Heiros Gamos, Babylon, And A Curious Past Life Result

What happens when you begin to develop a capacity to recall past lives? In my case, when I had enough details from some lifetimes, I began to see patterns from one life to another. Normally, the lives I have lived are of people unknown to history. Over the last few years I have had clear enough recall to be able to pinpoint two lives known to history. I include this post for those of you with an interest in this type of inquiry. It is possible, with some research, to sometimes find lives that have been known through historical accounts.

A few years ago, after having a conversation with someone who I didn’t know in this life but who I had had a dream about, someone who I had correspondence with, I later experienced seeing a scene emerge that I knew was from a very ancient lifetime that involved this person. What was interesting about this experience was how clear and crisp the images were. I was able, by feeling into it, to tease out details that I “just knew” about but didn’t know how or why I knew them. This experience was a lot like putting together a puzzle. Instead of trying to “push the river” on digging stuff up, and risking possibly making something up in the process, I found myself just feeling into it and then letting myself being led into the experience.

When I say I was “feeling into it” I will explain that this is a particular form of “thinking” that requires me to be (1) very honest with myself and (2) careful that I am truly feeling instead of fabricating something. This isn’t about using emotion though. Instead it is based on the awareness that our capacity to feel can lead to realization. I think many people might have a hard time with this because most tend to discount their feeling side, or think it is inconsequential. It isn’t. Also, the more clearing work that you do, the more you open up this side of your preceptual awareness in order to better see just what is there. That said, on to what I first began to see.

I stood in a room that was a bedroom chamber. The room was made of stone with hewn timbers in the roof. Near the head of the bed there was a window. I looked out with wooden shutters which were pulled to the side that opened to the bright warmth of the day. Looking into a courtyard I saw flowers and shrubs below. This was, though, desert country. I knew those plants were there because water was fed to them. They would not have survived without daily care, not in that sun, not in this dry land. Looking out that window, I saw I was at least two stories up from the ground. I knew that this building belonged to someone who was of high status because the homes for most people were single-story buildings, made of brick or stone.

As I stood in this space, I was immediately aware of a woman who was my wife. She was tall and willowy. Her hair was kept and fell around her shoulders in tight curls. When I saw her I recognized her as the person who I had had a series of conversations with previously. She wore what looked like a dress, but this dress went from shoulder to foot and it highlighted her height. Me, on the other hand, was another story. While she was refined and well kept, I was stocky, short even, with dark curly hair and beard. The word “bull” came into my mind. I was, I knew, much like a bull. I was strong, stocky….and as I saw myself, a clear realization came into my mind: I was a general who served a king. I was aware of my “office” which was a hive of activity. It was located a ways off from where I stood. A general….but who?

I thought about how this man looked. He wasn’t Egyptian. Not Greek. Not Jewish. Not Arab or Turk. Not Persian. I kept going through my mental rollodex and ended at Babylonian. Over and over it kept coming back to that. Babylonian? Huh….

Fast forward a couple of years, and as a result of having had an experience that emerged in the wake of my having had a regression this past Summer which I wrote about several months ago, I had an unexpected outcome afterwards. This gets a bit unusual, but hang on for a bit. In this experience, I was having a conversation with an ET who I had a dream about in the early 1990’s. In this case, the ET was unlike any ET I have heard any description of. It wasn’t the typical “grey” or any other ET race I have read about people describing. While the being was the “five-point star” configuration of two arms, feet and a head (humanoid), her skin was not at all like ours, but had the look of burnt marshmallow. Her eyes were golden and the pupils were of different shape. Her head had a curious extrusion-effect along the forehead that made her head like that of a hammerhead shark (but nowhere near as much as a hammerhead). We had been talking and she was sitting in my living room, pointing to the sky explaining that she had to return from where she had come. I was hoping to get into this dream during my regression this past Summer, but it turned out we were only able to cover one early dream during that first session. As a result, my mind thought about this encounter because I wondered what the source of that dream might have been. Having read a few books on the abduction phenomenon I was aware that many abductees first had dreams as a clue that something larger was happening in their lives.

It was a curious time because not long after this dream encounter, I awoke one morning to find that my feet looked like I had been taken out of the house at night. My feet were visibly scratched like I had been dragged through a gravel parking lot. I had grass stains on the sides of my feet. The stains were fresh. The nails on my toes had also been scratched. I sat on the edge of the bed, my heart racing, wondering what on earth had happened. There was no memory of what had transpired. I searched my memory and knew that I had not been out the day before or even weeks before barefoot. I had showered the night before. Seeing this was one of those very odd things that didn’t fit and that odd puzzle piece kept screaming at me as if it didn’t belong. It was also one of the chief reasons why I decided to see a trained hypnotherapist. There was no blood and I wouldn’t say it looked like a struggle. I began to attempt contact not long ago in my present day to see if doing so might yield some answers. It was a bit of an experiment, but I considered that in all of the ET lore, beings who have become interstellar all seem to communicate through telepathy. This was a very easy way to get around the issue of different languages and since telepathy has shown to not be held to the same laws that a radio signal has (going at the speed of light and taking tens or hundreds of thousands of years to reach its target), I considered that this was worth a try at least to see if anything came of it.

It was quite the surprise when I tried this, because I was immediately in a space with that being again and what took place was…bizarre. Instead of it being a case of a cagey alien keeping its cards close to its chest, this being was incredibly forthcoming. She immediately recognized me when I reached out to attempt contact, and as I found myself suddenly in her space, which looked like a giant hangar, she did this thing where she looked down at the ground, stopping dead in her tracks, and took in a deep breath and then looked straight at me. It was just like how you might expect someone to react who hadn’t seen you in over twenty years. The reason why I am mentioning this encounter is that this being said during our conversation that she had a counterpart alive on earth and she said that I even knew this person. Now I had a moment where I did a double-take. “On earth?” I asked. “Yes…” and she brought up the image of this person and it this was the person who I had been in contact with about two years ago and who I had remembered I had had a life in Babylon with. While our exchange was not pertinent to the Babylonian life, what the being told me I passed on to my friend later, contacting her after a few years of having been out of contact. This was the bizarre part….The being explained that she was a “commander” of a small fleet of ships and did a number of different things that involved trade and shipping, essentially. When I told my friend about this she said that she had a memory of having been an ET in another life who was a “commander” in just the way that the ET had described. So it seems once you go down that rabbit hole, it gets a bit unusual.

Time had passed, two years, and since then I have had a number of releases take place. I think as a result, one night not long ago when I walked into the studio, I found the same scene of that bedroom rise up around me, probably because of our conversation two weeks earlier. This time, as I looked at that same window and the bed nearby, I heard clearly….”He was a general….who became king.” A flurry of thoughts played through my mind at this point. I realized or knew that whoever this man was, his being crowned king after being a general made the events surrounding his ascendancy to a throne a rare one….because when have you heard of generals becoming king in any culture? Most cultures with kings meant you had to be in the family. This man wasn’t. Now, two years later, a whole new wrinkle emerged that wasn’t available to me previously. I mention this because it may help you to see how “doing the work” can have other ramifications, like better recall.

I had several more details stream in in the wake of this new realization. I saw a wrought iron “keeper” that was used to hold the shutters open. This detail was in the shape of what I recognized was the seed of anise. Additionally I knew that we were involved in a practice known as Heiros Gamos, the union of God and Goddess. This practice was understood by the people to be tied to our own creative energy and when this union took place the opposites merging resulted in powerful and potent forms of manifesting. In this culture, they used this for good crops. It was desert country. These people understood creative visualization taken to a high level, essentially. I saw just how ancient all of this was. While this may have been what the kings and queens engaged in, this was part of our own individual personal power. Back then it was about the authorities doing this for the good of all the people. This was a way, if you were successful, of holding onto power. Your ability to bring good things to all of the people was what cemented your rule and position with the people. All power comes from the people even if the kings would be the last to admit it. After all, I knew that this man was able to come to power because of the backing of the people. How this happened, I was not entirely clear on. I realized that it might be possible to find out who this person was because it was very likely that his rise to power was a unique event and might be mentioned in history.

During preparing this post I did more research into the details that I saw and I found some curious things. The wrought iron detail that I saw on the wall that held the shutters open, this star-like wrought iron form I thought originally there might be no way to know for sure whether it was correct or not. What was the chance of finding a wrought iron detail in an archeological dig of the same object to show that it had indeed been used at all? In watching a video of historical accounts related to Babylon I found that the older friezes and bas reliefs found in museums showed that many of the rulers had a floral design both on their headdresses and on wrist-bands. This same design shows up on the Ishtar Gate, which was built at about the same time. While this design looked similar to the anise design, I knew that it was not a direct hit. But while watching a video of images in the natural history museum in Iraq, I saw another image that was also in some of the images, and this image showed up a number of times, and it was a six-sided star form that has the same look as star anise. While this is itself probably not strong enough evidence and it could not hold up in a court of law, it is itself a tantalizing clue that I will continue to follow to see if archeologists have ever unearthed wrought iron forms or “keepers” for shutters, for example. Could it have just been the shape for a star and not anise? Yes, it is possible. At this point in the digging I have done, it can also possibly be anise as well. I wont know until I dig further to see if I can find more details related to this. But it is a clue and when you go looking into the past, it is details like these that you have to look for to see if history offers anything tangible or directly related to your search. The fact that I saw so clearly this design in the way I did deserves a second look. If I do dig something more up I will include it here in future edits of this post. Images of what I saw are included in the images below…

What I saw was very similar to this, but there were too many “petals.” So I looked further.

