odd process of awakening. Species not from Earth have been there for a very long time, they do not go through awakening like we do. Imagine how different that is. I am not entirely convinced that awakening is all that natural but may in fact be the result of a cognitive barrier placed there in each person through a physiological effect. It looks like the problem isn’t that awakening is so dangerous but that humans show every sign of having a perceptual curtain drawn that has, incidentally, resulted in our accumulation of stored emotion to the point that humans are neurotic. Kundalini is a cure, but you do need to be ready for what comes. If you are an overly mental person, this experience could make life very difficult for you before things get better. In the old days you learned from a teacher, you had to seek them out (you had to be pretty serious about it), and they required you to have a practice, which is important for learning a degree of control of mind before awakening. I do not subscribe to the idea of kundalini being dangerous. If you are unhappy, ill at ease, unable to concentrate, and are taking mood enhancing drugs, now is not the time to awaken kundalini. Kundalini is not an escape, but a kind of accounting and cleansing. It is intense, it can push you to your limits, and isn’t for everyone. You must be able to be honest with yourself, you see.

There was a time when I felt telling people how to awaken was not a wise move because of how difficult awakening can sometimes be for people. However, I have found that now, more than ever, we are in a place where there is more information available about awakening, and the hardest part is feeling like you might just be losing your mind, especially in cases where people, like myself, didn’t think to themselves, “I think I want to try to awaken” and not know what is happening to them. It helps a lot to have someone tell you, for example, that something you are going through at the time is perfectly normal. The fear of losing your mind can cause more problems than losing it itself.

Today I have only one main caution to people interested in awakening, and it is this: if you are a very rational person who needs to have everything in your life under control, you should rethink trying to trigger this experience. If you lack imagination and emotional flexibility, rethink going further. The reason for this is because those who are faced with the forces of awakening are now dealing with a part of consciousness that transcends the rational and works as well as it does due to it’s nonrational character. This can be incredibly difficult for a rational person, someone that the Zen master Taisen Deshimuru described as “mental” as poor candidates for cosmic mind. Taisen observed that monks who were overly mental had a very hard time with the experience. In my own life I knew a few people like this and it limited their growth and healing in the awakening process. The rational mindset hides from view the subsumed emotional energy that awakening can help to transmute. If awakening was a logical process this might not matter but awakening is very much about becoming aquainted with the parts of the self that have a deep capacity for feeling, and by having emotional baggage or energy standing in the way only limits the self, hobbles it, in this process.

If you are one of these people, I recommend learning to first cultivate a sense of surrender and letting go of the need to always know what is happening and the desire to control the outcome. In many ways it is like having someone bigger than you, more powerful than you are, stepping into your inner life and beginning to make changes to your life whether you like it or not.

This process doesn’t get easier until you learn the art of surrender, true surrender, where you put your life in the hands of this powerful force that is in your consciousness. Only then can the clearing process move along smoothly (Note to Self: this is going to happen).

It is helpful to practice how to reach deep states of surrender. Are you okay with not knowing? There is an interesting practice in Christianity that involves handing it over to God. When people do this, they can let go of needing to attend to how something turns out. You don’t need to be a Christian to cultivate this type of trust in a higher power that everything is going to work out. It serves to keep the rational non-feeling part of the mind out of the picture. This is an important prerequisite.

One important path into this is through meditation. Not just any meditation, but a type of meditation that will allow the go-to state most people still in slumber use to be side-stepped. To do this looks like you aren’t doing anything, and this is why most people don’t get anywhere with meditation in regards to waking up. What I think is helpful is to fill in this gap with the awareness that this is the case so that you can keep on the right path. What you are doing is allowing the knee-jerk state to go quiet. This isn’t easy, but through practice, you can incrementally train yourself to quiet the mind, that part that when you are trying to silence the mind, it just keeps on moving: “I need to settle this issue with my boss because it’s causing problems……I need to make sure I get half and half tomorrow…what’s that red spot on my leg?….Oh gosh, I’m meditating, I better get back to it…” It goes on and on.

One very useful method for quieting the part of the mind that chatters, what us called “monkey mind” is to give the mind something to focus on, giving it something to do. I used this method because my mind was all-a-chatter in the beginning and I had used meditation for decades, and despite being shown how to quiet the mind in the early 1990’s by an early guide experience, no amount of regular meditation got the job done. The method I am going to show you can serve to create a bridge to a quiter state of mind. Once you begin to do this, the other side, the quieter, silenced, part of your mind can begin to come forward. When that happens it acts like a catalytic force, which is the union of opposites that makes awakening possible. Think of it this way: you have two wires in your consciousness with corresponding wires that exist in your neurophysiology that connects the two hemispheres together in a “new” way. This union creates a new synthesis of mind that gives rise to a third state that is greater than the sum of its parts. These two seeming opposites in consciousness and in our physiology are aligned or connected in a way that has nit happened before in most people. This “silent second” part of mind has to be given the opportunity to come forward. This technique might work for you since it occupies the loud chattery part of mind long enough to begin to allow this quiter part to come forward, to begin to work with the part of mind that has reflexively been front and center for most people’s lives.

It’s helpful for me to explain that trying to make this happen will get in the way of it happening. What you are dealing with is a force that drives the universe and all of consciousness. You don’t make this work, it works regardless of what you do, you open your awareness to it in this body of yours in the here and now. The more your rational mind gets out of the way, the better. What I am going to show you is like your opening a door. Your job will be to allow, to facilitate this new arrangement. So quiet your mind and your expectations. This amounts to a union of opposites in mind, which is like an inner marriage. Your system knows how to deal with this new energy in consciousness if you remain in or cultivate a state of surrender.

The technique is simple. You want to calm your mind as best as you can. Start by breathing in the way that will instantly begin to signal to your body that you are relaxed. This method of breathing is a slow deliberate breath in and out that should be slowed so that you count five seconds to take in a full breath after which you hold that breath for three seconds before exhaling the breath in a long slow exhale lasting just as long as your inhale and holding your inhale for three seconds. If you do this over a period of at least several minutes, it will do a lot to calm your body and quiet your mind. It is an important first step before beginning meditation.

The Technique

First get comfortable. You can do this sitting, lounging, or even lying down. Since I did not meditate regularly, I found that I used my conditioned response to wanting to fall asleep to work in my favor by meditating before going to sleep. My mind calmed down the fastest, but I did need to be careful not to fall asleep. Monks often will begin meditation early in the morning when they have already slept but are still in a quiet state. Whatever you do long enough will create the conditioning for your body and mind to follow, and depending on who you are and what turn of mind that you have, it can take shorter or longer depending on a host of factors.

Second, place your hands together. Have you ever wondered why so many cultures clasp hands together in a prayerful position? Is it just possible that we have been subconsciously aware of what this position does for helping to bring our energy body into concordance with itself? Once you do this, place your awareness on the where your hands come together. This posture creates a flow of energy through the body that is directly helpful in reaching a certain state. Imagine yourself very small, so small in fact that you can sit in the whirls of your fingers like they are sand dunes or small crevices. Watch as you see subtle energy moving from one hand to the other. You can make this into a production if you want to by imagining these things. It will keep your mind occupied, too. You can also sit and simply place your attention on where your hands meet and then don’t think of anything else. After a while your will find that your mind has drifted, so just bring your attention back to your hands. Visualize them while your eyes are closed as placed together and feel how they feel placed in a prayer-like position. Do this for up to forty minutes each time. The point is to allow your mind to go blank. The point is also to keep your mind occupied with this one very simple act. If you find yourself thinking about the grocery list, simply bring your mind back to where it was and clear your mind. You want to keep the chattering part of your mind quiet. You can also control your breathing so that it is long and slow, and this will send signals to relax your body more and more.

