Understanding Desire

Here is a draft from a few years ago, part of my backlog of posts that I am bringing forward so it can be out there for what they are worth. This is a very busy time of the year for me, so it is nice to have this backlog….

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I came to awakening without having been raised in a tradition or philosophy. Yes, my family went to church for a time, but I didn’t join when it came time to do that (and luckily I was allowed to decide for myself). I was always listening to the voice in my heart that tended to caution me about buying into a religious or philosophical construct.

I spent my life in a solo singular approach, seeking out those sources that reflected back to me what spoke to my own growing body of inner truth. In the 80’s I heard the album by Van Morrison “No Guru No Method No Teacher” and found a common sense of belonging to a path that comes from within.

The advantage, to my mind, of this “path” is that we learn to rely on our own inner compass point instead of relying on dogmas from other outside authorities. There is so much in our world that has distortions. Most every philosophy and religion has them. I would be called a nit-picker to point out some, but others are quite big and substantive. This is not to say that there aren’t traditions that aren’t good or useful, it is just that my inner guidance kept me from buying into any one of these paths. Along with this resisting joining or buying into a religion or school of thought was the feeling or expectation of a ‘big reveal’ that was going to happen further down the line. That inner voice was telling me that all of this was building to something.

….And then awakening came and so much was made plain to me about religion, spirit, the world….

It feels like to me that in many ways (not all, but many) that I have been called to seek the light within in order to bring forward the perennial teachings. Now, I know what this might sound like, but I do this for myself. I know growing up, the one thing I was most interested in were the “secrets of the universe.” I also realized that no one else was interested in these things like I was. Not many, anyway. So it isn’t as though I do this for an audience of any kind….I do it because I want the truth. I know; and now I’m writing about it…doesn’t that suggest that I am all about the audience? Not like that.

I share what I come across for anyone who cares to read…so in this way, I very much keep away from the teacher and guru model. Over and over people want a link, a book, a teacher, when the real rubber- meeting-the-road moment happens within. I understand, but enlightenment is waaay simpler, way more foundational an event within the self. No methods, no postures. It is so simple but hard for most it seems. So simple it can be transmitted by a look, a breath, a sigh.

I prefer to be an example for a way to be. It turns out that others have done this also and it is Jiddu Krisnamurti who espoused the “Pathless Path” in his own work. So my impulse or inner directive is not a singular one since there are others who have done the same thing. So with that bit of babble, what I am saying here is something that I came across from what I would call an inner teaching has helped me to understand desire in a way that isn’t often talked about and is also often misunderstood.

In most religions and philosophies, there is a strand or need to describe desire as something that is bad. In other traditions, desire is considered a bad thing, something that is meant to be eschewed. What I have found, though, is that this is actually being filtered through a bias that serves to cause a good deal of misunderstanding about the natural path through the self as a way to work through the issues that remain.

These issues are stored emotions that are contained not just in the brain, but are all throughout the body and is contained and recorded from life to life through the pranamaykosha or the sum total of what we think of as the Light Body.

The “problem” with desire is that what we call prana is itself full of desire. EVERY SINGLE PERSON who has ever been touched by high levels of prana has felt how desire has been intensified. Now you might think that this is just a reaction to an outside stimulus, but in the world of the nondual, any belief about the seperateness of phenomenon quickly is dismissed when you experience how all phenomenon is connected (like Dr. Bronner used to say: “all-one”).

This is one reason why awakening bears with it considerable desire of all kinds. Now, this is not just because when you awaken that prana is stirring these desires (of all kinds), but is the very basis of prana. Yes, personal desires are stirred, but this isn’t all that is at work. The crux of this is that there are issues that we each have that result in desires that are distorted.

Imagine a pure light streaming through a window that is colored with stains that distort this pure light. This is what I am talking about here. We forget the nature of prana and thus also kundalini as being full of desire. Who doesn’t see the stimulating effects that kundalini has on the body who has gone through this? I saw effects of age slow, then reverse for a time before age continued forward more slowly than before.

This desire, though, is a perfected light that does not have the same distortions or blocked forms within it. We are experiencing this advanced energy in our bodies and consciousness while also experiencing what happens when that light strikes our own light bodies, which are most often chock full of blocks when awakening comes (because in the West we do not have traditions that properly help us to prepare for awakening—at least not yet). But we often hear about how bad desire is and how many monks will spend their lives eschewing desire. This leads to all kinds of problems.

One problem is how in Christianity we have shunted aside women as active participants in it (there have been no female popes and no female cardinals or priests (or priestesses)). In Islam, it is much the same. The covering of the feminine is considered a form of protecting modesty, but it is actually doing something else, which is holding back men from learning how to deal with their own energy in such a way that they can work on their blocks and move into this purer kind of light. This is simply one example of how this state of being has been distorted and so misunderstood. The path through desire is not to resist, but to work through it and you cannot do this without facing all of your junk. If you think desire is some bad thing like I have described, then you are hobbling yourself. You will find that your capacity to bring heaven on earth will be greatly limited. But the question naturally arises, does this mean that we must embrace our desires in order to work through them?