Here you can see the same floret, but look to the left and another image appears…

This is a closeup…

And there is another…

This is anise. It is described as having 6-10 points depending on the variety and development of the plant. A star? Or a plant that looked like a star? Perhaps they were used interchangeably…it was grown in the region.

While I regarded this scene again, feelings flooded in that filled in some of the spaces. I had known this person before and in a myriad of ways. I felt the love, the care, the admiration this man had for this woman. I felt how something would rise up within me, that ancient knowing of how we were whenever we came into each others’ presence. It was because of other pasts that this unspeakable familiarity came. I felt the rush of feeling, I felt how unapologetic I was about who I was…how direct and how utterly unashamed I was of how I felt because of its depth and vividness. Something in her brought something out in me. It is true that some people will do that to you. For me now, it was about the creative power within the opposites as one. And yet, this was simple in so many ways, effortless even. I stopped contact with this person initially because it was often too clear, too strong, and vivid. But this recent conversation, as unlikely as it was, with an ET millions of light years away, brought it all back, nudging an orbit back onto an ancient path….With all of this and the new disclosure that this man was not just a general to a king but a king himself, I took to the internet to see what might be there.

I didn’t have to look very far. When I entered “Babylonian general who became king” the result was a singular one. There was only one general of the Babylonian army who rose to be crowned king. His name was Nabopollaser and he reigned beginning in 628 B.C. His son was Nebuchadnezzar II.

Most of the lives I have lived have been of regular folks, many who were anonymous to history. This man, though, was able to rise to power, replacing the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal not long after his death, when there was a power vacuum involving his sons who clearly were having a struggle with holding onto power and even deciding who was going to succeed him. It was a coup, but one that involved wresting power back to the Babylonians, something that the people were behind him on. That, and he had an army who would fight for him if it came to that. I was aware that here was a man of Babylon who had served under an invading king who had been part of a dynasty that had been an occupying force in the country. In a way you could say it was not unlike what is happening right now with the U.S. as an occupying force in Iraq. He chafed under this rule, but he also was offered a better life by serving this king. His own loyalty to his own people won out, and along with his tenacity and courage, he took advantage of a situation that he saw develop after Ashur’s death. Also, years ago I awoke from dream with this very strange name in my head: Ashurbanapal. I didn’t know what it meant back then, didn’t even know that it was even a name. Where had that come from? I looked it up and saw it was the name of an old Babylonian king. It went no further than that. there was no memory back then, no sense of being on to something. It was like a curve ball from out of left field.

Here is where things get interesting. This life mirrored another life that I had with numerous memories from that took place in the Yucatan in Palenque. This was itself as much of a rabbit hole as the Babylonian life because of how many details that I recalled that wound up being in line with what we know about the ruler there in South America. In both cases, these men were involved in major building projects. Now you might think, “But a king would be building stuff, right?” But if you look at the history, some leaders undertook building projects and others did not. For example, Ashurbanipal allowed his kingdom to go into ruin to a great extent. Buildings were falling apart and he just let it go. Nabopollaser came along and began shoring up the old buildings and then began building new ones. When we look at the Yucatan in 600 A.D., it was one king and his son who were largely responsible for not just building projects of significant scope, but an attention to art and decoration for those buildings. This also happened in Babylon—his son built the Ishtar Gate and while it is “just a gate” into the city, it is considered by many historians to be one of the great wonders of the world for how beautiful it was. Both used nationalistic pride to get the cooperation of their people behind these construction projects. It took time and money, man and woman power, to get it all done. Stone had to be quarried, laid, and carved for decoration. Tiles were fired in bright colors, paintings were done on temple walls and bas relief which stood the test of time even as the murals have faded were part of both lives One was alive in 600 B.C. and the other almost exactly one century later in 600 A.D.

Both built water works. In Babylon, this makes sense because of how dry it was, but in a rain forest country like Palenque, the waterworks that were built were underground and archeologists are to this day still scratching their heads to understand what the purpose of that extensive building project was even about. Both built ziggurat-like buildings (ziggurat and step pyramids). Both had sons who followed them in their reign and in their building projects. Both leaders would not have ordinarily risen to power on their own merits or based on their lineage. In the case of Nabopollasser, he filled a power vacuum after an Assyrian king died by having the army in case he needed to use them, but more by having the backing of his own people who were eager to also throw off the influences of a foreign dominating power (the Assyrians). Once crowned, he pushed out the Assyrians (an invading force that also happened in the case of our king in Palenque). In the case of our jungle king, his mother essentially created a narrative that placed him within the royal line of kings even though this narrative really didn’t exist. Both led their people to a new zenith in their culture. Both were fierce in war. Pacal fought alongside his army to push out invaders from other areas and Nabopolassar pushed out the Assyrians, both in the early parts of their reigns. What I saw in Palenque was they literally scared the poop out of the invading forces. He explained that they had to appear as savages so that it would cement in the minds of the invaders that no one should even bother setting foot into their territory again. “Don’t mess with them, they are animals, they will eat your ears off!” As a result, there was peace during his lifetime. Both were involved in using spiritual energy to help bring abundance to the people. With the Babylonian king it was through the ritual of Heiros Gamos and with Pacal, it was his sacred blood which he shed ritually. In Mayan culture the king shed blood from his penis. Patterns, anyone?

So what happens when there is so much information through recall on crossing lifetimes from such disparate times and places? Does it forge the basis for a “new” way for us to be, based on the work done in other lives? What I know is that now I am not interested in the least with looking to authorities for the source of power. Instead, the next new wrinkle is the realization that we all have this inner authority and that we each have this gift, this ability to reach into the numinous. The keys to this realization were kept away from the common people for a very long time. Even in India and in other areas, the priestly caste kept the knowledge away from people because they knew that if not trained properly, it could lead to madness (which may have been legitimate to a certain degree but they also perpetuated a kind of infancy state in humanity at the same time not realizing how important it is that we experience what awakening is).

What I see as the biggest hurdle for us now has to do with our tendency to fall for the victim meme, which is all about the past. There is no power in the past, only in the present. We can learn things from it and in terms of reincarnation you can feel into what one person was able to feel back then that might help you with how to feel into your own issues facing you today, which can be helpful. If you are unable to see how this victim energy emerges, which is the connection between how you choose to react to outward events, events that are beyond your control, and how you then choose to make those events a problem….. is a very disempowering place to be. Trust me, I know. I had to dig myself out of that trap. It was one reason why once I awoke, my marriage came to an end because I could no longer play along with what I knew was a dysfunctional way of relating with another person.

What is so interesting, though, is this man knew power….but the way he wielded it was done in a singular way and not for everyone. Likewise, Pacal was also looked to as the source of divine power to his people. It is now time for us to grow up. Our channels for creative power exists just as powerfully in every person. One of these channels is our sexuality. Everyone says that kundalini is sexual energy. I don’t observe that this is the case, not completely, and it misses a critically important point. It isn’t just sexual energy, it is that our creative energy is not divided out into discrete streams but is felt in its truest way as uncompounded and undivided. It has long been seen and known as a path to God or the Source of All Life. When we reach that level of spiritual bliss our consciousness opens like a blooming lotus and as this happens the numinous emerges and union with the higher powers naturally rises up all around such a person. Here words fail, but you wind up in a place within yourself that shows there is this capacity to know realms that your physical senses will never show you. By letting this energy in and wash through you, your own inner lotus will bloom and so much of the past junk will naturally fall away. Nearly every tradition on earth has something to add to this understanding, and as a result it is not something that is an article of faith or belief, but can be understood as any other phenomenon is understood. Those wedded to a religious belief may not like this, but in my experience it is just another reason why we should begin the process of not allowing the limits of belief to limit our experience any longer. Central to each of these traditions is a release of that which limits us. In Christianity, we speak of baptism as a ritual for washing away sin, the blocked material from our past. In the Hindu tradition they describe this as the cleansing of the nadi channels in the body where it is now shown that the body stores this repressed emotional material from the past. In the Taoist tradition ego is superceded by a larger awareness that serves to heal false beliefs. The Tibetans have much the same practices all done through their own cultural lenses. The Native Americans have the “inipi” or sweat lodge where fasting and prayer go together to clear a person of the ghosts of the past.

In some cases, to do this work, you might need certain techniques to help the cleansing along because of how hard you are holding onto it. It is one reason why some people who have awakened can still remain blocked. I was like that at one time, and I had someone more aware than I was to set me straight. It represented a turning point in my awakening process. There is way more there if you can be humble enough to be led (by the cosmic mind or higher self) or to admit that you still have a lot of shit rattling around inside of you. In every single case, instead of a rational step by step formula meted out by some teacher from centuries ago (or from now even), the most immediate one is learning to surrender and to allow yourself to feel deeper and deeper into yourself. Using this very simple way of working, you can go deeper and deeper to pull up the whole place by its roots. Feeling. But many people still think that you do this by way of the rational. The problem is, you didn’t get there by feeling rational. You got there through feeling, but broken feeling. Still, people want techniques as if those things will magically transport them out of their problems. Sometimes those things can serve to be way of keeping people walking like an ox at a mill wheel who walks all day, getting nowhere. That is because many techniques are used to get you to feel a certain way….and it worked for one person in time and everyone else followed it. This is why so many people who do yoga or meditation will sit just as the Buddha was sitting when he had his awakening. There is no magic involved in sitting like that. I awakened without doing this and while I have used it, I have found no particular benefit from it (although I will say that the “mudras” do move energy through certain parts of the body that are beneficial). If you can learn that it is all about how you choose to use your consciousness through feeling, you really have a large part of it wrapped up. All techniques, save those that manipulate the meridian system manually, are based in getting you to a certain state of feeling and thus realization. The rational mind is entirely outclassed by the quantum leap that is cosmic consciousness and can only serve as a servant and not the master.