You will want to do this exercise for about forty days for forty minutes each day. You want to do it each day for this length of time in order to give it time to work, and to see if you have the capacity to reach the silent state where this fruit can be found.

Anything that comes up should be observed and allowed to happen. Sometimes some people will feel like they are dreaming. Sometimes the mind is so used to being busy that it will create things that will keep up the activity to which it is accustomed. Sometimes the body will start to itch, too. That is itself one way that the body keeps itself to its accustomed level of physical activity. What you are doing is learning to draw this activity down and it may take some time and some discipline to do this, but the body and mind can be trained gradually. Place your attention back on your hands and focus on where your hands touch.

When you are very relaxed and are near the end of your meditation, tell yourself that you will let go of all the things that stand in your way of progressing. You can focus on something that always seems to trigger you in your life that you would like to see gone and give yourself the suggestion that you are going to very soon just let this issue go. Forgive others who you feel have hurt you, and see how you feel relieved by doing so, as if a weight has been lifted off your body and your heart. See yourself as no longer burdened with many of the cares that tend to weight you down. Forgive those who have trespassed against you just as you as forgiveness for your own trespass. Feel how good it feels to do this, the relief that it brings. Feel how it changes how you feel in your body, the freedom that it brings.

One added practice that can help in bringing your mind into a state of unity is a technology developed by the Monroe Institute called Hemisync. This technique uses different frequencies of sound in each ear so that the two hemispheres match the difference between the two frequencies in order to keep the brain “synced.” Robert Monroe observed that both hemispheres create two different frequencies most of the time, and by using sound he found you could cause the two hemispheres to come into unity putting out the same brain waves. This tech can be used to do all kinds of things, depending on which frequency range that the hemisync program is set up to help your brain to produce. You can use hemisync programs for learning, and you can also use it for deep relaxation and inner work. The program that I am going to provide you with which is available free on the web as of the time of this writing can be used for helping to train your two hemispheres to come into synchronization faster and easier. The link is at the bottom of the page.

You can begin to use this program for some of your meditations. It is largely unguided, but there is a preparation provided that you may want to use for the beginning of some of your meditations. This takes up about twelve minutes of the program and it involves placing your troubles in a lock box so you can proceed with the program unencumbered. By the 12th minute, you have nothing but the sound. It is important to use headphones since one sound goes into the left ear and one sound goes into the right ear, and this does make a big difference in your results.

As you do the meditation if you feel like you are having something coming up, step out of its way and let it come, remain in an observational mode. If you feel like feeling emotion helps it to pass, then let that emotion flow, but come back to the meditation again.

After a period of time, which could be a week or more, you may find that you begin to enter into a state where the mind is quiet and you begin to feel a seemingly blank state, almost like that part of sleep where you aren’t quite dreaming yet, where you have awareness but your thoughts are very still. From time to time you might find that you black or blank out a little. This is in fact not a bad thing. You want the mind to drift into this state some, and it is marked by a feeling of presence but not of activity. You might even feel like you. begin to feel another state of mind where if you bring your rational thinking mind into it such as “what was that that just happened?” whatever what was happening will stop immediately. This is the same action where in a dream or as you are just beginning to dream after you fall asleep, sometimes you become self conscious again and wonder what was just happening, which takes you immediately out of what seemed like a floating trance-like state and back into “normal” awareness again. This floating nothing-like state will seem like nothing, but this is precisely the place you want to be, to get used to being. The biggest challenge is not to watch whatever happens in this state with your normal waking self. You want to observe but you don’t want to come back into self-consciousness, or normal ego-mind.

You are turning your awareness inward so that you are also turning what energy you normally bleed out through your attention with the world of your senses and your mind. You are circulating that energy into your awareness and back into your body. Your awareness is made up of energy and now this raw energy you are keeping in a loop so it builds in capacity over time. All the while you are keeping your attention on your hands and nothing else. Anything else that comes up, learn slowly how to let these things rise and fall and pay them no attention. Over time you will get better at this, so be patient with the process. The point here is to enter into a deeper and deeper state of stillness because what lies beneath needs this stillness to be felt by you. If something comes up like a pain in your body you can simply observe this and ask the energy in your mind and body to allow the pain to unravel by not resisting it anymore. You don’t need to know how this will be done, just imagine that there is a part of you that knows how to deal with it perfectly so you can not attend to it. Feel your energy, and be present with it during this exercise.

As you progress through this exercise and you find that you are having some success with it, you can fold into your practice a quick five or six minute inventory of your body, starting with your feet and letting them relax and release the stress of the day, slowly moving up your legs and into the trunk of your body, up to your chest, your arms, your neck and head. You can imagine a warm fluid flowing through your body which instantly relaxes each part that it flows through, and you can imagine that this fluid, like water, washes away any issues that may have been stored there. You can feel how this fluid washes away anything that is there and carries is up and out the top of your head. You can use breathing of the kind that I described to you to help facilitate this effect. Let anything that happens happen and always observe, knowing that you are protected and safe in this exercise. The simplest way to this is to just feel your energy while giving yourself permission to not have to attend to anything else. You can train your mind to reach a very simple place that is necessary for getting down into the substratum of your being.

Throughout your day you can also place your hands together to have a moment of being mindful of this state, and you can even do this by placing one finger together with the other finger from the other hand if you want, thinking how it brings you back to a mindful state as you wait in the grocery store line or sitting at a light or at a desk.

If this practice works for you and you have questions, you are welcome to ask me anything that you would like. Once you have progressed through this first round of the exercise, there are others which I can provide you when you reach the right state. But for now, begin working on this method to see how it works for you. Remember, there is no magic bullet for any of this. Most practices are designed with certain goals in mind, but these goals are best kept away from your thoughts as you do the exercise. This is so simple an exercise that it can seem boring at first, but after you give it some time to work, you will find that you will begin to experience a shift, almost imperceptible at first. It will seem almost as though you have gone into a kind of dream state, and this is fine. Additionally, if you fall asleep, that is fine also. Each day as you practice this method, try anew to not fall asleep while doing the exercise. The universe, which is made up of intelligent energy, will take note of what you are doing and will conspire to help you. It may not always seem that this is so, but big things come from small things and all of this can take some time. The very fact that you are reading this is itself a big step in the right direction.

Most of your success will depend upon you. Awakening is a very personal process and what works for one person may not work for another. In some cases, you might need more practice, in others other techniques added to the meditation at the right time can have positive effects. You are always welcome to contact me directly for suggestions based on what you find and are experiencing. When the time is right there is another exercise that can assist in your progress which I can pass on to you. This was given to me during meditation to do by an inner voice, but I have since found that it was once used in ancient times with the progress to awakening. For now, let the practice as I have given it be your first guide, and let me know how you are progressing and what you find.

