My Experience With Hypnotic Regression

 

It seems that I am, in my awakening, destined to try out all sorts of methods for assisting in the cleansing of consciousness….of stored material that gets in the way of knowing the authentic self and the connection that we have as our birthright (each of us!) with the divine.

I go about finding a new modality in large part intuitively. Sometimes someone will mention something a day or two after I have begun thinking about the same modality (I first sense maybe it might be a good one to try) and very often I will get a rather odd series of confirmations from innocent  bystanders who all mention the modality within a rather short span of time, usually a day or two, maybe three. I of course have never said peep about these modalities, it is the magic part in all of this, you see. No one knows that its anything that I have been thinking about, which is key to me for knowing when its a genuine synchronicity. Its how this thing works most often for me. It is like, through others, the universe tells me what is next on the agenda when it’s unable to contact me directly through dream or in meditation. Maybe an odd sounding thing at first, I can assure you that there is an efficiency about it that, once followed, leads to rather effective and rapid changes. There have been considerations of mine that just never go anywhere…a thought is raised, nothing comes because of it, and it gets dropped. But I never know when I will be on to something golden for me, it is a bit of a surprise. This is very much in line with the phenomenon involving synchronistic events that is experienced once a person is awakened. Everyone talks about them. I began utilizing them as a way to get a little more out of them than that uncanny 1:11 or 3:33 or 11:11. I get it, a sign to remind you where you are. But at a certain point in awakening I thought that there was much more to this odd phenomenon than just numbers or meaningful coincidences. For me, I began seeing it as a form of guidance, that the universe was speaking to me…because once I considered that it could be something more…it was.

Once I did this, I began to get direction more and more through these events that most often come in groups of threes. Its just how it works for me. It is like a code to show me that its not just a random coincidence, but rather something from the numinous realm. I think of how this all works as being like a cosmic morse code or how a secret knock is decided upon for two parties to know that a special guest has arrived, except for me it is the triple event that is the unmistakable sign of this having come from that place of the eternal light. For me and the universe (perhaps an aspect of my higher self, I often consider), we have a triple event arrangement that has been laid out. Anyway, the point here is that I listen to these events as a form of direction once they come in their triple form. For me, they are closely oriented, these events, in time. Some have been seperated by hours or minutes. The further away they get from each other on the time line the less likely that they mean much of anything. With my recent foray into regression therapy, it was much the same. I knew that this was something that would most likely work very well for me (even though I have felt that I would make a bad hypnotic subject). With the signs there, I looked into it, found a therapist fairly quickly, got an appointment, and went to see her. It all worked out smooth as silk, another good sign.

I travelled a number of hours to get to the office of my therapist. I was concerned about the effect that the hours of driving might have on my mental state, but this proved to be of no consequence. I had already explained my situation and how I had been involved in the release of stored emotional material for close to a decade, that there was a lot that had gone, but what remained was the hardest or the most stubborn stuff (so it was the hardest stuff, or so it has seemed). My therapist explained that instead of deep breathing (holotropic, for one) that we would dive into regression right away. She gave me a very quick overview of how it works and I was quickly lying down and getting relaxed.

I was  fist told to imagine a location that I liked a lot. It might be by a river, a beach, or some other natural surround. There were a series of suggestions and visualizations intended to relax me and then the image of a fog that moved into the area where I saw myself lying relaxed. It was suggested that I join with this fog or mist and let it take me where it will. It was curious to me that I was not taken to a specific time in the past (like a previous life), this was left open by my therapist. I guess she was hoping to take me to my past life before this one. She was surprised to find that the life I was in during the session was my present life. I had even said to her at one point in our presession talk that it might be best to just go back to my childhood past.

The result of this was that I wound up at about age one in my present life at a point very close to my fathers death. What I found curious about this was how easy it all seemed. My therapist had said before we began the session, “I have found that feeling as though I am making up the details in my head is a good sign that I am actually on to something; just go with it and see where it leads you.” I found that scenes would just pop up automatically, and instead of me censoring or questioning why they were there, I just went with them right out of the gate. It was at this point that there was a lot of detail swelling up around me in the form of events and feelings, which my therapist was busily writing down. I wasn’t taken deep into a hypnotic trance to the point where I had difficulty recalling details later. Instead, I was quite aware of my surroundings in the room in 2018 as scenes from the past just popped up and I looked at them and sought to determine why they were important. In a way, this was much like a meditative state that I was in.  So much for the deep hypnotic trance, right? I really had thought that I would need to go deep in order to get anything. Apparently not!