What I have observed, too, is how we can miss past life recall. I think how we do this is critical in order to ferret out accurate details. I was able to come to it to greater and greater degrees not by seeking it but by allowing enough barriers to perception to fall, and this took a good bit of time to do. Sometimes with each release, I can often have a new memory that was tied to that block emerge and sometimes it can have its roots in another life (and in this one too).

I once knew someone who tried to claim that she had known me in a past life, which she went on to describe in some detail. What she didn’t know was that the time period that she was claiming that this life took place in was already accounted for. I had at that time a growing level of recall of my past lives. I was living in Tibet during the end of this supposed time frame she was mentioning, and before that (in the earlier portion of this time period), I had one of my first detailed recalls living as a native American living in California. This life in my past simply didn’t exist as she had described. I did consider that I might have somehow missed it, but further investigation never brought it up. It also didn’t fit me, didn’t fit how I felt about family or the other aspects which she described, and if this post is any indication, patterns can reign supreme in this work. Having that life was like a curve ball, something that did not fit in my growing landscape of past lives whose patterns could be seen in my present life. I came to see that this was about telling a truth for her, but more in a mythical way. Instead, I began to see how the details, which didn’t fit any of my past life (and present life) patterns, were instead her own. It also revealed to me the issues that remained for her to clean up in her own life, some of which dog her to this day. A quick scan is enough to know what is up on that account. As a result, we get people who believe that they were Cleopatra, or some other figure in history who is well known. It turns out that thousands have claimed having been Cleopatra in a past life.

Truth be told, we live much more significant lives spiritually often when we are just the regular person on the street. But once in a great while we wind up in a drama that is recounted in our history. With this woman, the only life I had where she showed up was in a life in Spain during the period when the Inquisition was taking place. I was a magistrate and I had to pass sentence on a host of people who had gotten snagged by the Church. In it, this person came before me doing what she wound up doing in her present life. It won her no support to my mind. Yelling in court, she (as a he) had been caught defaming people and defrauding them. My karma was that I showed little mercy when I could have spared him (her). Just from that one forty-minute exchange we wound up with this pretty difficult karma that played out in this life. It didn’t take much, really. It wasn’t life after life after life, constantly seeking and not finding, but still trying. No, it wasn’t like that at all. I think it was that way for her, though, because clearly she believed she had known me many times before. But that “many times” was really about how invested she was in her own shame and hurt, which she had created as one of the most difficult emotional traps I could think of. I ultimately had to do what I could to let her think what she was going to think because that would wind up serving to distance her from me, and it did. It wasn’t the most honest thing to my mind at the time, but correcting her own narrative was not going to happen. She was dug in. And a lot of people are dug in in just this same way. Perhaps you have been much like this, caught up in things that you believe rather than truly know about yourself. I was. I hid out for decades, hiding the true me for fear that I might be held up for ridicule. And in the end, it happened anyway, and in letting it happen I learned that how those people act is their karma and how I react is mine. I had to simply exit that burning world. And when I did, I moved into a place of peace…..my own peace….on my own terms…and this led to a much better life for me. It allowed me to get back to square one and then reorient myself to my own inner truth and not the “truth” someone else was seeking to insert into my life simply because it felt so familiar to them even though it was a broken picture of their own work that remained to be done. Projection anyone?

Delores Canon, who spent decades doing regression hypnosis into past lives, found that the details that she uncovered during thousands of sessions could be cross referenced with other regression subjects who had been regressed to the same time periods and cultures to reveal a remarkably consistent story line that tended to agree with one another. When she took people back to the building of the pyramids for example, different people would describe the same things, some of which were quite unusual and not easy to just guess. As a result, it is important to have ways I think to cross-reference your details in cases where there are historical accounts available. I was able to find an account that was identical to a memory that I had as a Californian native American man that lined up perfectly with a written account in an old Army report in a case where the natives had tried to steal horses from an Army fort in the area. This case aligned with the same time frame as my memory (which I was lucky enough to be able to place on a specific time line based on what we also have in the historical record of these people) and involved details as to the number of people in our party as well as the number of people who were wounded (I was one of two who had been fatally wounded). This kind of historical evidence and detail isn’t always possible, though. In such a case, remaining open to more details coming through can sometimes help to flesh out more details. This can take time. It took me two years before I got enough information that I was able to locate myself in history where our Babylonian king was concerned. It may not be the kind of evidence that would hold up in a court of law, but it can provide important clues in helping to lead you to a fuller understanding of what was taking place and how this applies to your own spiritual development over time.

In my case, two years went by with releases of what are called “knots” or repressed stored emotion. Once you have gone through this enough times, it gets easier and more common. A full flow of prana or chi does help, but there are methods that can assist and many involve physical movement that unlocks emotional armoring locked into the body as well as manipulating the energy centers throughout the body. All are pretty simple methods. TRE, which I have written about before, is one very effective method along with body work involving acupressure with a practitioner who understands energy. Chi Gong is another very useful modality that when applied consistently over a period of time can result in significant releases of material, especially at the earlier (first two to three years) stages of awakening (although it could also help later as well). Sometimes even reiki can help. As the energy body clears, awareness also becomes more clear. A deeper understanding can result and a better understanding of your truer nature emerges to the degree that there is a greater awareness of the unity of all things and this translates to behavior changes that are permanent. Until that happens, these states are more like places that you can visit for periods of time as a kind of taste of what lies ahead. Until embodiment takes a greater hold, you can use these visits as a way to draw you forward. Things get easier, the self trusts in its ability to more consciously co-create with the universe.

Sound woo-woo? Well, that was what the ancients were doing, and tantra does just this, a tantra that isn’t rooted in just sex. Tantra is the direct path through, not around, problems. The only problem is the trouble that you have within yourself. This is what I have found. Any problem that you seem to have with the world has its root in you. That doesn’t mean, though, that you don’t seek to help bring change to those things that appear to be bad for people in the world. But the path to real change means being clear-eyed and honest about how the change needs to happen. Then you have to help with that change.

For me, the great interest facing me in coming back again in my next incarnation is in how differently I will be creating. In personal relationships, the way that a couple creates together is limited by the karmic threads that bind them. What is their character? What I know from experience is that as a couple become parents, the karma that those two hold together attracts the consciousness of other lives entering our reality, hopefully as the very means of working through that karma. But what happens when a couple creates without the kind of karmic load as that of a generation before? Does a new kind of person begin to make itself be known? What we each are doing in our own lives, waking up, has very concrete effects on the future of the planet even if you live your life in a solitary way.

No longer do we need the kings or priests. What they did, we can do. And in the Gospel of Philip, he explains that Jesus was teaching people how to BE Christs. How could Orthodoxy manage to have gotten this so wrong? This is the danger of this old way of thinking which is that only the kings and queens can do it, or the priests and priestesses or a church or government or an “outside” institution. We literally give up our power and give the institution our power by being a follower or adherent (and it also includes our money as well). It is less doing as allowing, a very feminine trait in all of our consciousness.

I know that I have made deals and resisted the hardest of blocks. I also know that as they go, I find greater and greater peace. There is this marvelous understanding of what these blocks do that was written in the Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi Library which I include here:

That is why the word says, “Already the ax is laid at the root of the trees.” (Mt 3:10). It will not merely cut – what is cut sprouts again – but the ax penetrates deeply until it brings up the root. Jesus pulled out the root of the whole place, while others did it only partially. As for ourselves, let each of us dig down after the root of evil which is within one, and let one pluck it out of one’s heart from the root. It will be plucked out if we recognize it. But if we are ignorant of it, it takes root in us and produces its fruit in our heart. It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive, to make us do what we do [not] want; and what we do want we do [not] do. It is powerful because we have not recognized it. While [it exists] it is active.

The more private teachings of Jesus and the ones which were hidden away for at least 1600 years and recovered in 1945 show a sophisticated understanding of how important it is to do release work. We might call it suppressed emotion today and they might have called it “evil” back then, but it is clearly the same thing. They saw this work as leading to “life” instead of “death.” I can tell you that when you do this work that your perceptions change simply because your beliefs that you hold that are part of the blocked emotion limit your perception and understanding of many things in the world, you see through a distorted lens, which then falls away (and “everything” about what that belief did to you changes). I have known people entirely caught up in their own inner story which had little to no relationship to the outside world. I was one of them, too. For myself, I see that all of this was a doing based on limited understanding, a growth through lifetimes, chapters in a larger book of life. Then later in time, there came a life that was made to open it all up. If you are awakened, then you are this life, made perfect for this work, so don’t doubt yourself. Step back and let that master within you show you what can be.

If you thought this was an interesting dive into reincarnation, you might find an associated post about how to navigate the professional victim worth a look..

https://wakingtheinfinite.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-victim-mentality/

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Is There An Energetic Connection With Restless Leg Syndrome?

Restless Leg Syndrome is a condition that many people experience. It can be a distracting sensation, which is often a desire to shake or move their legs, although there are other symptoms that are also part of this syndrome. Because of my posts on leg chakras, some readers have wondered if there is a connection between our vital energy (prana or chi) and restless leg syndrome. I have begun to wonder about it myself as a result of reading comments from readers.