This is the hemisync program (use with headphones): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze2jcwu4ddA

-Parker

Plant Medicine As An Ally In Meditation

Copyright, Parker Stafford

I was given weed recently as a result of my describing what took place this Summer where weed had made me more psychic, something I wrote about here at WTI.

Alone finally last night after the holiday goings-on, I decided to get ready for bed and go through a meditation after using the weed I had been given.

I used a very small amount, about a pinch, about 3/4 the size of a pea (if that). This amounted to two regular puffs and one fraction of a third. This was a very low dose, although the version I used was described as being a strong hybrid version. I put on my headphones, pulled up a Monroe Institute Hemisync program from the Gateway Experience, and listened with headphones. This particular audio helps to induce deep Theta states, and while there are directions for relaxation and breathing, most of it is designed for your own inner work. The audio lasts about 45 minutes, just enough to get you there.

Everything happened very quickly. Before the narrator/guide began his first comments, I already felt a presence of a male who was speaking to me in this bright excited voice who seemed to be positioned above me who extended his hand saying, “Take my hand and I’ll show you all the places you can go!” At this point I was already dissociated from my body and traveling through what looked to be outer space. I remember having an experience like this before many decades ago where I moved out of my body and began seeing a starry sky and feeling that the stars were actually consciousness. The sensation at the time was overwhelming and it put an end to the projection because of the state of overwhelm I invariably would fall into that kept me from further projecting. This time, I thought about this and as I saw all these stars, I didn’t feel overwhelm but instead felt a stirring warmth in my core where there was only love. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I acknowledged this love as the next step in my evolution and the evolution of everyone on the planet.

I was interupted by the narrator of the audio a number of times as he made suggestions for how to breathe and relax. I was there in seconds, I was ready instantly and kept having my meditation interrupted by this voice. It didn’t trip me up completely though, it was more that I paused my meditation and waited for the voice to complete what it had to say since it pulled me out of the “broad mind” state as I felt pulled into a more linear language-based state (rational left brain). I’ll have to work more on that in the future. I found myself back at my body after expanding outward through both space and dimension, which all took place very quickly.

I noticed during this whole experience that my third eye had become very active. This time, though, I could feel the third eye pressure at the bridge of my nose. My third eye is now a vertical band that goes from my nose all the way up to my hairline. When it activates, it is usually felt as a large dot on my forehead with a sense of energy and even something that feels akin to tightness of a sort. This tightness isn’t inhibiting in any way, it signals that my third eye is activating in a strong way. It is more that this tightness is the result of these bands of energy that flow around it and out of it. When this happens, it is a sign that I can begin to see clearly beyond the physical if I focus my mind correctly with the third eye center. The two work together in bringing information through. I was aware of information streaming into different parts of my brain which would get routed to the third eye as the lens used to see into the realities that these intuitions represented. Likewise, I was aware that the third eye could see into the mind to pick these things up. It was a fluid dynamic system where informatiin flowed both ways.

As I thought about this, the third eye energy shifted up into its usual place which was mid-brow up to the edge of my hairline. The whole area constitutes the third eye for me, which is akin to a long extended flame of awareness and sensation. The Hindu seers who paint the tilak on their foreheads are using an image of how I experience the third eye. Two vertical lines with a cental line in the center all corresponding to the Ida, Pengali, and Shushumna nadi. The Ida and Pengali merge in union and balance in the Shushuma, the place of boundless bliss. Below is a photo of the tilak as it is worn by mendicate monks. There are variations of the tilak, so the one shown below is just one of a handful of versions used.

I was also met by a small presence that I can only describe as dwarfish that spoke and moved excitedly as it began showing me the energy lines in my legs. I had gone from standing on a beach to being up in the hills in a tropical location atop a flat-topped roof of someone’s house, which was where this being began pointing out the energy lines in my legs.

I was in this kind of environment because the hemisync audio uses ocean waves as part of its audio. I naturally found myself standing on a beach, and later moved from the beach uphill into the mountains above where I landed on a slightly sloping rooftop. The being was showing me where the energy lines crossed in my legs when the narrator broke in and it made it hard to continue. I will see about going back to this in another meditation. I knew or could feel how others had mapped the energy body in not too different a way in the past in meditations much like this one, and I thought how easy it was, not the arduous task as I had originally had thought it was.

I was keen to get into the leg chakras because I could feel how there was some blocked energy that resided at the junction of the torso and the legs. It was curious how this energy trailed off behind me, right around my behind and extending out like coat-tails behind me. This awareness has always been one of the great gifts conferred by awakening, and the awareness itself has been enough to dissolve countless blocks in my field. At one time many years ago this awareness would make me feel defeated by the sheer volume of material present to still clear. Now, though, it existed more as a remnant, a trailing bit of material near my lower back.

What is worth mentioning is the back trouble I have been having since November. The week of Thanksgiving was where it came to a head after driving to see family. It was so bad I couldn’t move from a sitting to a standing position without the use of a broom handle which I used for about a week to get up from my couch. Luckily, I somehow managed to keep working even though all I wanted to do was to lie flat on the floor. I have been slowly rehabilitating my back muscles so I can move more freely. What would have taken weeks if adjystments by a chiropractor I was able to do on my own and now the sore muscles are in a much better place with slow and gentle stretches. It was I think not a coincidence that I was having this tightness along with the enhanced awareness of the stuck energy near my bottom in this meditation.

I soon decided to drift off to sleep after this took place. I revisited the idea of telepathy before going to sleep but every person who I put my mind to seemed much too vivid and in a tangle for me to even try another experiment along these lines. I did however find a part of my mind aware of one person who I kept feeling like I was communicating with during the meditation, like a quick check-in contacted me and there was an important message waiting for me from tat person when I checked messages this morning.

I say this only as a reminder about the things we can explore, learn, and discover. We are all inheritors of a noble light that is supportive and loving. We go and experience things that are part of our present “set and setting” and experiences are part and parcel of where we are at any moment in time.

I will note that up until this summer, I have only ever used natural methods for reaching accelerated states of being and awareness. I have also been an advocate for this approach for many decades (using it myself exclusively) since my early twenties—in the late 1980’s. My experience this past summer made me rethink this approach. After being able to reach these ecstatic states naturally, I have considered what some substances might do to help further expand both awareness and experience. While I have no interest in being a heavy user, I am considering this as one wrinkle among many in this entire process.

If weed helps me to hone in on the remnants if blocked energy, then I will consider future meditations using very small amounts to assist in sharpening that awareness. I don’t sense that weed opened my third eye, that initiation took place in a meditation in late 2006. Rather, my intent to do this meditatiin was set on “finding out what I might see ir discover” with my third eye dutifully responding to that intent and also aided by the much more fluid state I found myself in as the weed began to take affect.

The goal for me is to learn how to emulate these states without outside substances. I will mention though that even the food that we eat can have a significant effect on our physiology not unlike weed has done. I have found states of bliss after eating cantaloupe and other melons because it served to modify how my body responded to the energy of the awakened state. Just being well hydrated can change how I feel. Taking vitamin D has had dramatic effects on how I experience bliss, for example. So weed? It may well be one of many plant helpers that I can use to help open up my cognition and awareness to valid physical and nonphysical states, not as a distorter of experience, but as a liberator from an inhibited state to one that is not as inhibited.