I knew that the events of my early life were hard ones, ones that put me in an emotionally stuck place very early. I had given up accessing memory from that time because it seemed that while I had some very early memories in my life that were quite clear in my mind, I had a complete and total black-out on any memories having to do with my father. It was really quite curious….and telling…

The session did not involve my tapping into a memory of my father, not one of him while he was alive. Most of it had to do with the events surrounding him and his death. I did have one telling memory that involved my awareness of his body lying on the bed after he had died. It was one of those moments that felt like an “oops” moment where the small child is let into the room where the dead father lay on the bed. In fact, it was possible that I feltnthis just by walking by his room. The one thing that I noticed was that I seemed to be as sensitive energetically as I am now in awakening, essentially sensing everything from the inside out instead of just through the physical senses alone.

My father had a form of cancer that was known to metasticize very quickly in the body. There was virtually no hope for coming back from a diagnosis of his cancer. There was this odd swirl of denial going on where my father was concerned, perhaps his own way of coping with the innevitability of his own death and the uncertainty so many people feel about death and what might not exist beyond its doorway. So he had died at home, in the middle of the night, he had finally been able to let go and slip away. In my memory, I am walking past a bed, just the corner of it which was close to the door into the bedroom. I had this awarness, quite suddenly, of his presence filling the house one moment, then gone the next moment, even though his body was lying on the bed. I was extremely aware of how absent he was in that moment. It was like brushing past a person and feeling deep inside that this person was simply….no longer there. It was such an odd feeling, one that was entirely new in this life of mine at onenyear of age.

My therapist didnt understand at first what I meant. I had to explain, “Its like how the driver of a car steps out and the car is still there, but the driver isn’t. He was there one moment, then completely gone the next. His physical body was right there but I knew even though I was small, that he was just gone…” There was a shock about this. I also did not understand what this meant. I didnt fully understand that his sickness would lead to his death. I think in my world, you got sick, then you got better. That was the range of my experience. As small children, I think we are mire blank slates at certain points in our development. I have always sensed thatnwe do have memories very early on about our previous lives, but as we become more in our bodies and in greater command of it, those connections to past memories fade. As a result of this, there  was a directness to everything. I did less reflecting and more direct processing of what was happening, and this struck me as being different with how things are in my mind now, with so much more experience to pull from, comparing with, judge, etcetera. As small children, we look outward with a fresh uneducated and unbiased view until experience builds over time and we accumulate memories…at which time our perceptions change, or at least our relationship to those perceptions. As children, its so much simpler, direct. But there is less awareness of what all of what is happening might mean. All of that is simply  not there, at least that is how I experienced it.

It was this suddenness of my father’s absence that served to become the formation of the first major block in my early life. My siblings and I were not taken to the funeral on the advice of extended family who thought it wasn’t the right thing for my mother to do. This, though, created still more problems than they solved. My father became a mystery, a man who just evaporated in the night and was just….gone. I told the therapist later that in my family,  we didn’t talk about the death of my father that much. I never knew what he had died of until I was age ten, for example. It was as though we just rolled up the carpet of those events and packed them away in an attic or basement somewhere. I got the sense that it was just too painful to talk about these things, so we didnt. Such is the stuff that blocked emotional trauma is made of. And here we go, digging up those bones again so that we might be able to release the ghosts that they represent for us so that their ghost can be released from us.

While I was still under hypnosis, my therapist asked me to look at my father and tell  her what I saw after we had gone though this tour of memory. I said I saw the self that he was and the self that he is now, side by side. I was told to let the image of my father go into the memory of the small child I was, and then let the memory of my toddler self integrate itself into who I am now  and become a part of who I am now.  I then let go the father that was to see the father who is now. Then I was directed to cut the cords  that I have with my father, imagining the cord being sliced through and both of us being free to just be ourselves. By being stuck so early on, I was literally stuck in an early version of myself. By doing this, the idea was that I could better integrate my infant self with who I am today for greater wholeness.  Just being able to disrupt an old recursive memory pattern tied to a stuck emotion could help me to begin feeling….different.

Once we had done this, we had to move quickly because our hour was over, and another client was waiting for their session to begin.