While I cannot say for certain, what I can say is that there are a few coincidental elements that might connect the two. If there is, it will most likely be related to how blocked energy can be present in the legs. What I mean by this is that it has been known that for whatever reason, there appears to be a connection between past repressed emotion and certain places in the body that will seem to store that energy until it is released, which generates emotional relief for those who do this kind of work. I will say, however, that while I have myself experienced hundreds of these releases of stored emotional energy and understand the many ways that it can be released, I have not made a clear connection between that and RLS. What I do know is how much harder it is to release the blocked energy in the legs. I suspect that because of their distance from the core of the body that their energetic potential is different, perhaps less intense, and as a result, more difficult to bring changes in the same way that are seen in the core or torso region where the “larger” more powerful chakras as located.

The thing about the chakra system and the vital energy system in general is that it is not an entirely physical system. This energy system, while appearing a lot like nerve channels to those who can sense them, are not physical in the way that nerves or the vascular system is. It is one reason why modern science does not take the subject seriously despite the fact that the Chinese have carefully mapped out these energetic lines throughout the body with such specificity that their mapping has brought us the meridian system that is used for acupuncture and acupressure therapies that hospitals often use because they have found that they work for certain conditions. They don’t pretend to know why it works, only that it does and because this is minimally invasive, they use it. Additionally, in India, this same system was also mapped out and are instead called “nadi” instead of “meridian.” The nadi were known to house blocked or stored emotion and the ladder of yoga as it is referred to often details exercises intended to dislodge this blocked material from the nadi system. But it is the very same thing as the Chinese system, but with the addition of the chakras, which are described as being like wheels, and all sorts of illustrations have been made down through the centuries to help people to visualize them (like lotus or other flower forms for instance). While the Indian system does not appear to identify the points along the meridians that the Chinese use for needling in acupuncture in order to open up blocked energy pathways, neither does the Chinese system conceive or acknowledge a wheel-like vortex called a chakra either. I suspect that this is a cultural difference, and may also be attributed to what the adepts were doing, an outcome of their abilities and their focus when it came to subtle energy like prana or chi.

That said, being able to divest this energy that is stored from the body has as its end result in helping to release the stored burden upon the psyche or of the self. It is liberating to do this work, and it has the effect of shifting the physical chemistry in a long-term fashion of the body, which has positive effects on physical and mental health.

Consider if you have stored fear or anxiety, psychologists know that this stored or repressed memory has a recursive nature that can stay with a person their whole life if the issue isn’t dealt with. Every time that the person is triggered, so too is a burst of adrenaline or norepinephrine released, which puts the body into a pitched flight-like mode which most associate with fear. If allowed to be triggered often, the body wears under such a condition and disease of a degenerative nature could creep in if this trigger is, exercised often. The body does best in stasis or a balanced state.

What medical science has to say on the subject is best summed up by this article about a potential breakthrough in understanding the physiology of the condition which was published in November 2018 in Science Daily:

This new research indicates that the involuntary leg movements in RLS are caused by increased excitability of the nerve cells that supply the muscles in the leg, which results in an increased number of signals being sent between nerve cells.

Targeting the way messages are sent between nerve cells to reduce the number of messages to normal levels may help prevent the symptoms of RLS occurring. This could be achieved by new drugs that block the ion channels that are essential for the communication between nerve cells.

The research conducted by the University of Gottingen in conjunction with the University of Sydney and Vanderbilt University involved measuring the nerve excitability of motor nerve cells of patients suffering with RLS and healthy subjects.

The next step is to investigate the effect of different medications in patients and the effect on RLS.

SOURCE: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181114234848.htm

If RLS can be attributed to chi in the body, then a treatment will most often be more of a bandaid, a therapy that would likely never change the condition itself, but would bring relief through taking a chemical into the body that aids in the ionic actions that the quote describes. While it may be possible that vital force of chi/prana could have a role to play in stimulating RLS chemistry in the body, it could prove helpful to investigate alternative therapies before using chemistry.

So is there any relief produced using acupuncture or variants of it? It turns out that it has been used. The following article, while technical, provides the point locations used in a therapy and could be reproduced with a skilled acupuncture therapist. I will note that the article describes both acupuncture and what they call “acuinjection” of a synthetic dopamine-like compound (from the look of it) into the acupuncture point. Anyway, it may be worth reading to learn more about this technique. It can be found here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6028364/

In this article the result was that an extensive study did not return a conclusive result.

https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2020/01170/acupuncture_for_restless_legs_syndrome__a.90.aspx

The following article is interesting for the method of massage that a Chinese practitioner can perform that is said to be helpful for RLS:

https://www.acufinder.com/Acupuncture+Information/Detail/Acupuncture+Helps+Restless+Legs+Syndrome

I hope that this helps those who have inquired about this topic. I had hoped to have had an opportunity to speak with a noted energy healer while on the Hawaiian islands in March, but we wound up not covering this topic before the trip ended. My hope is that I will be seeing this healer again but this time in California before too much longer and will see if I can make a video of the encounter. Since uncertainty with Covid continues, no specific date is set, but it has been a topic of our discussion but we were so busy that we had trouble fitting it in on our last meeting. Hopefully I will be able to put something up in the next few months.

~Parker

Energetic Update

 

In the last week I had an unexpected release of an old block.  For the last couple of years now block release has gone from fast and furious to slower and more difficult as I have gotten down to what I know are the deepest of my blocked energy.  It is now like chiseling away stone.  While this has required greater patience than ever before, the reward has been great.

 

The interesting thing about the release of this latest block was that I was able to trace it back through history to a past life event.  While I do not know the exact date of the event, I have been able to locate it in the third to fourth century AD.  This was interesting, and this was not something that was on my radar at all.  In fact, I have in numerous instances been over this same ground that involved this block many times, but never had much of a reaction one way or the other.

 

It involved burying a cache of ancient documents, and it helps to explain why, before the block lifted, I felt the way I did.  For years I had this driving feeling as though something had been hidden that told the story , the untold story of a very important, a foundational, aspect of Christian thought.  This sense within me has driven me since I was a small child, and honestly, it wasn’t the best sense for a child to have.  How do you explain to someone that you KNOW that something had been hidden, but upon being questioned, you don’t have ANY details about what on earth this could be?  So you see the conundrum. This is why I have always kept this sense entirely to myself, with only a few people ever even knowing I felt this way.

 

To give you just enough back story without loading you down with details, I had to bury documents I considered sacred and extremely important to spiritual maturity (a code word for awakening) in order to hide them from the church. I hid them in order that they might be protected, so they might be found by someone at a later date who could appreciate their importance. I was hiding these documents because the church had deemed documents such as these heretical and were an anathema to Orthodox belief. This experience was not ot unlike placing a child in a boat on a river alone, hoping that they might survive. Things were so bad where I was that doing this was the last and final option. It was my message in a bottle. Hidden. Would they ever be found? Would they survive?  The desert is a sea where no oar is dipped, so say the Muslims. I placed my hopes in the hands of that great ocean of sand and said many prayers that they might come back to a more inquisitive kind of human in the future. This was in a day when everything was written down, not printed and widely distributed as today. 
Once the block was encountered and the emotions fully processed, this driving feeling in me that I had felt most of my life went away completely. What is interesting about this, though, is that I lost the “fire in the belly” over this issue…which has made my recent work more difficult because now I am left without this driving feeling as though something was done that should not have been and am instead left with a peace and bliss that comes as a result of fully processing these blocks.  All of this repressed emotion was what was driving me forward with such conviction and vigor….it ate at me, you could say, and this is very important to understand about how blocks affect us.  They just keep turning in us until we resolve them. Depending on the nature of the block, it could be very destructive to all you hold dear. 

 

I find it very curious that I would have a block like this pushed so far down.  I say this because over the course of my awakening process, I have noticed the the easier blocks all went first.  There were a lot of inconsequential blocks, many I had no clue what they were that simply evaporated, and these left in complete anonymity in numbers beyond my counting (but every one is accounted for in how they will affect us until it’s released).  I am happy not to know what they were about because I no longer am affected by them….whatever they were.  This has simply left me at a greater place of peace. But this last one, because I had a memory of how it was connected into the an event in the past and my connection to sacred texts, and because it came later in an area of the light body where the blocks have been notoriously difficult to dig out, I have been given a view of how this block has affected me and for so long. This was not an inconsequential one. How would you feel if you knew you had to hide the truth because those in power didn’t want to hear it? When I look back on the people I have known whose lies have degraded my joy, or destroyed parts of it, and I see how I did what I did, the guilt, the sadness, all of it, served to attract or draw to me lights that were less than the one great Light. This was what we called it back then because it was a great unfathomable beautiful mystery that was the Light!

 

Below is an image of the meridian where the block released.  In the hip there are three locations for acupuncture points 10-12.  It was on the #12 point that this last block released.  I could feel it quite vividly.  Shoot, I felt the presence of the block long before then nearly every day as a hard tense tight and burning sensation.  Really.  I am blessed to be able to feel these points, even though I feel them all the time.  But when you wake up, it seems that when you are able to feel more deeply, as is often the case, you feel all of it, right down to where blocks reside. Knowing where they are is one very useful step in releasing them.
It is on my right side that this block was located.  

Before I began feeling the specific meridians where blocks are now located, I felt them previously in a more regional way, and they were also released in a regional way through the action of the stirring effect of the major chakra centers.  Now, though, the chakras seem less at play as I get down to the last blocks in the major chakra regions. It seems that now I am down to doing this piecemeal.  But by feeling them as clearly as I do, I have been able to point directly to the specific blocked area on my body and either my acupuncturist or my body worker (a lovely Kahuna healer who is perfect for this kind of work at this stage in the game) were then able to go directly to the site and begin working their magic on me in those places.