The answer to my mind is no. However, it does mean that you do need to raise your awareness about where you are in your development. To do that, you need to be able to see how your desires are causing you problems.

Can you ask yourself if your desires are causing you problems? Can you observe the truth in this by observing what happens in your life? If you are experiencing awakening, you know how powerful this desire can be…and you can feel both this higher desire, which is this light that is moving through you, but you can also feel how this same light of prana is also activating a slew of other lesser desires, and it is natural for us to be drawn to our earthly desires. This is about learning to align to a higher vibrational state. When I hear about people seeking to “ascend” I wonder do people really know what this even means?

Sometimes I see people who are trying to ascend the hardest are the ones who are suffering the most. Simply, this is just holding onto blocks that keep these lower vibrational desires activated. So here’s a secret; if you respond to the reaction that you get from a block, you will never dig that block out. What you need to do is to actually find the stored emotion, not what that emotion is generating. Address that, and you are at the source. Blocks can fool you. You got hurt and you have been placing blame on others ever since. The problem here is as long as you are doing this, you are NOT addressing the initial reaction that you had that causes the block to begin with. I know people who are still going around in circles with something from childhood that they are too invested in how they felt they were hurt by others. This is the trap, you see. The universe does not give a whoop who did what. The only thing that matters is your reaction. You can let yourself be stuck in your reactions. You can be stuck for your whole life, even.

I say this as someone who has known this all too well. We hold onto these things because they feel so wonderfully strong and when we feel something that is so strong, we naturally get drawn to it. What I can tell you is that there is a higher power, a higher vibration that is available to us when we can do the work to cleanse the pranamayakosha (or Light Body).

Early in my awakening, when I began to really get involved in figuring out ways to help assist in releasing these blocked energies (which are often traumas) I began to be visited by higher vibrational beings. They came after awakening ramped up and began to accelerate, which made awakening difficult for a time. One of these spiritual visitors was someone whom I learned was my life guide, someone who revealed himself over twenty years ago to me, but who seemed to disappear for a long time.

When he showed up, he explained who he was. This turned out to be an angel from the Old Testament, called a Seraphim based on what it was he said to me. I never knew much about the angels, so I had to look his history up on the internet. It’s strange to find that the things that I saw about him were actually described in his description in the Old Testament accounts.

He showed up in my room at about four a.m. He walked over to my bed and explained that he needed to take something out of me. In a very matter of fact way he said “You are much more beautiful without this…” and he reached into my heart chakra and removed a dark body from my light body. This was itself amazingly vivid and it felt as though an inner body was being pulled out of me that had no bones. It was pulled away with a feeling of tearing at two points at the top of my lungs, up in the shoulders. But the moment that he reached into my heart center, I had a pulse of energy that was beyond anything I can even begin to describe. I was completely awed by my ability to experience this energy. I had never felt anything like this. It was like bliss X 1,000.00. This was a transformative experience in that I was able to see what is possible for us resting in potential. I wondered how on earth I was able to feel this, it seemed so beyond anything in our world. What this did was it showed me what I had to do in terms of work.

Needless to say, this has served as a kind of peak to look for within myself, to know that as I release more of the hurdles that are in the way within me that have accumulated over this life and other lives, I know that with dedication to this way of being that I can attain this pure light that is known by others seemingly more advanced than we.

You see, these blocks are tied up in beliefs that we have about ourselves that serve to hold us back. These are big and small and very often they are almost always limiting us. When you think about this energy of prana as a sentient energy (which it is), you are dealing with an energy that is limitless. Is it any wonder, then, that we experience synchronicities and perfectly timed events when kundalini (prana) begins to flow so strongly? When we are aligned within ourselves without limitations, what we wish for is unimpeded in its movement through the pranic field. When this happens, the field responds and it begins to create with us. Well, it is actually always creating with us, but the problem we so often talk about is how some of our wishes don’t come true. Instead, we have other things happen that hold us in a state that is “less than.”

The reason this is happening this way is because there is a competing belief that literally cancels out the signal of the wish that you wish could come to pass. Remove or resolve/change the belief and you open the flow and path for this wish to come true. To do this requires honesty and surrender.

Now bear in mind that I am not espousing some materialistic angle on spirituality that will bring you your wildest dreams for the sake of greed. Instead, when aligned to the highest within you, and when that alignment is not being cancelled by competing beliefs, that energy will flow in accord with how clear you are and the result that you get wont be filled with glitches like they so often might be. For example, here you are, you are finding you can wish for things and they happen. Great. You land that job you really needed in some new part of the country for the next leg of your journey and it is just what you need. That is one hurdle removed. But once you get in that job suddenly you find people emerging from the woodwork who seem to be the same color of some past experiences that you thought maybe you had dealt with, but obviously not because here they are causing you trouble. These people are part of a pattern from your past and they remain for as long as you have this belief still within you because that belief about yourself is actually activating physical reality along those same lines. The universe is super intelligent and it will bring you things that are bizarrely perfectly aligned with your stuff that you have not yet dealt with. Its like God is sending you something. But you are doing this. You. You are working with this amazingly creative force that is forming the physical and supporting it and bringing you all of this energy. It is up to you how you use it. If you are holding limiting beliefs, the universe dutifully brings you limited results.