Being able to grieve the loss of my father is an important step to my wholeness, I realize. By holding up or keeping grief at bay for years,the chemical signature that grief made in the body can lead to health problems that are chronic at midlife. A small niggling feeling, which boosts, say, adrenaline but suppresses endorphins and dopamine in the body can lead to a chemical landscape that could favor cancer, or dementia later in life, all depending on which way one decides to go emotionally. Does fear acidify the body? Do the kidneys and liver have to work harder to balance this acidification, for example? I am not a chemist or biologist, but what I do know is that our consciousness, as it resides in our bodies, tells the body system what (with the body following by producing chemistry to mimic what is happening in consciousness) to do based on the moment by moment state that this consciousness is in. I have been keen to remove as much of this material as possible over the course of the last ten years since awakening has come.

What is the chemical signature of grief held in the body for decades? Subtle, no doubt, but like a drip, drip, drip, wearing away the stone of our body and its integrity, it often will manifest at moments of physical weakness in the immune system, or a weakening ofnthe kidneys, or with some imbalance in nutrition or an illness that leaves us short on needed nutrients for building the physical representation of who we are in our souls, thoughts, and emotions. What is the physical chemical signature of fear, of anger, or paranoia, of jealousy, or worry? What effect do these have on us long-term as those stuck emotions live in us, unable to budge, unhealed, causing all manner of problems?

Releasing these stuck emotions leads to the cessation of those issues forever, I have noted. If they come back, they werent really fully released. When released, it is like breaking the chains on something that has imprisoned you for years (often without your realizing how much it had affected you all along). In my case, I know that the removal of these blocked energies can give us a new lease on life. Years ago I had an entire body of energy pulled out of me by,of all things, an angelic presence. With it went tension, physical pain, and symptoms that had been bothering me for close to a year. While I refused to get diagnosed prior to this, the symptoms in my case were consistent with cancer, which went completely away once this bundle of body emotion was pulled out of me. If you think of it this way that your body is a mirror of your soul, then your thoughts and feelings are the body of your soul through eternity, then changing your thoughts and feelings can lead to changing how the mirror of that soul, the body, responds to the signals being sent to it from the “driver” of that body.

This is an inside job. You alone can do it, but despite how impossible it might seem to you now, it is well within your reach. I am no different from anyone else, I just know that it can be made simple if we let it. And really, the world conforms to our notions of what it is that we think it is. A rationalist scientist does not have the bizarre and magical events we call synchronicity because s/he doesn’t believe that such a thing is even…..a thing. So it isn’t. But once you FEEL the juicy energy within consciousness as strong enough to move mountains, well, the mountains move…

There are many therapists throughtout the U.S. and abroad  who are trained in regression therapy who can help you in your work. Luckily, they are easier to find now with the internet as our vast storehouse of information.

Peace Be With You…

 

#reincarnation, #regressiontherapy, #hypnoticregression

 

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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.

Ho’oponopono

What is in me is seen in the world.  What brings suffering in me is mirrored in the world.  My world is like a thousand refracted rainbows all based on a bending of the light.  Sometimes the light gets bent too far…..but I see this bending in the world around me…this light that is bent in me. The path to healing becomes a path of self honesty that there is nothing before me that does not first originate within.  As much as I try to make deals with it, the truth of it faces me each moment.  There is a way to heal it.  It takes honesty.  Humility.  I am not the most humble person, so there is often struggle.

Ho’oponopono recognizes this reality, that what we see before us in our day-to-day is a reflection that is within us.  Each moment is colored by it.  We attract perfectly what we are.  If you do not like something “out there” look within for the answer.  It sounds magical, but it is the way.

Ho’oponopono is a healing modality or Hawaiian origin that recognizes that the way to healing is by healing first what is within us.  When we do this, it provides a path for healing what we ourselves have attracted. Shift yourself, you shift the world.  It has a powerful leveraging effect.  It is also the essence of a compassionate path whereby what you heal in yourself will be healed in others.

The practice is simple.  You pray to the universe.  You think of the problem before you in your awareness and you hold it there while you pray to the universe saying

I am sorry

Please forgive me

I love you

Thank you

Ho’oponopono is a method for atonement, for helping to heal and erase the error and cause of hurt in our lives.  By being able to touch upon the grace available to us, that can be in us, we can begin to free ourselves and others from the things that have troubled us and that cause trouble for us.

To understand the power that this simple method has for you, I  direct you to a video that I think you will find very interesting.  After that, perhaps you will find a way to include this in your tool-box of tools for healing.  It is an interesting video of a practitioner of Ho’oponopono who has a great story to help illustrate how this can work in your life.