 

In an odd twist, though, it helps me to see how close this issue of getting the word out is to my own soul.  As a result, while I now feel freer than ever before, I have this calm sense of resolve that I do indeed need to finish this work. No fire in the belly, no, but I have something much better perhaps.  A quiet calm knowing.  To know that something I did in the past helped in some way to preserve the esoteric wing of early Christian thought is like having the past reach out to me and touch me on my heart, telling me that while we are at a time when these books can be seen anew, or seen for the first time in a new context, the work is perhaps even more important so I can round the end of this one chapter that has been almost 1600 years in the making. I get to tell the story I didn’t get to tell, you see. My work will be for the texts themselves and what they meant to me and how it was that I understood them when others did not seem to know.  The research I am doing will seek to illuminate this to show just how revolutionary and how similar these teachings were to other very different traditions in other parts of the globe.  

We each do not see the sun rise through the eyes of a Muslim or Christian or Zorasterian.  We see them through human eyes and awakening is very much a human experience, not one attained by way of religion (our self-imposed ignorance as a race has seen to that!).

 

The other really interesting thing is how it has loosened up my energy.  The heart center, which has been one center that has cleared the most in my ten years at this work, now suddenly seemed to explode with a new found sense of energy.  The heart center was not the one blocked, though, but when a block near the root opened up, it put the heart center into what felt like was a new context.  It has provided a vibrant presence of this energy within me that is remarkable.  That is a beautiful outcome. This is showing me yet again the complex reciprocity between all aspects of the light body (yes, heart is open and clear, but when the root is clear, the heart can know continuously what it could only feel in peak states previously).  It also gives me an unexpected level of hope and excitement about clearing up the two other blocked areas in the root that I can feel vividly. This last release helped to confirm what I had felt in my body before laying eyes on a meridian chart, which was a cluster of points (and blocks in each) that corresponds to an acupuncture meridian that has three points along it.   That is pretty cool, I think, because it shows that those Chinese who helped develop these charts really knew their energy centers and could feel them like I do. It’s almost as if I can see them talking now, “Xiao, I feel resistance right here in my hip!”
“Write it down on the chart! A new point! Now let us observe if anyone else has it and what its nature is!”

 

With each release, there is also sometimes a certain kind of confusion over why I am feeling the emotional reaction that I am feeling.  Often, for me at least, a few days before a block lets go, I begin feeling all kinds of emotions that are tied to the block….except I don’t know in the beginning that it is associated with that block.  I just feel all this emotion and I wonder if I am just “in a mood” or just what is going on!  But, as is often the case, my mind turns to the possibility that it is a block releasing and it is then that I quietly observe and just do as I have always done, which is the work to help the block go ahead and release.  In some cases, physical movement helps this.  Shaking, massage (deep tissue), breath work, and some other somatic work can help.  In this case, actually feeling the emotion and seeing where the block happened, can in some cases help me to realize its origin and to just let it go by flushing the emotion in my system partly by processing the emotion more fully.  In this case, this meant feeling such an intense mix of emotions was what took place.  Over the period of one day, this emotion kept coming up.  In moments through the day I mourned the loss of something I knew were texts that were  central to understanding how to help people to wake up.  And the narrative changed considerably after that date as Orthodoxy stretched out its limiting hand on Christian thought.  In its origins, what these people had was nothing short of explosive, and it was largely lost to time until about 60 years ago when some of them were recovered.  But how do you explain to people who don’t get it how important these books were?  Most often, people’s eyes glaze over when they are confronted with something someone says is important Christian thought.  But this was itself a different Christianity, an aspect that never made its way to the light of day.  I have had people criticize my thesis on this because, well, they only know what they know as a result of what Orthodoxy has handed down to them.  But this….this was something powerful, and there were people who had a clear view and understanding of it.  What it means is that human experience is human experience.  This prefigures ALL religion because an awakening is NOT Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Sufi or Native American.  Each has its unique cultural coloring, but its all like Rumi said, just water.  We all argue over the water in one bottle over another, simply because the labels are different.  But really, they all come from the same well, the same source.  We all experience it the same way the world over.  This is what people have a hard time coming around to.  But it is the truth.  It is also what will set us free. We all are seeing the same light. Our water all has the same source. Call it heresy if you must, so we all must face a common heresy because we are made by the same one who created the truth that we call heresy.

 

We don’t often feel a connection to the church because, it lost its own connection with the truth….or an important aspect of it.  The church has much good to say, some about a glorious garden whose keys to they themselves have lost. And it is here, in the midst of this, that I have been set free.  Here, the flow of life force is so strong, I am excited over getting the rest of the blocks cleared so that I can know a greater peace and a field of undisturbed bliss.  It is already better than it has ever been before.  
It is interesting to see how it will affect those who have been caught up in karma contrary to my own who have not themselves come to the truth of their own soul. And really, who knows.  It is their story.  I have my own, and in the end, we are each like flowers opening before the light of this new day, aren’t we?  Isn’t this a pretty amazing time?  And no matter what happens, we each know that at the least, we helped to bring the collective to a point of greater realization than has happened in a very long time.  It would be nice to continue just to witness even bigger miracles on the world stage. I suspect that in the next six months, we will be in for a very bumpy ride.  All of it, though, will be the collective consciousness coming to grips with many of the issues that still dog it. Some will see the change coming and miss understand the forces at work seeking to work it’s own agenda. If that sounds cryptic, hang on because the last leg holding up our economic table is about to be assaulted. And soon! This will unfold in such a way that someone who could have brought great change will be, very likely will be, neutered in effectiveness. If events unfold as I feel they will, this event is soon upon us.

 

Not long ago I was gifted with a reading by a really great person who works with ancient systems of knowledge and divination.  I know how that might sound, but when I talked to him, I explained that I never felt like I could do the work he was saying I would be doing because I had not fully cleared my field.  I have just always felt that before I do healing work with others, I need to be clear.  He explained that I needed to begin the work now because doing the work would get me to where I needed to be.  He had his ideas about what this would look like, but in doing this work with this book, which he didn’t see as playing a very big role in my future work, I have found that it has helped to do just what he was saying my work would do, which is to get me to that place of clarity.  While I have some ideas about what I am interested in delving into to help others, I don’t know what this will look like in specific because spirit always has a way of bringing me all the right events and opportunities in unbelievably synchronistic ways. So we will see how that unfolds, but by giving it the room it needs, the higher self will express itself as it needs to, with elbow room and with me not meddling too much in what I think it needs to look like. Maybe you have a few experiences with how that has worked out in your own life?

 

And all of this happening on the eve of my birthday.  I think I picked a great time to be born; a time when everything in the world is waking up, peeking out as new life.  How juicy it is to feel new life in me, right along with new life in the world.
Until next time…
-Parker

Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part 1

When I had my awakening, I awoke aware that I was feeling someone in my head, in my space….it was hard to pin down at first….but some part of me that woke up KNEW this was so, even as my rational mind was struggling just to keep up with the newness that was taking place.  All of it was novel, interesting, sometimes even scary or anxiety-producing.  I lived with the idea that I had a soul twin because, simply, there was no other theory out there that explained it so….well.

Cracks began to show up in that fairy-tale world when I heard the really hard and mean things this twin of mine would say sometimes.  I began to question, and as I questioned, more things popped up that showed me that something was amiss.  The concept of the twin soul was a fairy-tale.  Like angels on clouds and happily ever afters and gurus who are perfect (note: there is no such thing-these are things we would like to be true but are not). The experience was cosmic and I WAS feeling this person at the soul level deeply.  Yes.  Wonderful, yes.  But human still, yes.

In perfect timing, as I was beginning to question the mythos of the Twin Soul and the Twin Flame along came a person who had gone through all of this herself and we began this dialog.  It was one of the most insightful of any kind of dialog I have had with another person.  She spoke my language, and she helped to fill in some spots that I was clamoring around in the dark for.  One of the things that she talked about was how karma creates chemistry.  At first, this was so non-intuitive that while I took it all in, I honestly had some trouble with it.  After all, the energy that was a part of the connection felt so….natural. It just felt like it was so deep within me, right?

But the same is true for karma.  Whoops.

I have been at the cleansing process that is a part of awakening since early 2007 (early February) and I have slowly come to a realization through many many releases that some of the biggest troubles have been in the more base chakras.  Each release in the meridians or chakras (or both) has always been accompanied by changes in how I felt and how I reacted to things that might have upset me before.  I have been hard at “work” getting my field cleared because of how much better it has made me feel, how richer and more…..buoyant….my energy has felt following a clearing.  Despite how some have said that the root is cleared first, I have to take issue with this and call such tales utter nonsense. No, kundalini clears the easiest to the hardest.  It is like water, following the path of least resistance.  If it had tackled my poor solar plexus, sacral, or root chakras first, I would still be here today telling you how kundalini is still trying to bust down that one hardened armored wall!  Instead, I have hundreds, thousands of victories both big and small that has made the last three years easier.