We live limited lives in part because we believe that we are limited beings. We think we are just this one body, and we have created both consciousness and culture to close our larger being down, but we are much more. Being able to tap into what we truly are, which is a vessel for this shining light, is a very good first start. Only then can we know what is possible.

You can begin to taste this by removing the blocked energy in your field. As you do, you will find gradually, that things will get easier and easier. In fact, desire itself will change. It will get better, stronger, more cosmic, but also more peaceful. I think we all know just how chaotic awakening can make us feel especially in the beginning. But this is not because of our upbringing or because of another person making us feel a certain way or any of that. We feel this chaos because we are the chaos. Work through it, and it will go away, never to return.

The thing about doing this work is that desire does not go away, it get better. The thing about this work is that we realize over and over that no one else is ever the problem, we are. When you can turn the lantern of your awareness into yourself and dare to see all of your broken places and roll up your sleeves and ask the universe how to heal it, it quite naturally will begin to show you ways to do that. When I said I wanted to clear away the dross, my awakening accelerated because I had someone telling me where the blocks were and who to go see to take care of some of them. I had books and I had dreams, I had realizations in meditation or throughout the day, all showing up in amazingly perfect timing over and over. These things were not based in the old way of doing things but of being willing to finally be really honest with myself about my own shit.

The other side of desire that limits us is our shame. It keeps us locked in a prison most often. We don’t want to be seen as “less than” so we put on these masks or we try to hide in order to get through our days. Someone once said that we should be as children and we will know the kingdom. We need to return to a kind of openness and innocence in our work I think in order for it to go more smoothly. We might need to get used to the idea that things are going to change and that the intense current we are feeling in awakening is likely coming from holding our fingers over the end of the hose. No, more energy is not flowing, it is being impeded. Impeding the light will make everything seem intense and strong, but it is holding back the flow. This happens the first five years of aeakening for most people (some it can take much longer, some, fewer, for less time).

When we hold back, we are also holding back or denying what we are destined to be. There is no reason to feel shame that you have not reached perfection. The truth is, no such perfection exists, we just keep getting better and better. I mean really. if you think of the supreme consciousness and how advanced it is and how it interpenetrates the entirety of all things and knows each sparrow that falls, then that is a pretty high bar to set, don’t you think? So don’t be silly; ascension is simply a process that goes on and on. Maybe its even a good idea to let that old husk of an idea go because at some point all that striving will actually serve to limit you. There is no arrival, there is no real ascension save for a continuum of becoming and improving ourselves continuously forever. When we can be like children, we are no longer impressed so much by big productions and hunger for the really simple things…like play (creating).

So I say this to speak to myself because I am telling myself what I need to remember. Since I have experienced this, I have no hesitation sharing it because when you share what you know and what has served you as genuine, it will work for others too. Our fields are part of the same field. All are connected. Our consciousness divides “this” from “that” creating arbitrary and sometimes not too arbitrary divisions. Some are important for a time but fall away.

Even as I am writing this, I can feel the presence of the future and those who will be reading it. I know that my own energy will meet the reader, you, and something in me that is entirely without word will remind you of what it is that you are and what you are capable of. And this happens all the time. It is only a reminder.

The goal of desire is to teach us about our need to create and how central this is in our universe. We create all the time and we do so out of desire….desire of all kinds…and those creations are a mirror for where we are in our development like how children are a biological mirror in part of who the parent are. As you clear desire of the blocks, desire will grow ever more powerful and it will be….simpler, less impeded, and it wont trip you up as much as it did in the past. it wont be that you will feel any less desire, it is that the desire that you feel will be free from limiting ways of getting energized by things that aren’t good for you. It isn’t that desire is bad, it is that so many people can’t get over the hump of their own junk enough to see that desire actually changes and does so in a wonderful way. No, this is not about denying desire, and if you do, you will forestall your development, I promise you that. If you release fear then you might find yourself more easy with others so your own energy can just fill a room without any hesitation. You wont be afraid of somehow being captured by another person’s energy because you are so sure of your own. You will be more easy in yourself and desire will simply be aligned to a higher purpose. This wont be something that you think with your mind, it will be something that you feel all through you. And even then, you might still have things to work on…like all of us.

But the homework for today is; what is the source of desire? What IS desire? if prana IS desire-filled, then what is its parentage, its origins? What is animating prana?

I think desire is here to help us to refine the way we feel. It is to help us to feel. Most tend to pooh-poohs feeling, but the truth here is in order to know peace and contentment, we first need to understand all of the things that color our feeling. When the consciousness is clarified, we don’t get tossed about by our knee-jerk and hot button issues all of which are being driven by the result of the repressed emotions, the blocks I have been discussing all along here. I’m talking about a version of you that you were always meant to know. Now isn’t this interesting, a great mystery to help yourself unravel.

