What You Resist…

In the work of awakening, the great stumbling blocks we encounter are the things we resist. And what you resist is what persists.

The road to wholeness and happiness is in the singular awareness that no matter what troubles you in your life, it all comes down to an inner resistance deep within. It does not seem that way when we get upset by the events and people in our lives that upset us, but what’s unsettling you is an inability to see and respond to things as they are. When you are able to see things as they are, without your own inner dialog running, you can much more easily accept that things are happening not to unseat you from your bliss, but that you are resisting the world as it is. You probably wont change the world, but you can change yourself, which is what inspires others to want to change, and many people all doing this in their own back yards helps to sow seeds of change. People have their own reasons for doing what they do that most often has nothing at all to do with you, but is more a story all their own. When you can honestly give them real space to be, resistance ends and we can accept that none of what upsets us is personal. We choose to be hurt. We choose to be angry. Most often, we don’t want to take responsibility for how we feel in each moment, though. This is resistance. Expect the feeling to persist many times each day. Or you can let it go. Was it really so important to your ego. Really?

All the great teachers taught how important it was to chang the mind. Even Jesus did so. Jesus is often thought to have used the word “repent” as the key term for shifting the tide, but he (along with John the Baptist) actually used the word Metanoia, which means to change ones mind. Call it a translational error, but if you ask me, its a significant clarification that really casts more of Jesus teaching in a new light. But I digress. The point is that all of the great teacher saw, experienced, and knew that we all have a capacity to remove thinking of one kind much the same way a mask of thinking or believing is removed (often with the effect of revealing a deeper layer of being and thinking that’s more original to our nature in the process).

So I ask you, how do you see things differently? It is all in how you choose to see it—the power is in your mind! Choose a different conclusion, choose a different assumption. It only seems hard if you have never tried.

How many times did you have something happen where you assumed an outcome that was completely wrong once you learned more about it later? We make all kinds of assumptions that are based more on who we are rather than how things are in the world. I have seen myself do this more times than I care to admit. But I do learn from them when they happen. It’s done by reflecting on events from the past and assuming the events are following the same pattern, but nothing is ever quite the way we think it is, especially from the past and how we have responded to it emotionally as we color it the way it suits us.

Now what if you could rewind the tape and assume differently using a whole different mindset? Maybe you try not to judge anything until you speak to the people involved, or until you check your messages, or gather more information. All of this behavior I’m describing says nothing about the world, it’s only saying something about you. Maybe you have been on the receiving end of similar assumptions before. Maybe you know what it’s like to have someone do that, completely convinced of the utterly fallacious script running in their heads, right? So change it on your end and it will be one less person doing this. Your greatest gift is who you are. What kind of you do you want to be?

I was once told a dream this guy had. It illustrates resistance and acceptance so well. In the dream, my friend would encounter werewolves. This dream would happen over and over. It bugged him. These werewolves would show up as these slobbering wild men who would transform into these beasts, menacing and chasing him all night long. It was really getting old and he needed a solution to this nighttime delimna.

One night my friend was in his dream and he saw these men coming through the woods. They had just transformed and came rushing up at him. The chief werewolf got up in his face. He was still wearing, of all things, his sunglasses! As my friend looked closely, he could see his reflection in the glasses. What he saw surprised him; he could see that he too was a werewolf! He could see his own teeth gleaming in the reflection as the other werewolf smiled with a grimacing set of teeth. My friend, realizing all of this, gave a chuckle and took off with the pack, howling and running like the wild things that they were. Oh, and after that, my friend no longer had another werewolf dream.

I can’t speak for him, but I think one thing is clear; our dreamer was resisting something about himself which morphed into fear and scary dreams about an aspect of himself he had been resisting. Once he accepted it, he integrated it into himself, making it a conscious (rather than subconscious) part of himself. Maybe he was afraid of what it might mean if he was a werewolf. But instead, accepting it freed him of fear and the trouble it caused and he saw these werewolves were all just out having a grand old time. He learned, I think, that what he resisted wasn’t about what he thought at all. He integrated or accepted it, and thus was free.