The last three years has been a time period where MOST of my energy field was cleared with mostly sacral/root blocks remaining.  it has been challenging and sometimes utterly frustrating to see how big the block was, but I can say that over the last year especially, I have spent every single day surrendering to the flow of prana in the hopes that it would flow into those hard places and break up the material.  My meditations have shown me that it was a densely packed series of layers.  Some of the work that I have done has included utilizing a reiki practitioner as well as a  massage therapist who specializes in the Kahuna method, which honors the balance of the masculine and feminine current in our bodies.  I was able to break a lot of material free from those sessions.  I even reported a year or two ago how one reiki practitioner could not detect ANY blockages in my root and patted me on the back and admonished me about not trying to create a problem where no problem existed.  This was a person who was the head of a massage school and is well known in our community for her therapy work.  And this is mentioned as a cautionary tale that for those of you who are going extra deep into yourselves that there may be some who could help you that don’t….or can’t…perhaps because they themselves cannot feel that deep or detect what exists at such a cleared level.

I mean, think about it….most everyone on the planet is blocked from head to toe in some way or another.  I know this may sound severe, but as I awoke, my ability to sense energy was increased about three to four-fold.  Before then, I had been reading auras since I was 18 and I am now 50.  So lots of experience with this end of awareness…..and I can say that those who slumber are simply not aware all that much.  And it is probably good that they are not aware for the time being.  Only when you are ready to tackle such a backlog of material as we all have here on the planet can you really have any hope of getting it done.  otherwise it simply seems to be too big of a mountain.  I know that it has been a mountain for me, and I also know people who have been at this for decades who are still wearing away the stone, so to speak. I am not saying this to be negative, I am saying it because I observe that it is true.

So the “proof” part….

I was reflecting how I was able to magically release the soul connection I had when I first awakened.  God bless her, but she had issues that made dealing with her hard, and being connected to this, once I became aware of the hardness (I was not aware of the hardness in the beginning you see), it got more difficult.  But what “did it” was a couple of years ago when I initiated a correspondence with her in the hopes of clearing up whatever was left was the moment when she wrote to me, “Parker, I am really HAPPY in my life now…..I woke up and had someone like you to help me through it, to share and make sense of it…..and I now feel things I had not felt before but knew was possible….I really love my life!” Poof!  In that moment, it was like this thing gave way in me and I realized I was holding something up I just didn’t need to hold up anymore.  Then thre came this awareness in the clarified moment that I had known her in some official capacity as an advisor.  It FELT like she was a leader of some kind….and somehow I had let her down in some way.  THIS led to a hitch karmically that led to our connection later while in the super-charged environs of an awakening (a double-whammy!).  Then, as I began breathing more deeply and more slowly, I dropped down into it deeper and I was shown that no, I had not let her down.  It wasn’t event THAT clear-cut.  I had FELT like I had let her down.  Her problem was HER problem, but I had taken it to mean that I had failed her.

The interesting thing is that this was exactly what happened in another relationship…I was hooked, literally hooked into this fear of failing another person and letting it eat me up energetically and karmically.  It doesn’t matter what actually happened, it is HOW we choose to FEEL about an event that is the hook of karma.  And this is one reason why I have so much trouble with the concept of karma.  It is called “action” and I have recently considered maybe they were including inner action, because otherwise the definition as given by the Buddha seems…shallow….and prone to turning into being a punishment or something of the like.  People do this, though.  They are upset that something didn’t turn out the way they would like and they say “Karma is gonna get you!!!”  All the while, though, the deeper truth is that karma isn’t a punishment.  It is based on how far we have chosen, yes chosen, to turn away from our inner divine natures.  THAT nature is….perfect.  it does not NEED to be anything except perfectly itself.  And yet, we allow ourselves to get pulled in all these directions that are not in our highest.  Like me, just wanting people to be happy and failing at it because…..well…I am not the Lord of people’s happiness.  They are.  This was so bad in a prior relationship that my ex told my children that I had failed them at a time when I was sticking to my guns when the economy was in a rut.  Truth be told, when you tell children this kind of thing, YOU are the one “failing.”  But this was the consequence of living in this way.  The person who acted as the put-upon victim became the victimizer.  Terrible.  So it was in my interest to untangle this mess as soon as possible, right?

To learn more about how this all turned out, I have broken this post into two chapters, with the second one immediately following this one.  So now for chapter two….

 

 

The Subtle Energy System & Leg Chakras

I wanted to share this article that has just gone up on my sister site Divine Alignment about leg chakras and developing a keener awareness of subtle energy.  Enjoy!

http://divinealignment.blogspot.com/2016/05/energy-awereness-leg-chakras.html

Recipes For A Happy Holiday Season

 

In my previous post I mentioned how feeling is a choice. I know this often rankles people because most people feel as though they have no choice in their deeper-held feelings of emotions. What we do not feel we have control over are the emotions that crop up out of nowhere that leave us feeling as though feeling has mastered us instead of the other way around.  I get it. There is a way, though, to deal with feelings that have plagued you for years that put you in that sudden miasma of emotion….and the great thing about the approach is that its not a band-aid, but a permanent reversal of the reactivity that we feel that we can’t always control.

The method is not about control, it is about genuine healing, and that is what is so different about the first portion of this post (which I know gets lengthy but…)

One important key to changing how you feel is understanding the choices you may have made years ago, maybe even in childhood, for a pattern of feeling that has stuck with you to the present day. We aren’t always self aware enough to realize that sometimes our emotional reactions are based in an assumption we have might, right or wrong, about how we think the world is, or how we are.

The choice I am talking about here may now be a long lost memory by now, so be easy on yourself. It may also be a feeling that has descended on you during adulthood, too. In either case, I am going to unravel some of this for you to see if it helps you to understand how it is that you might feel governed by feelings that you have little or no seeming control over, and that you CAN in fact make the change by changing the underlying assumptions or feelings that give rise to these emotions in the first place.  The first method will involve the science of somatics, which, simply put, reveals how it is that the body stores trauma and latent emotion.

In this post, I have a rather long series of recipes, or prescriptions, for how to deal with a wide array of things that often trip people up this time of year.  Sadly, this is not light reading, however, it has a lot of very good info culled from years worth of work on this subject.  To make navigating this post a little easier and quicker for those of you who feel harried, I have divided each portion of this post up into sections, which you can quickly scan through if you find a heading that strikes our fancy.

 

The Root Of Our Troubles

 

When we experience an emotion that we have never fully processed, which is to say, that we never really truly felt in its fullest depth and intensity, we know that these emotions get stored in the body (this is a somatic effect). What many people don’t know is the degree to which this happens.  Over years we push away many hard feelings resulting in a collection of unprocessed emotion. All modern psychologists have explained that anything that is repressed comes roaring back to life. If held in too long and too tightly, it can even lead to disease because of how the feelings distort the body’s own ability to function in a healthy way.  My observation has been that when we create this stance in relation to our submerged feelings, they come bubbling up from time to time when triggered, but for may people, this bubbling up does not release them and they always remain not fully processed as a result.  This creates a scenario where we have certain “hot button issues” that keep upsetting us over and over, seemingly without end. The answer lies in being able to let the feeling come out into the bright light of day, so to speak.  To do that, however, requires a level of awareness that has not been brought to the emotion or feeling before.

How this happens is still a bit of a mystery to western minds even though it has been observed and taken as fact for thousands of years by eastern traditions. You could say that the Western mindset in medicine has been a material and rational one that looks at the brain as the center of much of the psychological activity, while the eastern traditions take a much less material approach (its all just chemicals bouncing around), that considers the body and somatics.

Most of Chinese medicine, the parts that concerns itself with energetics, deals directly with the issue of blocked chi (qi) or prana (in the Indian tradition) and Ka in both the Egyptian and Polynesian traditions. This blocked energy is always removed by manipulating the connections in what is described as a kind of etheric or energetic circuitry of chi energy that is nonphysical, but is very much a part of the body. This circuitry has been mapped out with a high degree of detail in the Chinese acupuncture tradition. It also exists in similar form, with the addition of chakras, in the Indian traditions. These are the often-mentioned meridians of the Chinese and the nadi of the Indian tradition (as in the illustration included below).

Nadi chart. Source: http://www.yinyoga.com/ys1_3.1.2_nadis.php

 

There are numerous ways that  blocks can be removed, and in each case the first step towards removing them comes with an intention to do so. Regardless of the method used, it seems that when we are able to remove blocked emotional energy in the body, we can actually release an emotion that we have been holding in the body. The really interesting counterpoint to such releases of stored material is that once they go, they are gone forever. In fact, these types of releases can be so dramatic that the person who has released them no longer goes back into the old thinking and feeling that created them in the first place. Part of the reason for this is because each block in the body is actually blocking the flow of prana. When the flow of this energy is allowed to move freely in the body in a large enough volume in hindered by our thoughts and feelings, the result is a state of ecstasy or bliss. Blocks will always center around some kind of attenuation of this energy.  Think of it as starving yourself of the loving force that will help animate your body and make you feel wonderful.  This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking, but is actually a state that each human is capable of feeling and being every moment of the day when enough blocks are removed.  So its beneficial to do this work, you see.