If you ask the question how do I do this work, the first and most important step is to learn how to help facilitate the release of stored energy in the body. Kundalini helps immensely with this, but you can also facilitate its removal greatly with a variety of methods. Qi Gong is very helpful especially in the first five years, but so is a method called TRE which uses tremor movement (shaking) to tap into an ability that we have to release stored trauma. It can work remarkably well. There is body work or deep tissue massage by an intuitive therapist who can feel blocks in your body. There is also forms of yoga that involve helping to clear the energy channels in the light body that hold these blocks. Being creative is itself very helpful also. There are many methods that can assist you in releasing this material.

~P.

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REiKi

For years I have been aware of the energy therapy called Reiki that was developed by a Japanese man who lived up until 1929 who had an awakening and developed this method for helping to move energy blocks.  I learned about it as a therapy while speaking to a friend and psychotherapist who was beloved by many in our community as a wise and intuitive healer.  We were sitting in his yard and I was explaining that I felt like there was a way that one could heal a person through their energy field without talking to them, or even touching them, all done at a distance.  He smiled and said that I might be on to something. It was there that I learned about this therapy called Reiki.  Being the nonconformist and lone wolf, I never did any more than read about the basics of the discipline.  Having been aware of energy for years since beginning to see auras when I was 18, the ideas behind Reiki all sounded on the mark to me.  But I was not a joiner.  It was like some sense I had even back then that by not aligning to other methods that I would be more free to create my own or to see something perhaps more clearly….what, I was not sure.  Twenty years and an awakening later, this impulse has begun to make more sense to me in terms of what it is I am trying to do with understanding awakenings.

It has been seven years since my awakening began and in that time I have had clearings of old latent material from a host of different levels within the light body, what is also called the pranamayakosha.  This light body has sheathes or levels much like an onion.  The literature states that there are five layers in the pranamayakosha, but intuition tells me there are seven within the range of our awareness in the physical.  In all truth, I suspect more and more that the real structure is that of a cone, a continuous broadening of the energy body into ever larger dimensions of awareness.  This is where we begin to experience the higher self.  Here resides bliss which we can begin to learn to anchor in our bodies, thus marrying heaven to earth, which I know to be a big goal in my own life.  If it helps to think of this all as layers, then use it, but just don’t limit your thinking…..there is more to all of this and it is waiting for you and me once we are ready to see touch and taste it. The result of this clearing is that I have removed a great deal of material.  It has been quite the trip!  And if anything has been a certainty is that the movement of life force or kundalini has not always been orderly. It has gone where it could do the most work, it seems.  So the idea that it goes from root to crown is a nice idea, but for me, the material in my root has been the hardest most stubborn stuff to deal with and so it has remained throughout this journey.  I have become increasingly aware of just how important is has been to clear this area, but it has been an example of a big glitch in my karmic makeup.

I have observed that most people seem to have a small cluster of issues that form a hard center or core of challenges that often tend to repeat from one lifetime to another.  Being able to heal these patterns is a huge thing since by dissolving it in one life it can loosen the threads in all others.  In truth, the idea of time works only as it is being lived…..but in the larger perspective, alltime becomes more like a landscape where many more things become possible. An event, then, in the past effects the future just as much as a future event sends out energetic ripples deep into the past.  In a recent journey into my own life as a teen, I was able to slip into my dreamtime way back then and insert a brief but brilliant moment of wisdom to my younger self.  The effect the following day was nothing short of revolutionary.  Whats so  curios was that I can remember having a dream where a weird almost manic future self showed up in a dream I had, looked me deep in the eyes and told me one simple thing.  It wasn’t about how to win the lottery or anything like that.  It was the one thing that would make the single biggest impact; love.  Love as deeply as you can.  She is going to come around the corner in fifteen minutes and if you get on that bus, you will miss her.  Just wait.  Wait and you will see her.  Love is the way. The following day there was a subtle yet noticable difference.  In the same way that I have known that the intelligence of kundalini is itself a future self more refined looping back through all time into its version of the past, it is helping me to change the pattern that might have otherwise been my life the way it was going before awakening visited me seven years ago.  The future self is thus changed.  I am changed.  Doing this travel is easy to do actually because it involves no mass.  No body. Just the light body. Try it.  You might be surprised just how easy it is.  Increasingly as people are becoming aware of this as a possibility this sort of travel, when used for healing and growth, reaps huge rewards.  The future self, like a more developed you, perhaps even like a cosmic parent, can visit you right here and now.