I hope you are getting a break and have enjoyed the holidays. If you don’t hear back from me, happy new year!

Overcoming Resistance As A Path To Healing

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now Is The BEST Time

If you want to know where you are in cultivating presence and whether your quiet-mindedness holds up only because you know there will be something to relieve you of having to hold that “pose, ” now is a great time to test whether you are as far along as you thought. And no, this isn’t a competition. It is a test, and while it is easy to say where you think you are, the actual boots on the ground experience will be what actually gets to tell the story. And don’t beat yourself up over it if you feel you came up short.

I say this because in the beginning of my work, because so much was happening so quickly, I thought I was further along than I thought. I didn’t realize one release does not cure the whole system. It is one step, one erasure of something from the past. This is painstaking work. Be gentle, be kind, but also be honest with yourself.

Why?

I knew her before and after awakening. Her reaction to her awakening resulted in her going through all manner of meltdowns, most were in front of me. In each case she would say I was at fault for her preterbations emotionally. That of course wasn’t true, and as an observer it showed to me the sheer volume of emotional junk that she was dealing with and how she was going to deal with it going forward. I was able to see pretty clearly how she thought she was further along than she actually was. Everytime there was some release or some shift, a grand pronouncement was made. Everything was suddenly better I am healed!

On the one hand it was congradulations on the change, but the reality was there was still way too much remaining for her to be able to behave and feel without ripple, without upset, without problems. Let me be clear, we are human, and we are not going to be perfect. We also must rid ourselves of the old patterns in order for the presence of the higher self to come forward to aid and guide. It (the higher or core self) helps a lot, but you are still human and you are still having to deal with duality. So it is a balance. Each release makes something easier (whatever you were repressing). It doesn’t make the whole thing better necessarily. You have to want it. Repressed emotion will ALWAYS make you want something different from what you THINK you want.

What???

Be honest. Be true to you, no one else. Have compassion for yourself. This isn’t a race. Didn’t get everything you wanted to get done in this life? You can do it in the next one. Sure, challenging yourself can be fun, so do that if it is your bliss, but go easy on yourself. And still be honest, too. This may all sound unusual, but it is a good prescription. We have all time.

I wonder if she got to where she hoped she would be? I suspect she still suffers from that problem of overstating the cure. I think I served as a test for her development. Ten minutes with me would reveal all of the places that still needed work. Our connection meant that I could feel all the places that needed work. She was a real “fixer-upper.” I could feel her blocks because they were not mine, but I could feel them as if they were mine (except they weren’t-and this made it possible to know all of them).

In a similar way this pandemic can be the same test to see where you are in your work. Just wait for it until you start feeling hard or rough. Where did that come from? Ask yourself, your inner wisdom, to show you where it comes from and then wait. It might come in meditation, when falling asleep, taking a shower, who knows. It will show you if you trust it and are willing to place yourself in a blind spot. You are receptive, blind to what you think it might be. Sssshhhh…..

The blind spot is an ability to not know while letting another part, your subconscious perhaps, maybe it is superconscious, to do the work for you. It has the peculiar quality of feeling as though you yourself didn’t get the answer but something else did. I think it is you, but that is for another time. But it is imagining the problem having a string tying itself to some part of you deep down. You grab that string and it leads you down into the watery depths where the core self resides, or at least the source of this issue in you. This works only because you are going blind, only because you keep your rational concrete mind in ignorance. Then, once you reach its end, you just feel. Don’t rationalize now. That will not work. Feel. Sense. No judging. How did it start? Was it in another life? If so, it may show itself as its released. A feeling might bubble up. Let it go. As it does it might reveal its origins. If it doesn’t, that is okay too. It is gone, that is good enough. Some part that was hard is now easier. It is like a walkway made up of tessera, that is, mosaics. One piece might stick up more and you find yourself tripping over it over and over again. After you do this, it is easier in that one place (within you). So doing this work is like repaving a rough walkway of small mosaics. After a few years you notice a difference. It takes time. It is a labor of love. When you return, you will have a smoother foundation for a new story that will be easier. I promise this is how this works. When you reincarnate your foundation will be so much easier you will wonder why you didn’t discover and started using this sooner.

So what bugs you the most? Selfish people? Duplicity? Dishonesty? It will take looking into yourself first to turn that hard feeling into bliss. But you can do it, and I hope you do. You are worth the bliss it will bring.

-All My Blessings-

~Parker

Healing Energy Meditation

Someone recently asked me for a meditation technique which I have written about in the past, but during a search for it I realized it might be easier to have it be at the top of the blog roll.

This is a gentle and healing method that is very simple and was passed on to me from an old friend just before awakening took hold. It was in fact one of several types of meditations that I used that helped to train my mind in how to trigger and sink into the part of our awareness where we process cosmic consciousness in the brain. This is the right brain, and to utilize its native focus requires a big shift in your awareness which I will describe to you as a potential outcome of this method.

It is my experience that this method can be an important prelude to awakening, but there also needs to be several other parts added in order to more fully prepare the energy body for this significant change that can take place once you are properly prepared. This technique is gentle so anyone can do it in order to learn about their powers of consciousness.

To begin, you should pick a time when you can be both relaxed but alert. I have always meditated before bedtime because my body was already trained to become deeply relaxed, a precursor for all meditation work. In Buddhism this is often done very early in the morning and it is done consistently, again, because the body will in time slip more easily into these deep states of calm. I will go to bed early so that I am less prone to just fall asleep. I also like having a quiet house and dim or even darkness to cut out any distractions. You might have times that work just as well with you that are different from how I do it. Do what works for you.

You can sit or you can lie down. Just be in a relaxed position. Place your hands together like you are praying. Do you ever wonder why so many traditions use placing the hands together? Could it be that it helps to bring the mind together in a unified way energetically?

I want you to imagine getting very small and standing in the crevices and grooves of where your hands come together and to focus only on your hands. Feel your hands and keep your focus on them and try to eliminate all thought reactions for as long as you can. You can start with doing breathwork if it helps to settle you and quiet your mind. Long deep breaths, focusing on just your breathing, works wonders for calming and quieting the mind. Breathe deep and long and hold the breath for at least three seconds, four or five might work even better…just don’t do it for so long that it makes you deel out of breath.

So here you are, focused on your hands. Just do that. Settle in. Eventually, your mind might wander, but don’t be upset with yourself. Just bring your awareness back to your hands again. Doing this will slowly train you to have longer periods where you are focused on just your hands and fingers. This is an important first step. Feel and focus on the place where your hands touch. Very simple.

You need to do this meditation for at least two weeks each day in order to see any benefits or results. This takes time in order for the right kind of shift to work within.

Over time, maybe quickly, you will notice that you might move from your usual awareness to an awareness where you lose your focus of self. I liken this to how we dream. We often aren’t aware of ourselves in quite the same way when dreaming. It is slightly….defocused. Have you ever been drifting off to sleep but found yourself suddenly in a kind of blank state, perfectly quiet, but you ask yourself “where am I?” only to jerk back to waking consciousness? This meditation will assist you in cultivating that awareness by letting your mind go blank for periods of time. This is the beginning of the shift I am relating to you.