 

The concept of blocked energy was for me a foreign concept in many ways until upon awakening I saw how I was releasing blocks with the aid of kundalini stirring in me. It is odd, too, given how long I had been aware and able to see auras, which went back over 20 years. I had simply never learned about blocks and how to see them in the aura when I “read” someone. But after a particularly illuminating conversation I had with a brilliant intuitive about a year and a half into my awakening, I was made aware of my own blocked energy. I had been experiencing releases of blocked energy all along, but I didn’t believe I was as blocked as I was (I was!)  This gifted intuitive explained that there was someone in my community who would be someone who would help me in removing these blocks, and she told me that while she did not know this person’s name, she described the person to a “T” and then explained I needed to keep my eye out for this person. It helped that she was very specific, because her description of this person as an expert in their field related to healing and energy, along with his personality traits she described made this person instantly recognizable to me. In my case, I did not have to wait very long before finding this person. In fact, it was the very next day as I was talking to a client and old family friend about some matters with a piece of glass she had bought from my studio that she began to describe this person to me in enough detail to cause me to sit up and take notice. The most interesting part to this story was that the classes that this person held were just around the corner from my home. By beginning weekly sessions with his Qi Gong class (also spelled Qi Gung), I embarked on an intensive period of block removal that led to hundreds of releases over a six month period. It led to a lack of reactivity on a slew of issues, too.  I have continued with this work because the amount of blocked material for most people experiencing this rapid type of removal is fairly significant.  Don’t ever feel daunted by the volume of material, just keep chipping away at it; it is extremely beneficial work! When things get difficult, I think about U.G. Krishnamurti, who went through the process of awakening and saw how he used to say “Nothing bothers me” only to see that near the end of his life, his core blocks came to life, the ones he had not dealt with….and it shows that we are all so very human (be easy with yourself–this is the great work we each can do).

 

While the work of releasing blocked chi is so incredibly useful for helping bring us back to a state of greater balance or equilibrium, the effects are most often permanent for the simple fact that if you are releasing a block from childhood, say, the person you are now is no longer the person you were as a child, and you now quite simply see and understand in a different way now than you did all those years ago. The problem with blocks, though, is that it does not matter if you are now “older and wiser” because as long as the block is shoved down inside of you, you suffer in direct proportion to how “off” your emotions were concerning a given event in your past. You can then very much relive the feelings from your childhood self over and over endlessly….experiencing feelings of blueness or depression as the holidays hit simply because they remind you of what you have not yet forgiven and let go from your childhood, for example.

I know that, again, I might upset you by suggesting that your feelings were “off” but it is nonetheless true. If your feelings were spot on with the incident in question, you would be much more able to see that some slight or hurt dealt you, whether real or imagined, would actually be seen for what it is, which means taking a lot more information into account than what any block has ever been able to do.

There is a reason why a block is called a block, which has everything to do with the silent but brilliant intelligence which lies within prana itself. When we feel something that is off axis from what prana is, we incur a negative type of karmic thread, and often an emotion forms at the same time as a result that is tricky because of how it mis-perceives something in the world. We think our mother does not love us because of how she acts, when in truth, her behavior may not have had to with her love, but that she was going through a hard time, which we took to mean what we believe it means, for example.  This forms into a notion of ourselves and each time she displays this hard emotion, we think it has to do with us, for example, when in fact, it may have nothing at all to do with us (it may not change how she appears to be-snapping at people around her, and maybe even at you…but there may be more to the story).  This then gets played over and over within us until the end of time like some kind of merry-go-round experience that seems to lock us into the same recursive reaction or behavior.

Sometimes the act that helps to release a block is a simple act of deep unconditional forgiveness of others, but it also means forgiving ourselves for having felt hard or anything less than wonderful and wonder-filled. There is something about the nature of the cosmos that provides reward when our compass point is spot-on but difficulty when it is off. When it is off, we incur negative karma and blockages in our bodies and also a slew of undesirable emotions that we can’t seem to change no matter how hard we try.

One method that I was introduced to as a way of working with our own sense of accountability and honesty for owning our feelings was embodied in the Polynesian methodology called Ho-Oponopo.  It means returning back to the zero-point that the Zen Buddhists talk about, which is the removal of all of the reactive material we have floating around in us. The method is not complicated, and is amazingly simple.  I suggest that you take a look at an interview with Dr. Hew Lin to better understand how radical a change can happen when healing takes place.  As is often the case, when we heal ourselves it can also lead to others being healed as well.  I think it is clear how we hold other people in webs of resistance unknowingly that lead to these hard feelings.  When that web goes, the healing can begin.  I can say that in nine years of this work that I have encountered this similar phenomenon over and over many times.  The benefit of our own healing is that it frees others to heal, too.

 

First Things First

In the case of subconscious material, it can be helpful to use a healing modality where a practitioner is trained and is intuitive and knowledgeable enough to know about where the emotional material is stored in the energy body, that system of meridians that acupuncture helps to open up and allow to flow. But acupuncture is not the only method. There are many others. To help you get at old stored material I have created a list of similar and also divergent methods that all address the energetic aspect of stored emotion.

 

Movement

 

Movement is a critical part of tapping into stored blocks. It is one “angle” you can use to get at certain kinds of material. By using forms of movement that have been studied over a long time and known to be of benefit to all of us when we practice them, you can begin to soften blocks all through the body through continuous practice and attention during that practice.

 

The practice known as Chi Gung (Gong) can have very beneficial effects on removing these emotional blocks. I was able to remove significant blocks using White Crane Chi Gung at a certain point in my work. I was able to go twice a week. Chi Gung has as its benefit being a discipline that moves through each major center of the body in order to “work” each center. My teacher explained that whenever you feel a sense of resistance or pain during this low impact workout, it is most often a sign of a block. When I first went to Chi Gung I came away feeling sick. In fact, I didn’t feel good after my first two workouts. I felt clammy and nauseous. What I learned was that this was just how powerful the Qi Gung was for me. I was already beginning to move a lot of blocks and this was having an impact on my system. I doubt that most people should expect the same reaction that I had for the simple reason that I was in the midst of an intense kundalini experience. I was “ready” for anything that might begin moving the blocks quicker than kundalini itself was doing. If you have experienced strong pranic flow, you may want to keep an eye out for physical symptoms and see how they change as your work progresses. If you study with an experienced teacher s/he should be able to help point out what it most likely an energetic rather than physical reaction.

 

The method is to place awareness on this feeling of resistance or strain and work on that area gently and with intention. It is so simple; you simply allow yourself to be aware and to fill that space with the light of your awareness. There is a difference here with intending to release a block and simply allowing yourself to observe and be aware, never judging or making up your mind what you think the block is. By allowing yourself to simply be aware but not judging, my experience has shown that blocks resolve themselves much easier. You do not want to create more resistance in by bringing this awareness, you simply want to bring a very simple awareness that does not judge.  It SEES.I know how simple this sounds, but I sense that there is a part of our awareness that we are not fully conscious of that IS seeing into these blocked places and bypasses our own so-called “conscious” awareness in order to get at the block and release the stored material.  This is a method I developed that is a part of my own meditation practice that has led me to become much more aware of my remaining blocks.  They are each translated as a seeming physical feeling that is in fact energetic.  They are marked by a feeling of tightness or, in the words of my teacher, “resistance.” I simply allow my mind or attention to go to the resistance and over weeks, sometimes months, the block is dissolved.  I mention this method because you can join it with your work with a physical discipline like Qi Gong, but you do not even have to do this in order to get Qi Gong to work well.

You don’t even need to know what the block was, but you can feel a difference in your own inner energy flow and state of mind once it does release. After having done this a few times, you might not even want to know, which is akin to revisiting an old scene of the crime kind of experience. The experience of being freed from the old hard feeling is so good, I have most often not even looked back at what it was that was released that helped to bring the better flow within. And really, when you think about it, well-being is concurrent with a nice flow of energy in the body. I don’t mean just physical energy, but also the feeling of lightness and joy that can come with an increase in prana or chi. With enough of it, bliss begins to fill the body and it helps to bring a sense of lightness and awe.

 

Shaking

 

Shaking has been shown to help relieve the effects of PTSD in traumatized patients and is now being used for war veterans as a therapy with measurable results. It turns out that Osho offered a method of ecstatic movement that emphasized feeling the shaking not just physically, but within ones own being. It has been shown that we can literally shake off our hurt. The prescription for maintenance is to shake for ten to fifteen minutes while laying on a bed, a level of shaking that does not cause injury, but is like a gentle workout.

 

I myself have also used shaking and what I found most useful is a gentle shaking for five to ten minutes, continuously or intermittently over about a 15 to twenty minute period. I have found that when I can identify a center where a block is, I simply put my awareness there and leave it there during shaking. I don’t even think about what the block is, I just imagine my awareness as a larger awareness of prana flowing into me, and as I do this, I can feel the prana actually helping to dissolve the block along with the actions of shaking. I was first introduced to shaking by my intuitive friend I mentioned earlier, and I went on to find that shaking has a place in healing.

 

I have also developed a method of “inner shaking” that I can only do when I am lying still and alone. This inner shaking is a feeling that I have identified as a manipulation of prana itself that feels like a tightening and loosening of prana in my meridians, but it has no movement involved. It is in effect constricting and releasing the energy quickly so that I feel a swimming effect that borders on feeling physical.

 

To understand what I am talking about, the effect is nearly identical to the feeling when you feel yourself shuddering when you see something that upsets you. Do you know how you feel when that happens? The shudder is actually taking place at a level of consciousness and of energy. Your body might also shudder, too, but if you are careful and are not swept away when a shudder happens, you will be able to identify the inner shudder that is not part of the physical effect. You can then repeat this shudder inwardly and use it to have a very real effect on the meridians in your body where these old emotions appear to be stored in some way. When I came across the method described by Osho, which was to feel the quiver or shaking inwardly, I suspected that he was on to the same idea. Once you “get it” you can repeat it over and over quite easily, although it may take some degree of concentration and quiet to do so.