So this root has had be hung up. This root has been about the death of a father, the loss of a mother, a small baby who was not loved enough, who did not feel safe, who shut down…..and was thus also part of a pattern of countless lives lived where children were left without parents, adopted, left to live as urchins on the streets in centuries past.  This glitch in my makeup wore deep groooves into my being. Coming into this life, I carried it as a big skip on my karmic recording.  It kept going round and round, the record playing the same full revolution, never getting past that one spot. So it has been with awareness that I have sought to lessen its effects energetically as much as I can.  It has been stubborn.  Over the last few months, the removal of other material has highlighted the root more and more.  I have become more aware of it in a singular sort of way.  I have felt a near-constant sense of nausea, a feeling of thickness energetically there. And so it was that when I heard that there was a group who did Reiki attunements in my area that I thought it would be a good idea to get to know these folks.

I went last night.  The air was brisk and as I entered, there were perhaps seven people working on two people in the room.  I chatted with one of the therapists as they completed a therapy session with a student.  In an interesting turn of events, I was explaining that I had had a friend and healer who helped to move a block in my sacral with the waive of her hand. It was so effortless it changed how I thought about this “work” that we do in liberating ourselves from these kinds of things.  What was so unusual was that during that visit, the person who had just hopped up from the table had been at the local farmer’s market in my area and they chatted while we browsed the booths.  So here he was, again, standing up just as I told how my friend had done this clearing for me when we had met this young man who was…..just getting off the therapists table!  We all had a big smile and I got on the table.

At first, I could feel the energy, yes, but nothing happened.  One of the therapists left mid way through as he had to leave to go to work.  After he left, the therapists changed orientation.  We spoke as they began to place their hands at different places on my body.  I explained what it was that was giving me trouble, that for all the clearing I had done my root was giving me a real challenge.  Everyone was gentle, kind, and supportive.  As I relaxed more and more I found that my awareness opened up and I dropped into what I call the zone.  Within minutes I felt a shimmering of high vibrational energy moving through me.  I could feel the therapist with her energy moving up through my feet into my legs, serving as a kind of tuning fork for my own energy.  Someone at my head cradled me. After some minutes the therapists changed position and someone new came over to my head.  This was where I felt like some part of my awareness went waaaay out.  Gosh, what WAS that?  I felt like he was almost bilocated to some other place…..a higher dimension.  I kept hearing the number “7” being said over and over.  I realized that this was my crown chakra.  “Oh right!  Crown!…..”  there was a presence in the room and I was suddenly standing with him over near where I first came in.  I was asking him something but he smiled and said, “you wont remember…..just keep with the attunement and all will be well…..”

A therapist asked if my neck hurt and I said that it didn’t.  In that moment, though, I felt a sudden thickness in my shoulders rising up out of my heart and I replied that while I didn’t feel physical pain, I did feel like a block was trying to move all of a sudden.  I felt a familiar kind of sense as though I was about to pass out, except I never did. This feeling always seems to accompany strong releases of energy for me.  I also can get a feeling of nasusea as well.  I was getting both at this point.  It was here that I mentioned how I felt the pain in my energy body from the root upwards into the sacral.  A therapist was already there describing it, which was when the energy began to move.  I had said earlier that I thought that maybe the energy would move quietly through Reiki, but I was beginning to feel a swelling of emotion deep down inside of me.

I felt as though I had been hurdled all the way back to an early time in life.  This was hard.  It was a hard, sad, and even scary time.  My father was dying and my mother was in turmoil.  I was very young, an infant.  I felt a swirl of emotion.  I felt sadness over not being loved.  I also felt grief.  I was aware of my father dying, of his absence and how important his presence was in my life during that brief time. It was as though I never got to grieve his death.  This was a light bulb moment for me.   I had always felt a kind of sadness related to him, whcih I of course associated with his dying so young.  But when I touched it, the feeling was incredibly specific.  You see, I had always thought if I ever touched these feelings they would just be vague senses of loss or sadness.  Not so.  Everything felt keyed into very specific things that were immediately identifiable in my life.  It was as though emotional energy had the capacity to interface with very specific memories or perhaps that memory is also buried within feeling (which I think is maybe not what we might think at first blush when considering these things).  The discovery was that even as an infant, I had never gotten to grieve his death properly.  All of that grief got bottled up inside me. This was actually very clear.  I was very sad and had not grieved his death properly.  At age 14 months, I was not taken to his funeral. Deeper still were all these layers…..I wasn’t good enough to be loved….that was why I had slipped into this situation…..I feared I was not lovable.  These waves of emotion came one after another as I felt as though I had been pressed into the first year of my life, back into a space where I felt very small physically but very big energetically.  Everything felt out of proportion somehow.

The therapists could not have been more kind and supportive.  There was gentle and loving laughter as we chatted between my fits of grief and sadness.  It felt like layers were being shed.  I was aware of an edge of being uncomfortable with really letting go fully. There were other people there on another table.  One therapist said for me not to feel funny just letting it all out.  He let me know it was not unusual to really howl if I had to.  After a few more minutes it felt like I had cleared a good piece of it.  I felt some relief and THAT was a real relief.  As I lay there I could feel how everyone was wanting to go home.  It was a very quick and simple end to the session.  I got up and found that I could not write my name or my email address for a few moments.  This was a bit unexpected, but I really felt like I had gone way out. I suddenly had a flurry of impressions about the people who had worked on me.  One man I saw scrambling around on rocks near water.  He said he loved to be outdoors.  The man who had been there earlier I said I saw as a cook in another life, one in which he valued quality, was kind of crazy about quality as a path toward nurturing people. They smiled and explained that he was having to go to his job that he hated, which was at a local restaurant where the quality of the food was poor.  He was hoping to get a job at a place that valued quality more.  I agreed that he really needed that and actually thrived on it.