This state is not a normal observer state and any effort to bring ego awareness into it will break the wave of awareness and any phenomenon that might be arising. This is not your “doer” consciousness, this is almost like dreaming consciousness. It works very differently than your waking awareness does.

Now you might begin having small dreams or visions with this method. Just observe and don’t judge. As you sit or lie with your hands together, just keep your awareness on the space between your hands. Being able to not disrupt the flow of phenomena is itself the challenge of this method.

I know how simple this method is, but it is hard because of how spare it is. It must be, in order to train you to shift awareness, but all the while it is also cycling your energy back into your system through joining the hands together.

It is important to be quiet in your thoughts so the energy can do its work. Its possible to experience a state of presence which is largely devoid of a need to think. If you are familiar with this state I am mentioning, you can use it here. Often we feel this state only fleetingly, but its time base can be stretched so that it lasts longer. Don’t worry if you can only hold this for short periods, this isn’t a race! And if you are unable to do this, concentrate on your hands and put your attention there.

Twenty minutes a day will work for this method, but it is even better if you can go forty minutes or an hour. Do what you can and start with where you are. We are all different.

In time, you will notice things happening. What exactly, I wont say because it can be different for each person, but know that this method is very healing.

Pay attention to your dreams during this time and see if you notice any changes. Do you notice any changes during the day? During the meditation being able to hold on to that state of nonlinear being which is the feeling nonverbal self is key. This part of you can begin to come forward and with it some very interesting things. When I say “feeling” I don’t mean your emotions. I mean your capacity to feel and to feel deeply.

The important thing is to not try and use your rational observer mind during this, but the part of you that sees but does not critically examine and think the way you usually do while awake. I know this might sound impossible to do, but give it a try and don’t worry whether you feel like you aren’t catching on fast. We are each unique and different.

If things start to happen, it just means that it is working well for you. If anything comes up that seems odd or alarming, don’t judge it, never judge, just watch it and observe with curiosity and interest, but let it pass as it does naturally. And if you wind up experiencing something that you don’t understand or are confused by, feel free to leave me a comment. I can see your comments before they get published so if its personal I can not publish your comment and then leave a comment of my own that answers your question. But most of what people experience wont be earth shattering or private, so I welcome your comments or questions.

Now as an aside, once you begin, you want to carry through each day with this meditation for at least two weeks. You will need to give it an opportunity to work its magic. If after the first week you feel like you are getting nowhere, simply stop. It might not be a good match for where you are. But if given time, this method tends to bring very good results when applied in the way described. If this method works for you, you can do the meditation while standing in line at a store by placing just a few fingers together. This helps to concentrate the energy in your body in a very particular way!

As an adjunct to this meditation, being able to learn what your biggest hot button issues are and do the work to bring energy to those places where they normally reside in your body will assist this work later for stimulating a more gradual opening to awakening. Choose something you can do, that is easy enough for you to deal with but that has dogged you most of your life. These are blocks and they impede the flow of this energy that is behind awakening.

For example, whenever you feel your stomach tighten or your heart cramped, these are signs of blocked energy in the body. Learning to know how to release them opens the light body to a better flow of prana or qi (chi). When you remove what divides you, you open yourself more and more to the flow of energy tied to awakening or kundalini. Go slow, take it easy, but also engage your intuition. Going at this with fear is not the way. You need to cultivate trust in the energy. While the energy is strong, stronger than you, it wont ever hurt or harm but seek to heal you even more, even if it all seems a bit much.

Have fun and let me know how it goes!

In The Shadow Of The Light

In my last entry I described a meditation I got caught up in that resulted in strong light activity, a phenomenon often tied to awakening experiences. After what was a very productive session, I decided it would be a good idea to revisit the meditation again to see if I could continue with the work. This time was decidedly different, but was oddly similar to the movie about the after death experience “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams. In a similar way, it was also a bit like the movie “Inception” too. This was due to the lucidity present throughout the experience, I think.

When I say my meditation was like a movie, it’s not lost on me that there was an undercurrent of drama, hinting at a subsumed emotional energy, like a great big question lying in hidden veils at the center of some great edifice that kept coming up and up, over and over. But this meditation took me deep while awake, and then took me into dream, while I alternated between lucidity and full-on dream state and forgetfulness of earthbound ego awareness. This time, instead of brilliance, I delved deep into the shadow.

I have tended to see awakening taking on this kind of cycle; a moment of brilliance followed by a deep dredge of the muck as though one serves to bring up the other. It isn’t perhaps why many people misunderstand the power that awakening contains. It’s not all rainbows. It is more about clearing, cleansing, and it can be hard on you to do this kind of delving. I know it’s not fun for me….but it always comes with a reward that is forever reaped, an inheritance that remains perennial.

I slipped into the deep state. This part is the easy part. It’s being able to remain lucid enough inside such a deep lovely swirling eddy of energy and not lose consciousness, especially when it’s at the end of the day and you are ready for bed. I remained neutral, not seeking to do anything since the intention was already placed. I just had to wait for the subconscious and higher self to do their part. I was along as a witness to what would unfold. My cat lay next to me, again, purring softly, a few snorts as she drifted either deep or up out of her own deep sleep. This time, she would project right into my lucid dream, acting as a reminder to remember why I was there.

I wound up inside a dream. It was night and I was walking around an old house that I remembered having dreamed of years before in another shadow work dream at an earlier stage in my progress. Nowadays, dream imagery and its meaning tends to be much more direct or understandable than it ever was before awakening. For me, a house represents the construct of human consciousness. It is an image that Jesus often used, too, and it has been a consistent image each time I dream of it. In one dream I might be in a house, in another, a warehouse, or in one, I stood on the streets of a city as I observed the roots of some massive tree or plant that was growing in a large building, revealing its roots as it emerged through cracks in a deep stairwell….an image that spoke to me of the work that remained to be done in the root chakra, the foundation.

Last night, it was that same old haunted house. It had the weight of ghosts, of lives and people who had lived inside of it and now it lay abandoned. A moment of lucidity began to build and I felt myself dream while kicking into meditation all awareness simultaneously. The last time I was here, the dream ended with me discovering that I could lift up into the air; a clear indication of my letting go and allowing the organic force flow through me. I lifted up into the treetops. This time, though, I was solidly grounded. I pondered what else was there to clear out, to resolve in this tumble of an old home? It was in its own slanted way, a great life, but it wasn’t my life today, but one lived a long time ago. All of this was emblematic of the work I had left incomplete in that previous life, and here I was, having to set it right, to give it that moment of forgiveness it so needed in order to be free.

The house lay in a depression, between two sloping meadows. It must have been a lovely sight in its heyday, but it was lying in moonlight and was ramshackle. The large wrapping porch had sunk in, taking a wing of the roof with it. You could see into its interior and as I made my way around it, I realized how much it lay in shadow. “If there is to be light here, I am the one who must bring it…” I realized.

Just as I thought this, I felt myself lift and the dream fall away from me. I was warm in bed, and only had a moment to ponder as, like a swimmer, I went right back in, grabbing a quick breath as the waves of sleep lapped over my head and everything went muffled and I lost ordinary waking consciousness, trusting that I would find myself again on the other side.