So for our dreamer it might have been fear of his wild side. For you, it might be something else. It could be any sort of fear that drives you…and very often these issues come down to fear of some kind. A fearless person is calm, gentle, easy in themselves. They dont jump to conclusions. Maybe you fear a seemingly thoughtless person. But let me ask; if they are being thoughtless, how could it be that they are being this way just to upset little old you? Let it be, give it acceptance, maybe see that it was in you all along, and you will see it all melt or fall away like a house of cards. It means being willing to change your mind, to change how you see it. Then, poof, like magic, it evaporates and any negative charge it had is gone because you changed it. This is the essence of all clearing of the consciousness to help reveal the true self shining within. And this self is more free to express itself. Energy moves more freely when you are not so resistant to an aspect of yourself that remains unhealed. You are, afterall, a conduit for an energy that was called “the water of life.”

“Be like water, my friend.” —Bruce Lee

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Surrender

It isn’t easy to do sometimes.  But surrender is a choice.  It just is.  And in knowing this fact, you can choose not to be caught in the grip of some hard emotion or feeling.  We think we are our emotions, but our emotions are the result of so many programs running in our minds as part of our conditioning which began as children, infants, even.  These can be undone.  You just have to work on them first by examining them, then by changing your mind in the moment away from the knee-jerk reaction that is so often the providence of these whirl-winds within us.  All of this can be changed even if you are an old dog!  I have undergone more change in the last eight years than I can begin to explain or recount.  The process continues and what I do even with my remaining “hard stuff” is to continually push my attention in a new place each and every time I come across a wave of that old stuff.  Each time, it is like erasing the old program.  I just keep doing this and there comes a moment when something give inside and poof; it is gone.

Surrender is good for us.  It is.  Surrendering to the mystery opens us to that mystery. Stop needing to know and to control everything.  Some things are not in your control.  And in controlling, you are letting your little rational mind to come up with solutions that your higher self, which exists in the breach between the earthly mind and the divine one.  You have a mind beyond your body and it is infinite.  This is the realm all yogis and saints have experienced.  It is each and every one of our birthright.  So give the mystery room in you through some good surrender.  It will lower your blood pressure, it will help you be less obsessive, and it will flood your body with the chemistry of a place of peace.  It catches on, too!  People will see a bigger smile and wonder what is going on. Spread some peace this season, and let it begin with you!

So breathe deep, stop and be mindful of where you are in your feelings.  Step back and think about all of this and decide not to let it rule you.  Even in the hardest of situations you can choose to do this, and it has so many great benefits.  We know that simply visualizing these states help to bring them on, and leads us along because beyond our rational minds, we really do know!

 

Through The Gateway Of The Heart

Your heart center is one of the most amazing creations you could ever believe. It can literally lead you to a place within yourself and the universe that you simply did not know existed. Those are tall words, I know, but it is true. I am not talking syrupy sweetness, but a connection to a force that will leave you without words. In fact, for some who have experienced the profundity of a heart opening they can be left feeling at odd ends in a world like ours. I did.

But what it showed me was something so revolutionary that I was dumbfounded. When this event took place the first time, I was as I usually am with things like this; observing carefully. I don’t know what it is, perhaps it is the acceleration in consciousness that does this, but it seems as though I am operating on multiple channels at once. That might sound a bit hard to wrap your head around, but I have observed that when we shift focus from our normal way of being a LOT can be experienced in a VERY short period of time. As if time is slowed down even as it flows at normal speed. Perhaps as though some part of me steps out of ordinary earthly time and can spend a lot of “time” observing what is taking place. And what have I found?

I have found that these heart openings, which some call union with the divine, are a matter of our choice. This is not a mental choice that we make, but a deep fundamental one, and as a result is less about thinking as it is with feeling. And for me, it was like being taken by the divine. The only way this could have happened the way it did was that I had had enough experiences with my own inner yin or divine feminine. The level of receptivity and willingness to take something within myself is something that quite honestly was not part of my functional framework as a male. Wasn’t I the initiating energy? Well yes. But there is way more to these experiences than that. Without the receptive inward flowing energy of the feminine I don’t know I would have been able to feel this in the way I did.