For the next hour I felt similar to how I had felt after I had had  acupuncture  a year previously.  I was aware of feeling a whole new layer of feelings that had been stuck in the root somehow. I felt…..different……I felt a level of compassion that was different than before.  It is hard to explain but I saw some things in my life differently.  I realized I had been seeing them through a lens of the old latent hurt. I also was able to see how the hurt as it was composed had attracted certain people in my life and how it too had blinded them in a like fashion.  I saw more clearly how important it is to accept our own stuff and not seek to put it on to other people, something that I saw how others had done to me before and that I had done to others also.  I saw how I had only been hurting myself, but that I had also hurt others by allowing this distortion to persist within me.  This distortion disrupted my ability to align to my higher self in this clearer way.  As long as that was in the way, I could not know the subtlety of awareness and perception that existed beyond the realm of those old suite of clothes.

My sense is that while I had an intense session, clearings using Reiki will have different effects for people at different stages of their process.  Like an onion, you may find that you start in one place and progress ever deeper until you reach the harder places where the self does not want to let go out of fear or shame.  This process, though, is slowly revealing the beauty that we are within. And me, I am going back next week for some follow-up work.

The Physiology of Kundalini

That is the title of a book written about coping with kundalini.  Today, however, I was in the studio working with my students on sculpture projects and while I was doing so there was a discussion about creativity and the brain.  This is one of my favorite topics and it has been given new life with my own awakening which has helped to highlight a good many things in regards to what happens with the body and brain in the midst of such an experience.  The topic made a turn for slightly subtle realms when one of the students wondered aloud if the experience of consciousness was beyond the body or if it was just the body.  This person was thinking or feeling it was beyond body.

We were talking about this whole connection and I said that what is really remarkable is the Left/Right brain relationship and that when we can let the left brain serve the right brain (effectively a linear processor serving a parallel processor) then we can begin to see just how amazing the brain is in creating a hologram in 3-D physical chemistry of the domain of the soul, of consciousness beyond the body.  I said consider what happens when awareness is not there at the body for an experience that is in consciousness…..it is as though it does not exist….and people will thus pooh-pooh an idea or experience they themselves have not had because they can’t feel it or “get” it at all.  And yet, the body HAS to have a way to record or measure the nonphysical experience which is in the ether, of the experience or else it is as good as not known or experienced.  So for the brain to be able to contemplate the infinite is pretty amazing.  You begin to realize the masterwork involved in the chemistry necessary to make up what we feel inside our skins.

Within the Light Body or what the Hindus call the Pranamayakosha, there are these nonphysical layers and within these layers there are different vibrations of energy that move through them.  This light body is electromagnetic and is fed by iron rich blood pumping through the body to create a weak but very real electrical and electromagnetic field.  When I read an aura it is courtesy of this field which displays the information as a stream of light and color around the body….again…in layers.  It is like having a slew of bodies one inside the other.  This body will record everything that has ever happened to you in the same way that the brain does.  Anything that you have had a hard time allowing to flow through you and has gotten “caught” emotionally will lodge and create a block.  Over time these blocks can be many.  Releasing these blocks leads to liberation and freedom from the emotions that served to create them in the first place.  Instead of denying emotion, they are instead felt fully and can be released through a range of methods which can be as simple as movement (Qi Gung worked for me), shaking (learned by an animal behaviorist by watching how animals shed trauma), reexperiencing the emotion, body massage or deep tissue manipulation, as well as Reiki and Reiki-like methods for moving energy.  But however the methods, the effects are permanent and leave the self increasingly free from the bonds of certain stuck emotions.  As these things are often shed chakra by chakra, they also go layer by layer….so think of the light body as a house with seven levels and seven rooms (chakras) within each level.  Or an onion with seven layers.  By doing this clearing, you also optimize the brain and body connection as well.  While kundalini brings wild swings as a result of latent karmic energy in the chakras or light body, these swings are less and less as you move through the process of casting off the dross.

My experience as a result of having to deal with the dark night of the soul, which for me was the revving up of kundalini to extremely high levels along with the triggering of some sort of adrenal response in my body, resulted in a painful six month ordeal where my adrenals were stuck in the on position.  This experience forced me to learn how to deal with fear in a while new way. It was the most arduous experience I have to date experienced.  It was also one of the most illuminating, too. I had to work to get my chemistry balanced the right way.  Along the way I learned how the body is a mirror of our feelings and just how much of a choice every single emotion is.  It underscored just how important it was that we choose healthy perspectives in living.  If we feel like a victim, this will be very disempowering and the body will follow suite PERFECTLY.  Being able to gain some measure of control over the body and what it does is huge for helping illustrate the clear connection between mind/brain and body chemistry.  I can make my body chemistry change ON A DIME now.  As a result, it pays for me to remain in a state of mind that is most conducive to bliss and a good flow of positive energy.  Instead of negatives reinforcing, its positives.