I was walking in yet another building, another old house, and this time I was inside it. There was no light, and windows down the hall and into a large outer room were painted over a kind of greenish color. Drapes hung in tatters, and there was a drip of water that made a smacking sound as each drop filled a puddle on the wooden floor, now a wash of sepia in the dark of the night. I remembered this house, too. This was one I didn’t like at all. It looked like it hadn’t been lived in in forty years. Nothing was bright about this place, it had a dank and decaying feeling to it. I kept walking though, wondering if I would find something that would mean I had broken through to something. I noticed kitty was with me. She has a name, but she knows kitty best. Sometimes she is monkey, sometimes Georgette. There she was, her tail flicking upwards. I could hear her thoughts, wondering why we were here, then immediately realizing that she was in my dream. She settled in after that and began following alongside me with less trepidation. She predicted that we wouldn’t be here long,and she was right. I surfaced yet another time out of sleep and felt my deep breathing. It was like being awake, but feeling the spell of dreaming still all around me.

The answers didn’t come in the usual fashion. So much of these places represented aspects of myself from the past, mostly distant, unresolved, lying unseen, needing badly to be seen. They had a surrealistic quality to them. I felt that edge of…fear, dread, and yuck about it. But that was exactly why I had to go back into these old haunts. I wasn’t there seeking to do what a guide once admonished me never to do, which was to try and drag it back into my life again. No, this was different. The idea that I had to carry the light into these darker corners was what this was all about.

Awakening is ruthless. You can’t bullshit yourself. Only when it’s completely clean, clear, forgiven, can things be forgotten. Until our inner compass is satisfied, we wind up going back to those places to sweep that little remaining bit of shadow away. I felt like I was ingesting it, taking it in so that I could metabolize it into light. Kitty stirred and looked at me through blinking eyes, sleepily, her head up, then back down, nonchalantly falling back in for another round of sleep. This felt like it was turning into a tag team wrestling match, dipping into lucid dreaming using meditation as the launching pad.

I kept at this all night in a marathon of visitations, never knowing where I would end up next, but in each case it was some long forgotten building, some old remnant that I have inherited in this go-round and am tasked with emptying of what is less than it’s best. Like  a big cleaning. You know how it is. You pull out the big stuff and haul it away, and with each time you go back, the particles get finer and finer until you go from sweeping up the last bits to wiping up the dust. This is all old business, an old self, a past life, and it’s now being brought forward.

I thought about that first house I dreamed of in the months before awakening came. It was all so much brighter, more optimistic. A road led up a hill with a creek running beside it. The creek grew stronger the closer I got to its headwaters, which revealed how this wasn’t an ordinary body of water. It was prana itself, filled with symbols and brilliant. How could water be so bright? Climbing the hill, on the right, was a beautiful arts and crafts meets Zen monastery. Built from large beams, the building interlocked, revealing its construction. Stone rose up through its middle, and when you walked inside you could clearly see two fountains inside, split down the middle, representing the Ida and Pengali currents with the Shushuma in the middle. That was my house, my temple, a place that was more than just home, but was who I was. It still is. But since that time, I have had to venture out into the past in order to heal it and cleanse it. Actually, I can’t even say it is I who does this; clearly my earthbound self isn’t up to this, but something deeply rooted in me is. It is this part of me that teaches, reveals, redeems, and ressurects. I wish dream could be brighter sometimes, but there are plenty of regular dreams that are, and besides, digging into shadow always resolves some deeper sense of feeling ill at ease in me.

It would be great if I could offer some grand finale, but an ending is itself a beginning, a new thread is discovered and it’s then followed through until something big is exposed from the rubble. Another chapter is begun even as additional chapters emerge. Over time, what I have found, is the gradient becomes finer and finer. It actually gets harder to keep the shoulder to the grind stone sometimes. It’s easier…the energy is less turbulent and it doesn’t stir me in the same way. But what I also find is that in some ways it’s a little easier simply because so many blocks have been removed. The blocks have gotten harder, but the level of confidence has been forged in the flame of awakening. As if that makes any kind of sense, right? The easy stuff came away first, and when I put myself into energy work like Chi Gong, material cascaded away, and this continued for years. Thousands of blocks, I figure, big and small, always burrowing down deeper and deeper.

For me, the hardest blocks lay deep down. For me, the root was where the hardest wounds lay. And despite all of this, I was able to manifest truly remarkable opportunities in my life, and when I was ready, events have simply fallen into place. When I was ready to fund the next phase of my life after a collapse of the markets, I waited, keeping my wealth in assets I could relate to, which was real estate. Even though I saw half the value of my property evaporate, it also came back during a confluence of events when I was ready to make my next step. Wanting in truth to sell directly to a buyer instead of a realtor, my soon-to-be realtor cancels when she gets too busy with a market which suddenly was going crazy. Deciding to sign papers for representation in another three days, I’m contacted by a family who heard through the grapevine that I was going to list my house soon. They asked if they could buy it directly from me, an outcome which I had wished for in my heart. While taking a nap hours before I would speak to them on the phone, I see them in a meditative state, not knowing that they would be talking to me later that day. Before I was set to sign papers with my realtor for representation, they brought a contract. I was able to sell to a family who had loved my house for years and were having trouble even seeing homes because of how hot the market had heated up within months.

Now it might be a big question what this has to do with my work. What I have found is that as each block is removed, so too are the blocks to manifesting the events in my life that support what needs to come next. This isn’t for me about chasing wealth, but finding my own inner abundance, which is less about money as it is about opportunity and helping to make others lives better. There is so much feeling of loss and lack, and for years I too fell for this feeling. But often, the things I chased after weren’t the things that would have been good for me. That was why they were hard. What is easy comes like magic. These things emerge in perfect timing. Life is increasingly different as the years roll, and as the air clears. Life is more a series of serendipitous events that have purpose and flow, pushing some old block to the surface, or leading to the next step. Something bigger is in control. That might sound superstitious, but it’s not. As division falls away, there is a marriage of the small self with something larger within. This is about bridging the gap and clearing the way for this to happen, and it’s not done halfway or half-assed. How’s that for mystical musing?

Whatever it will be for you, getting out from underneath the tangles holding you back, is what brings the change. For now, the work continues, and who knows what is around the corner.

Making It Count

 

 

I only want one thing for you, if you are blazing with the fire and rushing with the rivers running through your heart and soul as your body is taking this wild ride of awakening: to make it count.

 

 

You can push this beyond what you think is possible, you can reach for the ripe fruit. You can dare yourself, you can reach uncharted waters.  I have been there, and I am egging you, nudging, waving my arms.  Its here.

 

 

Imagination is the portal through which you will go. Learn to trust it.  If you bring the awakened state with you, as you sink into it and it fires up, a world will emerge before you.  Blank slate at first, but hush, be quiet; its up ahead.  I am pointing you to the impossible.  I am asking you to make the unknown, known. Now lean into it.  Lean into it and ask a question….but that question should be something that you are really interested in.  Its not stock quotes or the lottery; you are here for the secrets of the universe, right?  Ask about how things go, the root cause of things.  Do not expect an answer, just make the call inside of your mind.  This is the inception.  It broods, it grows, it gestates. This is how it goes.  Wait.  But be ready. At any moment, it could come.  Make awakening your friend, make it your partner.  In it will be everything reflected.  But disbelieve that you can even do this and poof! It scatters like light in rain.