One very effective way of learning to deal with what is out in the world is first becoming aware that what you are being attracted to is something unresolved in you at some level.  People who have awakenings speak of how they can feel what others feel.  True, but look deeper though at what it is that you are picking up on.  In every instance, you will find that you are making a choice in what you are picking up on. If you are like me, you might come to the realization that you aren’t picking up on EVERYONE’s energy, just certain people.  Why some and not others?  There is a reason for this, and it is rooted in where you are and what you are feeling, even when you are not entirely aware of what these things are.  They are still inside of you and they help to paint a portrait of your life in a way that might be difficult to face sometimes, but is perfect for how accurate it can be.  It is in learning what the point is of connect within you that can lead you to resolving the issue that is at hand.  And maybe you find that you, say, keep running into people who have trouble with anger and this is very troubling to you because you find it so unsettling.  You aren’t an angry person, no, but there is an issue that is not completely resolved and the universe is serving as a perfect mirror for you.  Time to dig deep on this one!   For example, I had someone not long ago who was having trouble being in public because he was feeling everyone’s energy. In truth, he was sensing certain kinds of energy, and this was all itself a mirror of where he was.   I explained to him how an experience I had helped me break the cycle of feeling as though I was wide open to others thoughts and feelings.

Up to that point I would walk down the street and be overcome with incredible pain coming from people I would pass in public.  At first I thought this was because I was more sensitive, that I was picking up on everything.  true, yes, but there was something more that bears pointing out, since it is a finer point in all of this and can help a good deal when dealing with these things at least initially, which is that I was not picking up on everyone’s thoughts.  I was in truth picking up on those thoughts that held a vibration that had something in common with me.  A specific example and break-through for me was when I was attending a party with family where there were at least a dozen people in attendance.  I began to feel very anxious during a certain part of the party and as I felt this wave of anxiety wash over me, I found myself stopping for a moment and questioning why it was I was feeling this all of a sudden.  There was no good reason why I should be feeling this sudden wave of anxiety.  So I asked myself was this mine?  The answer was a quick “no.”  So I then asked myself “where is this coming from?”  The energy pointed me immediately in the direction of a man sitting quietly talking to my Mother who was over to the side, kind of out-of-the-way of things.  I looked at him and asked him point-blank, “Do you have problems with anxiety?”  He kind of sunk into his chair for a moment.  the look on his face was the same look that a kid gets when they realize they have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.  But looking at me for a moment, he seemed to realize I was not asking this in a mean way, and that I did not mean anything by it.  I was just being direct.  He then softened, and explained that he had actually had a lifelong problem with anxiety and had gone to numerous therapists for it and took medications over the years because of it.  I listened as he spoke and as he did, I felt the feeling of anxiety melt away.

After that experience, I no longer felt others’ energy like I had before in that same sort of way.  I was not seized with a pain in my heart chakra after passing some man on the street, or feel a sense of tightness in the shoulders when I was talking to the receptionist over the phone.  I suspect, or feel, that the very act of identifying these things in the way that I did had the effect of helping me to identify between my own feelings and those of others in a more clarified way so that I was no longer processing things that were not entirely mine.  What it did do also was to point out why I would feel something from another person, which was that there was some aspect of it that was also in me.  I also think, though, that this mirroring still continues in our lives, just in a different way. Maybe you see them in the customers you deal with, or the clients that come through to your workplace, or the kind of people you work with.  The interesting thing is that often, when I do this work, I see a change in the other person.  I have seen some big changes taking place in my family, for example, that has led to some very healing results and some marvelous results for these people in my life.

I have seen that as I clear things up in me the type of people I encounter on a day-to-day basis has also changed.  The power of the Law of Attraction, which is that like energy attracts like energy, is at play.  It is just how the universe is.  this is not some kind of game, it is just how things work.  By being aware of this I can look at the world and the people around me to get a good view of what I might want to heal in the next go-round of work on my roster. Layer by layer, new material is revealed, I become more aware or sensitive to layers I had not felt before, and the work continues.  It is what I call spiritual archeology.  This is a digging down, revealing and healing old baggage that has been buried down there for ages.  The force of kundalini, which is itself a creative force, has a magnificent ability to heal these knots of cords that we have built up within us.

So try it on for a bit and see how it works for you if you are so bold.  And also try Ho’oponopono.

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.