This is where developing a way of dealing with positive energy in an ongoing fashion is very helpful.  Perhaps you take something off the shelf….like yoga or a form of meditation.  For me, kundalini showed me the path WAS meditation.  Most of what I do in my day-to-day is like living a prayer.  This prayer is about the highest and best.  It is exciting because there were times when I could not imagine living like this.  There was, I think, just too much chaotic energy.  But all of this is a process and I can have my days.  the intense adrenal burn of kundalini three and a half years ago was very hard on my body.  Some suggested adrenal burn-out.  Time has shown that I still have reasonable adrenal function despite what I went through.

There is a very real mind/body connection with us as humans. This is no less obvious than in awakening.  How amazingly well the body will respond to our thoughts is a wonderful teacher for you if you can observe.  If you feel bad you will learn that its you who is doing it.  It’s not you being at the mercy of your body (unless you have a longstanding physiological problem that prohibits you from creating some portion of the necessary chemistry for some reason). This is, to my mind, the beginning at least, of learning how to be the master instead of the slave, the victor, not the victim.

Pranamayakosha The Light Body

In my awakening,  I observed that after I had removed a good deal of material from my light body, things that are old blocks or unresolved emotional issues, I found that the energy which had gone from root to crown was going other places, was starting back at the root or near it only to go back up again. I wondered – what gives?  What little I DID read from the eastern information about kundalini all said the energy rises from root to crown and once there you have had the system swept clean.

Well hang on a moment. Not really. For me, it went up down and all around.  What is up with that?

If you know about awakenings and how entirely miraculous events wind up being, then you can very likely guess how easy it was for me to ask that question in my mind only to get an answer in short order without even going looking for it.  It is how these things go.

What I discovered was the concept in the Hindu tradition of something called the Light Body or the energy body, which was described as having etheric sheaths. It is called the Pranamayakosha  and was mentioned in the previous post.  This body is made up of five layers of nonphysical material and one layer of physical matter (which is the physical body).  These layers  are like layers of an onion. Nested into one another.  This explained a lot about what I was experiencing!  Being able to be present but not standing in the way of this energy and what it is doing has been the hallmark of my work in many ways. I might try to focus on some problem areas and I might congratulate myself on my progress, the truth is that an agency more than I was doing this. And good thing, too, because what comes after these clearings has been extremely helpful to me.  The notion or idea that the guru is inside of you has been literally true for me as there is a self that exists here that is me but seems to have a life beyond just this one focus.  Call it a cosmic parent, a higher self. from it, I can actually learn how to be, to grow, to become.  This is helpful to know how to be when there may not be good mentors available.

Learning to trust this force alive in you, which is you and is the universe, will go a long way in bringing you peace and contentment.  You are in good hands. That kind of perspective is very good to feel wrapped all around you. Now, the universe is free to conspire to help you the most and in the best of ways.

Release Method

Not long ago I was talking to someone who refers to me as her teacher about the process of letting go, of releasing old stored material in the light body, and of releasing energetic bonds to other people that are karmic in nature.  Curiously, a post popped up on this topic by this “student” in a search I did on kundalini here and it contained most of the material we had talked about as a way of releasing old material from the self. However, it had material we had not discussed and it was this added material that can actually cause more problems than it solves.

We very much love to have methods and techniques, but in truth, these methods are merely a way to guide feeling.  If you aren’t in touch with your feelings, you wont be doing the work. If you don’t understand WHY a given method is seeking to make you feel, then its possible that you wont feel what you need to feel. Period. The more alienated you are from your true self, your essential self (soul), the harder it is to do substantive work.  So, in this very simple way, learning how to FEEL is important. Techniques ONLY work if they succeed in helping you to FEEL in the right direction. That is really all any method achieves, no matter how much you might think that it does something else.  It is all about feeling, about tapping the light body so you can affect the change from the inside out.  Even mudras and kriyas, for example, which help to move energy, only go so far if they fail to assist you in reaching a given feeling.  It is true that the language of the cosmos is feeling. Mind is in there, but only as a tool for the much more vast feeling side of everything.

In awakening there is the issue of soul connections.  Some call these twin souls and rays and all the rest.  These drive powerful energy but they also can drive very strong energy that is less resolved and healed in people. I myself have observed some pretty crazy behavior in myself as well as others and can say that the value of reducing the blocks and karmic snares is that it helps to bring peace and awareness of who and what we are…..which is why we are here.  That, and to enjoy the view.

I am not going to teach you how to fish, I am going to teach you the essence of all fishing which means that under any and all circumstances, you will be able to catch a fish, even if you do not have a net or fishing pole.  You will be able to do so because you understand the root causes and essence behind the world of fish themselves. If this sounds good to you, maybe I have hooked you and can show you the substance behind the appearance.