 

 

Then you are lost.  You are stuck with what you think you know, relying on what your senses have been telling you, which is itself a limited story.  You don’t need to read or acquire knowledge in the old way.  There is a new way, a way that has been used for a long time by a very few people.  It isn’t magic, and its poorly understood.  It just takes getting in the right grooove.

 

 

Feel with your body. Stop the mind.  This is how you shift out of the physical senses.  It is also how you can make your awakening count by doing this.  It does not seem legitimate simply because our world is awash in the belief that you can’t do this.  But you CAN.  I have, and so can you.  Sink into it, and let the mind go blank.  Its easy once you know how.  So slip into that delicious space where you don’t have to think or worry, you are in that place where you feel Presence.  It is YOUR presence that meets the Tao.  The One.  Its simple, no thunderclaps.  In fact, no one would believe you had done it, so let the haters hate, the empty suits just be empty.  You have this.  It is all done through feeling.  Its how its been done for centuries.  FEEL your body, FEEL your energy.  Let it grow and increase. Its so simple, so easy, yes?  Get quiet.  Feel those eddies and currents begin to flow and increase.  That is the first part.  Your mind goes quiet, you focus inwardly.  You are almost there…

 

 

You let your body FEEL it and the mind goes silent.  There, as you wonder if its even working, is the first thread.  Just grab it with that empty mind and don’t worry what will come.  FEEL it!  The more you learn to feel, the more of it that will come. This is the secret.  This is the reverse of rational thought.  It’s okay, you can do this, you have permission.  Play.  Consider.  What is there to lose or risk?  Then, it will seem as though some part of you is magically coming up with ideas, images, concepts. They will slowly begin to resolve.  Reach beyond what you think is possible.  It is like being suspended in thin air and all of a sudden land builds around you to support you: impossible, you think.  But there it is, a world is forming.  Let form build.  See where it takes you.  Everyone will go in the direction that they are most intimately interested in.  That is always the best stuff because it is so close to your heart, you see.  Your imagination is stepping beyond mere production to reception.  This is the other side of what imagination is! As you go, things add up….ideas stack up in your head.  You feel excited, you feel inspired.  It all seems crazy, your rational mind is in fits.  You let the rational mind go in circles for a while longer as you tease more and more threads from thin air.

 

 

I will tell you that I saw how matter is formed from energy using this method.  I wanted to know, but I did not know how it could be known.  Weeks later as I sat in a park I felt the inner Presence speak: “Look at the trees” it said.  I did, and I felt something pull me inward through their leaves and cells, down into their compounds, atoms, then subatomic particles.  All of this, through my third eye, I saw as if in my imagination a world explode into view.  I was there, feeling the warm breeze and watching carefully as my child played in front of me.  I was all completely there, tantalizingly present, totally aware of everything, yet this energetic presence was supporting me and showing me another channel.  My mind was fed information about that place where matter turns into energy and energy into matter.  It took me years to untangle it, to understand that what I was seeing had been described by such great minds as Plank, Heisenberg, and more.  I knew what I had seen was true, but really, who would have believed me?  I hadn’t gone to school for this, I hadn’t studied for years in books, and I hadn’t worked on advanced formulae.  I simply got pulled down into it and saw it first-hand.  I related to what I was feeling.  I FELT the phenomenon as an atom might feel itself.  I WAS the phenomenon.  I had to translate it, make it into something my mind could grasp.  But I did, and you can too.  All of this took only moments. I kept going back to it over and over, just to get a better look, and to satisfy my rational mind that it was real.  Of course it was real.  Doubters will always doubt, and that is the rational mind for you…

 

Seers have done this for centuries, and because it was so poorly understood they were often oppressed.  You do not need to fear this this time around.  The world supports this, this way is built into the very molecules of life and matter.  It is encoded into the All like light shines through our world.  This thread can lead you to many other worlds and can fill your life with inspiration, creativity, and life.  It IS life.  A forgotten life….but you can remember it, and the more who do this the easier it will be for others.  I have blazed a trail as others have, too.  Just follow the path of least resistance into the underbrush.  Feel the currents pull you.  Trust the universe in the wisdom and structure built into it.

We can all do this, it isn’t so hard.  It is reading the light.  It is teasing strands out of the ether, and it can be used for the good of all.  We can learn how to do this and we can teach others. We have this one moment in the sun of our illumination where this can be done and passed on.  It need not be covered over in myths and legends, or in misconstrued notions about how reality is or might be.  You need only consider that it could happen….

Great Music For Yoga, Meditation, Workout, Or Getting Through The Day!

Source:  yoanu.com

 

Do you find yourself having trouble with much of the music out there today that gets airplay over the radio waves? Do you find yourself having trouble with your old play lists that you listened to before awakening? Old favorites that have just….fallen away?

Oh so much changes, doesn’t it? I know that at a certain point in my process, I could no longer watch certain movies or even listen to certain kinds of music. So much of our world is drenched in this vibration of hardness, and it shows in the music we listen to. I recently began to reflect on all of the really great music that I have listened to over the last ten years that helped me to find a place to be where I could still listen to music without going into the wrong kind of overwhelm.

 

So if that has been the case for you, I have a treat or two hiding in here for you!

 

I have a list. It is in truth, a lot of different stuff, but its been selected because it has at different periods of time, helped to support me in my process.  Some days, I just could not listen to ANYTHING deeply rhythmic because, awakening.  But other times, I NEEDED that deep beat.   But mostly?  I needed something that wasn’t drenched in the drama and BS of popular culture. Some of the music is great for work, yoga, meditation practice (if you use music at all) and for just getting around through the day. I have selected out all of the things that didn’t put me in a funk and that usually tend to lift me up or helps to put me in one great zone or another (some very quiet and subtle). I don’t know about you, but my tastes range all over the place, and what suits me one day does not work the next. I have all kinds of play lists often just to suit the mood. So the list….it ranges all over the place, too. I hope you can pick up a few things to add to your sonic tool box. So sharpen your pencil, take down some names and head over to i-Tunes to listen to the free samples, or try them on YouTube.

 

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and there is a lot that is not included because it might only be one great song on one album, but this should be something to get you started on a new sonic-mind space groove. Note: everything I am listing, except for a few noted exceptions, can be found on i-Tunes. Injoy!

 

What’s your favorite music these days?  Care to share?  I’m expanding my list on a daily basis and would love to hear from you.

 

 

 

Elephant Revival. An eclectic blend of styles rooted in folk, but without slavery to instrumental styles that hem them in. My favorites from their most recent album Petals are Peace Tonight, Petal.

Their album These Changing Skies is their second most recent album and it’s worth taking a look/listen because the sound is a little different in some ways, while staying true to their quiet calming meditative music. In some ways, there are songs on this album I like even more than their most recent Petals. Make sure to check out

Birds and Stars, and Down To The Sea – I do have to admit that these soft-sided works often get a little much for me; I like some variety, so Down To The Sea feels a little turned inward, but I am sure you will like it in the right pairing, right? Also, Rogue River is worth listening for a bit of unexpected bluesy variety on the same album. Rogue is a bit hard in the lyrics, though.