 

Body Work

 

Never underestimate the benefit of a massage performed by a practitioner who understand energy. I recommend having someone who describes their work as involving energy work along with deep tissue massage. I do feel that for me, I am careful of the people who do this type of work.  I have had some energy workers be unaware of the blocks I could feel and knew were there.  I also find that the universe has a way of providing the perfect thing for me at my level of work (which is always changing over time) Often you will find that a therapist that does one aspect involving energy will also do other complimentary practices as well, such as cranio-sacral therapy, or reiki along with body work. I have found a Kahuna practitioner who has melded her culture’s knowledge of Kah (chi) with a method that is balanced, which is very much like the Chinese system of recognizing the yin and yang energies. By keeping these balanced, both aspects of the self and prana or chi are brought through and worked with. A good body worker can be worth their weight in gold for how they can feel a block in your body tissue even if you yourself are unaware. They can, if you are ready, remove those blocks for you. I have found that by asking the universe to provide you with just such a person, and then keeping your eyes and ears peeled, that it has a way of coming along in due course. This was just how I found my very effective Kahuna healer who I felt instantly comfortable with dealing with some of the deeper root chakra issues that I knew were keeping me blocked. As a result, I could just let completely go while also guiding her in some cases for that exact position over a given block. I knew just enough about the work to be a help and not a hindrance.

 

I have found that I have had the most beneficial effects when I was already aware of the blocks in my body. These blocks always feel either like a feeling of tension in a part of the body, and sometimes can be expressed as pain. This tension is itself a restriction of prana and this gets referred to the brain as feeling like tightness. It is in truth a narrowing of energy flow that gets translated into tightness, pressure, or sometimes other related symptoms. These can often feel quite physical, and its probably a good idea for you to describe them when working with a practitioner for your own peace of mind.

 

This is not to say that I always knew what the block was about, only that I could feel its presence as a sense of tightness or resistance or even pressure in a certain part of my body. By working on that center, I often had flashes of memory as the block dissolved that showed me what the block was about. Don’t be shy to ask practitioners if they work with helping remove blocked material.

 

Another good first step towards making change is being aware that there is a problem. Since so much of these problems or snags for us reside at the edges of our awareness, being able to see your own reactions to a wide range of things that upset you can actually be a powerful way to get very quickly to the source of the challenges you face. I’m not suggesting that your reactions are wrong in any way, but if you are to change how your respond to certain issues that upset you, the only way is to identify them first. Being able to do this in an honest way as possible is the first step in identifying the root cause.

 

You can actually change how you respond to your hot button issues if you tell yourself that your hot button issues are very often the face of a deeper issue. What lies beneath that face is more material that has had you tied up in a certain way of feeling. Seeing it as an ally, not an enemy, is one first step in turning all of this around. If you can learn to do this, you can turn your issues from problems into potential solutions. Within them lies the answer, you see, so really, were they so bad? It is often our response to a given issue or our fear of looking deeper, or even our seeming inability to ever address it that often leaves us not dealing with these snags for years. Very often the fear of addressing something or looking at it seemingly for the first time square on is greater than anything that the issue itself contains. It is more that it is a mouse when we imagine it is a dragon.

 

Behold The Light

 

One important aspect to feeling better this time of year is the nature of the light our bodies receive. We have been learning recently that the character and color of light goes a long way to setting our internal clocks and also our sleep cycles. When you are unknowingly disrupting your inner clock, it can lead to feelings of sleeplessness, fatigue, and irritability. One part of this is the fact that our days have shortened. We are all getting less light, so our sleep cycles can change. You might sleep a little more in winter, and it might be in some latitudes that you should give yourself a little more time for this. Sometimes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour is all that is needed. In other cases, though, for people who do not need as much sleep as some people, this could lead to oversleeping, and this is sometimes almost as bad as not getting enough sleep, since it leads to a feeling of dulled senses. I think you might find yourself more rested and feeling less sleepy by adjusting your sleep requirements over the winter. That means going to bed a little earlier than you may be used to. It may also mean keeping your sleep at night the same and finding ways to take a nap in the afternoon. While I know that many people cannot do this, I have found significant benefits with a short 45 minute nap in the middle of the day when I am suffering from fatigue. Some people are so affected by the change in light that it leads to depression, fatigue, and other problems like a weakened immune system. One solution can also be getting more light into your body, but as with anything, the quality of that kind of light is very important for how you feel. Light screens can be a way to combat the winter “blahs” by giving your body much needed light. I once had a friend who became bipolar as a direct result of not getting enough light in winter. She was able to fix this after I suggested she look into seeing if a light table or light screen might help her. In the case of my friend, it was a life saver. It saved her from the drastic swings from one state of feeling to another. The clue for me was that she was complaining about these things affecting her more in winter than in the summer.

 

Quality Not Quantity

 

While the sun is hiding from us, there is another issue concerning the character of light that many people are not aware of, and this has to do with computer screens and phone or portable devices. Most of these devices are powered with low power consuming high intensity L.E.D.’s. The L.E.D.’s that are most often used to create a white screen and lighter colors in our handhelds and computer screens are actually tinted very slightly blue. The white light, it turns out, mimics the same light the sun puts out at mid-day. What this means for you when you are sitting in bed with your phone checking email is that you are most certainly getting zapped with a lot of “blue” white light. Your pineal gland is responsible for the production of melatonin in your body, and melatonin is responsible for helping you get sound restful sleep. The production of melatonin is set in large part by the kind of light that you look at each day. Your pineal gland is actually photo-sensitive. So what is the prescription for helping your body produce melatonin so you can get to sleep?

 

Don’t look at a computer screen past 7:30 in the evening. Its even better if you can avoid looking at any computer screen in the evening after you come home from work unless it is a quick peek at email or something. Avoid compulsive “surfing” on the net if you are having to take melatonin to get to sleep. Those pills may be trying to tell you something.

 

One very useful and important thing that you can do to reset your melatonin production is to have warm light in your home. There are even clear films being made that make your handhelds and computer screens slightly more amber in color, which helps to counteract the ever-so-slight blue in the white light on these screens. Often these films do very little to dramatically alter images on the screen, and they can also help protect you from the effects of making your body think its daytime. You can very easily change the balance of light around your home to a warmer one by finding sheer fabrics that are amber that you can throw over a lamp.  Like I said earlier, nearly ALL “white” L.E.D. lighting clusters lean in the blue range and often have a light balanced much closer to daylight than all incandescent bulbs. Candle light and fire light are excellent choices too, and can be naturally very relaxing for you. Its not so much that you have to deprive yourself of light, but that its better for sleep cycles when you choose warm light over computer-screen light.

 

Last year I ran a fund raising campaign on indiegogo that was centered around creating a light feature that worked with warm colors, and the effect of these lamps has been quite wonderful for me and many of the people who donated to the campaign. The added benefit is that they get a warm wavelength of light that helps to calm them. If you can’t have fire light in your home for some reason, having a lamp that produces warm light is a great choice. Treating yourself to a golden-colored lamp shade might be just the ticket for helping to reset your sleep cycles. You will need to give this method at least a week to begin showing signs of its working.

 

Changing The Reason For The Season

 

Another way of dealing with the season when the pressure of gift giving gets you down is to find a group of friends who feel similarly pressured and choose to have gatherings and parties that do not involve gifts but other types of giving and sharing. Sometimes simply sharing a meal among friends can help shake off the perception of demand that this time of year brings. Despite your guests insistence to bring a gift for the host, ask your friends to bring a story that they would like to share with each other. People love stories, and you might consider telling your friends to keep their stories down to about ten minutes each. This way, a group of five or six people can all share something they found significant without taxing the after-dinner attention spans of the rest of the guests. Then, lighting candles and decking the table with good wholesome food, enjoy the time laughing and talking, saving the story telling for the desert round, or coffee and tea, at the end. Families also often head off the stress of the holidays with limiting the price of gifts, which is a good way to ease the angst of building expectations.

 

Desire and Expectation

 

I think sometimes that the nature of desire is often at the root of many of our misgivings about the holidays. We sense that everyone is hoping for a perfect kind of gift, and in so doing, it can lead to disappointment sometimes, and as can be so often the case, we can perceive that our gift recipients were less than happy than they actually were. But just as likely, the holidays remind us of the morass of emotions from our younger years that we may not have fully dealt with, so they keep coming back year after year.  It is amazing how radical honesty can help clear these feelings away for good.  Sometimes, without knowing it, we have been holding a person accountable for some perceived slight from decades ago that we never fully got over and are still holding onto it.

 

Sometimes just finding the time to do all the shopping for gifts for friends and coworkers and for family is enough to turn the most ardent gift giver into a tarnished hum-bug. So why not admit that this time of year is hard and seek to find a way to soften whatever it is that bothers you about it. I have never had problems with Christmas time, but I knew many who did, and it was feeling on edge as a kid that was MY issue.

If this time of year is getting you down, it’s a sign that something needs to change, and the wonderful thing is that while we might have expectations and desire driving us about what we think this time of year is supposed to represent, there is nothing that says that you can’t craft your own tradition. Those who crave piles of wrapping paper will look elsewhere and might even find your home a retreat from business as usual. In the end, love is the greatest gift we can give this time of year, and with so many holidays crowding into such a narrow corridor, it strikes me as all the more important that we are able to be easy with others and with ourselves, too. You never know who you are going to inspire towards a more wholesome and healthy approach to this time of year.

 

I hope your holidays are bright and happy and that you can find yourself looking forward to letting it serve the love in your heart with the people who mean the most to you. And if you cannot be with those whom you love, for whatever reason, I hope that you can hold them in your heart, or mend the bridges that might have been harmed in our storied pasts.