The light body, which is the energetic matrix that makes up your nadis (energetic channels which are pronounced “nardees”) and chakras (vortices of energy), stores or contains everything that has happened to you.  While the brain may be seen as the memory banks of your self, the light body ( the Pranamayakosha in Hindu) actually stores the energetic potential of all emotional issues that have happened to you in your life as well as previous lives (this is the “physical evidence for and physical evidence of karma).  Anything that remains unresolved in you, for whatever reason, expresses itself as something we call a block.  This is an emotional hurdle we feel with something.  We actually attract people and events in our lives based on these blocks (and we also attract based on what is also NOT blocked too!) Because we are unable to see its fullest truth or reality, we most often ignore it or “shove it down” out of the way.  It remains, however, until the day that we deal with the issue. It also creates problems with our ability to manifest or attract the kind of life we say that we want.  As long as you remain divided within, however, you continue to attract based on a host of issues within you, one of which are the unresolved blocks. This is why you can WANT something but still not get it because you are not entirely resolved within yourself. You simply need to move the block and the energy will flow in the right way instead of manifesting the wrong things over and over.  Your energy body will then be a more perfect mirror of your thoughts wants and wishes!  Blocks create tension in the Pranamayakosha or light body, and then often express as distorted forms of the true self.  When focused in the root chakra, for example, it will result in distorted perception (we see people are sexual threats or feeding on us or wanting something from us that they may in truth not really want—we see it because we are projecting it and believe what we see).  It also results in very raw sexual energy instead of more refined experiences of the energy. It is because deep down we are holding on to something that is not true and this affects the pure energy that would otherwise be flowing through us (we are bending it or distorting it with our blocks—be a pure channel!).  To know the truth of what we are requires us to bring awareness into this knot or block of misunderstanding.  Here you will find the greatest of compassion, for this is sacred work.  Forget what you think you know and allow yourself to simply feel.  To do this, you MUST be simple. Jesus, who was himself awakened said you needed to be like a child.  And indeed you do.  This is not complicated.  Be like a child. Be simple.  You then will know the kingdom shining within yourself more clearly than ever before.

In awakening or in instances of powerful inner work, these blocks can be removed very quickly.  They can be removed by way of movement (massage work and Qi Gung) as well as by way of awareness and acceptance.  In the first case, you can have blocks removed by skilled body workers who know how to work body tissue and who can feel intuitively where these blocks are.  Most often this results in the person feeling or realizing sudden emotion which is then allowed to be released by feeling it fully.  There is another method, the one that I was describing to my “student” that goes hand in glove with all of this.  This method involves your feeling into yourself in a full way without pulling back from any emotion that might become dislodged or rise to the surface. There is a reason for this. In the method the student was offering, the method suggested actually masking feeling instead of feeling it completely.  You have to feel it completely before you can feel differently.  It is a small thing, but an important one. It is part of complete emotional release.

The whole reason why we have these blocks to begin with is because of how we have ignored and repressed emotions that have needed to be worked through. The key to all of this work is one simple thing and its awareness. If you can shine the light of awareness you WILL get it, you WILL resolve the issues.  Yes, you have material that is shoved down so deep that even you feel like you can’t get to it, but trust me on this one thing; simply putting your awareness and intent on a great mystery inside of you will eventually resolve the mystery.  The reason why this is so is because when you look at something, when you are shining your awareness into it, there is something much more than you which is aware  that is looking at what you think you see!  The Divine is looking out through you and sees all that you see, and furthermore, is a part of what you and I and everything else is!  The infinite is literally looking out through your eyes as you observe and it is this awareness (which you aren’t aware of!) which is what does the great work.  In fact, if you can trust me on this one seemingly impossible little admission, you can do remarkable things with your own spiritual work.  The only thing you have to do is to realize it and then give it a little space in your being to be.

This method works if you can be entirely honest and allow yourself to feel as deep into an old emotion as possible.  You really have to be honest here and just let yourself get down into it.  If you feel it half heartedly this will have the same effect as trimming weeds but not digging them up.  They will come back at a later date and perhaps even stronger.  Remember, the idea here is to not repress or deny your feelings.  Once you have done the release work you can then feel differently about a person you were connected to because what is in you has changed.  The wonderful thing that is a bonus is that you can actually make it easier for others who were connected to you in this common block to also heal.  It is a win-win.

This is the essence of the practice.  There are a number of ways to create the practice out of knowing how to feel.  One way is to use breath.  Another way is to use movement.  Another way is even more simpler and it involves another person bringing their own awareness to the issue (when you wont or can’t). This is the substance of yet another post, however.

All of this, at its very core, is about becoming more aware.  Aware that you are not powerless, aware that you can be anything you want to be, aware that you are part of the divine and no matter what happens, that will never change.  When you become aware or realize more fully who and what you are, your problems will cease to be and your opportunities will multiply.  Cross my heart.