 

Here is a link to one of their songs on youtube:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LgHDFHzMI4

 

Jai-Jagdeesh. Taking a sudden turn into the Bakhti vibe, there is the work of Jai-Jagdeesh who blends western with Indian sensibilities. This is good for those who want longer songs, more contemplation, less just easy listening, but often delightful and uplifting. Her album I Am Thine is made up of mostly long six to eight-minute tracks that help to keep you in the groove. I liked the first song on the album Aad Guray Nameh. And while the title track I Am Thine might be pretty popular, I liked Om Namah Shivaya Raam more because it departed from the more mellow rhythms and had a more bluesy feel, which is always interesting to me from a creative standpoint. Her earlier album Of Heaven and Earth has a little more upbeat feeling overall, and might be worth a listen.

 

Bachan Kaur is another artist whose work seems to be designed for yoga. Her album Anahata has a very folk feel, but this is not because it has traditional folk instrumentals, often just a guitar and a sitar in the background. Her work is spare, but if you want to have a fifteen minute tune, her work could be just the ticket.

 

Mirabai Ceiba is a duo that blends an interesting range of instrumental styles. I found myself grasping for a way to describe their sound. The best I can say is that it is a Celtic-meets-Latin feel. I find that I’d like their work without the singing because the instruments shine so beautifully on their own. Their albums Sevati, and their most recent Sacred Love Meditations, along with several others, are all on i-Tunes.

 

Matisyahu is less meditative music as it is something with a positive message. It has a reggae backbone, toss in some world, and you are done. Light is one of his recent releases and personally, I like the track on Light, One Day the best.

 

Trevor Hall has a great message, and isn’t into the trancy eight minute journey’s, which means that Trevor is a bit like Matisyahu not so much in style, but in that they have a rhythmic instrumental style that lacks the rawness often present in music of this type. I like Trevors music a lot and I find I pepper my play lists with his stuff when I need to break up the longer “trancy” stuff with something that has a nice beat. His last two albums Kala and Chapter of the Forest are two you should start with and explore his earlier work from there. I wouldn’t call his work yoga music though. Its really nice thoughtful music with soul.

 

This is his Youtube channel:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96SGUEnI2uw&list=PL11s0VhvKvosz9kjROX5j11NrnP8meHCJ

 

In a similar kind of rockin’ vein is Michael Franti. Again, his stuff might be too fast for some yoga, but his message is supportive and strong with his hi-hop reggae blended style. In fact, his music is often really great to dance to. His most recent album is Soulrocker.

 

Deva Premal was music I listened to when I did my Qi Gong practice. Her music has a contemporary backbone but well within the New Age style. The focus is on her voice, which she uses very well for create rich landscapes that can help carry you along in your work. It tends to be faster tempo than, say Bachan Kaur. If you want a really wild sound scape, try her Tibetan Mantras for Turbulent Times. This album is most definitely for trance work, if you ask me. Much of her work tends to be mantras sung in the Sanskrit.

 

NOT ON I-TUNES: Now for one that might be hard to get to, but at a certain point in my work, especially meditation and Qi Gung, Vyas Huston’s Victory Over Death fit the bill. It’s a bit severe sounding sometimes, but when its good, it can be really good. I copied the file twice and burned a disc for listening for long periods since it is one giant circle of mantra (but somehow, it doesn’t listen as repetitive because of how the phrases are paced out with the music). And to be fair, he isn’t singing mantras, but reciting a prayer whose words can be found on other sites dealing with Huston and his work.   I was introduced to his work by my teacher Robin and I was able to copy his disc. If you do Thai Chi or Chi Gung, you might see how the pacing of his recitation works really well with the moves of Qi Gung (which my teacher Robin presented to the rhythm of his piece, which is almost half an hour long-perfect for getting in a number of important moves in the Gung).

 

When I went looking for his work on i-Tunes, it didn’t show up, and honestly besides a Youtube video, I am not sure where to tell you to go to get it (if you like it). Vyas is mentioned on the internet here and there, so maybe you can get lucky (and maybe share back here for a link?). Let me know what you think of his work! Until then, this is the link to the youtube that has the piece on it (and a few images that are a dead-ringer for places where I live):

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv4DcBDNwI8

 

 

Moksha (featuring Kanchman Babbar). If you want something in a similar and perhaps more traditional vein, try these Vedic chants by a chorus of 21 Brahmins. Just type “Moskha” in i-Tunes and it should be the first choice that comes up and give it a try. All of the chants are done in a pitch and style that does not vary except the mantras being chanted.

 

Odesza. So nice. One album worth listening to is In Return. First track: Always This Late. This is not meditation music per se, but its great texture and a sonic landscape for….running, working on writing (if the vibrations match what you are doing), cleaning, dancing (?)and heck, maybe even an active yoga routine. Check them out and let me know what you think. Very upbeat, bright, and lovely vocals with a definite electronic backbone to it all. I own their work.

 

 

Emancipator. Another electronic trance groove kind of sound-scape in a similar vein as Odesza. See their album Seven Seas, safe In the Steep Cliffs, and Soon It Will Be Cold Enough. I like their stuff. I have a few of their songs, too!

 

Peter Gabriel. I know, “isn’t he that pop artist who was once with Genesis and did Shock the Monkey?” Yes! If you listen to his music, you will find that all of his work has a driving desire towards awareness. He is a modern Gnostic in my book with his revealing More Than This. He is a kind of revealer of important issues concerning our place in the world. While his music has hit the charts and has had a lot of play, giving his music a listen to revealed, at least to me, a great depth of comprehension about spiritual issues. His album Growing Up, which was also released as a DVD of his live concert (in France, if I remember correctly).   While his work with Genesis was more in the pop/rock vein, his work began to mature once he broke from the band. Some of his work gets hard and even edgy, but some of his songs, like Signal To Noise are dealing with the issue of disinformation and seeking truth. His music was indispensible at a certain phase in my awakening. Blood of Eden speaks to the union of the opposites in consciousness.

 

1. IZ. Also known as Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, Iz is Polynesian and has a beautiful melodic voice that he matches with equally sensitive lyrics. Iz is no longer with us, but he has left a number of albums like Facing Future, and Alone in IZ World. His is a Hawaiian experience.

 

Yoga Music Co. These folks create music expressly for yoga. Might be worth a try. If you want a quick intro, you can go to youtube:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij28wzJMijI

 

I am not sure if they are i-Tunes but their web site is www.yougamusicco.com. I liked what I heard!

 

For that matter, there are a number of channels on youtube now with music like Yoga Music, so it might be worth a listen and a little seeking to find things that you like.

 

Deborah Van Dyke is a chanter and her work is, as you might have guessed, very repetitive, but these are mantras after all.

 

In a more melodic and musical vein is the work of Donna De Lory, a mix of English and Sanskrit language styling.

 

So what music do you like? Please feel free to share and we can make a nice list for others in desperate need of a sonic transformation!

 

Until next time,

 

-Parker