But it was a choice. Something inside of me just opened up. Completely. In one case I was skimming a book online about Nondual Saivism called The Triadic Heart Of Siva. What was so interesting was that right after I had the first opening in a spontaneous way, the book went on to begin to describe openings of the heart, something I had never heard of before. It was as though in that moment something in me anticipated this and then experienced it. It is as though something was telling me I didn’t need a book to tell me how this was done. This repeated itself later the same day. The physical result was that I felt my body arch upward and my head flew back uncontrollably. It was such a powerful feeling I could not help but react in this way. This is not something I would call a kriya (involuntary movement) in the typical sense, but is itself a natural response we all seem to have when experiencing such powerful flows of divine energy.

the first initiation into these heart openings happened early one morning when a being came into my room who announced that his name was Sandalphon and that he was a Seraphim. He reached into my heart center and pulled out what felt like a body….a body without bones. Yes, I know, that is kind of weird. However, the feeling was incredibly vivid, which helped to highlight what then took place, which was that a major clearing had taken place in my body. All through my upper torso I felt a sense of clarity and lack of clutter. I had a distinct sensation of two spots in my upper lungs that felt as though something had been pulled away. It was tender. The tender spot was at my back near my shoulder blades. I was told by this being that he was going to take this dark mass of energy and show it to “Source.”

Over the course of a few days this being showed up again and explained that he had been my protector, showing me an image of himself as he appeared to me over 20 years ago during a time when I was seeing him a lot during efforts I was making at the time to project consciousness from my body. I was at the time wanting to experience this with the thought that in so doing I could conquer fear of death. It seemed like a reasonable thing, like how the Tibetans have their Book Of the Dead to help prepare for life beyond the physical body. If you know me, you know that I have never been one to go in for angels. But here he was, showing up as unusually tall, stooping in order to stand in my bedroom. When I went online to type in his name, he was described as one of the tallest of the angels.

It would turn out that there is an account, nearly identical to my own that was written by a Christian mystic who lived in the 1500’s by the name of St. Teresa of Avila who had an experience with an angel who pulled her insides out of her while she was on fire with a “great love of God.” This angel took an arrow tipped in gold fire and plunged it into her heart whereupon he pulled out something that felt like her insides. Exactly! But only ONE account? Is that all?

Heart openings put us in touch with our native ability to connect with the divine at a level that is difficult to even put into words. It is so singular an experience it is hard to square with anything else. I think if I was able to connect into that kind of energy on a more continual basis, I think that my process of inner cleansing would be so much the faster. But maybe the point is to catalyze us with these singular experiences to show us how we, as humans, can touch upon so much more.

So how? Surrender. A deep state of surrender that is complete and total. To do this requires that you let go of all fear, all resistance. Once this is overcome or released, little stands in the way. It is I think also the result of a deep desire to reconnect with this lost part of ourselves. It seems to require a willingness that goes from toe to crown, and something in you just opens up. The feeling in the heart is one of unusual expansiveness. The feeling I had in the back of my mind was “really? I am opening up THAT MUCH?” Yes. That much.

In the last few days I have been out with family kayaking one of the oldest rivers in the world that happens to snake its way through our region of the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies. So old, this river runs from south to north, a river whose bed was established long before the earth shifted its physical axis. We are kind of proud of her. And so it was that as my daughter and I stood skipping stones in the river I found a rock shaped perfectly into a heart. It reminded me of another event where every stone I picked up was heart shaped. The message then as now is that love is the single most important thing, and when we can go beyond the things that serve to limit us, what is left is without limit. Our concept of love also changes in the process. All of the little loves in our life….love of our job, family, hobbies, and more are like subsets of a larger canopy overarching all of these other perfectly valid forms of love…..a kind of BIG LOVE that is waiting for each and every one of us.

Death

You do not know death when it touches you because you have lost touch with how it touches you constantly.  You have fooled yourself into believing that death is a great drama, a great fear, an unknown.  But I can tell you that all of this stuff about death is itself a giant ruse, a play for your own satisfaction just to scare yourself.  For many here, death is like a roller coaster ride with a bloody end, a hatchet, a bug that will eat you from the inside out.  Death is unknowable, mysterious and thus fertile ground for every fear you ever had about what is not known.

That is why what I am going to tell you about your death will upset you because of how utterly anticlimactic it is.  Death is simple and death is known in each of your moments.  You have simply resfused to see its coming and going because you have attached fear to it and thus do not know it by any other means than the scary dark and empty things it seems to conjure.  You have so convinced yourself that you just aren’t sure what lies on the other side of death that death has help a delicious coldness, a dramatic iciness that you SAY you hate, yet the movie houses are packed when death is on the menu and billboards.  No, you wont like what I am going to tell you because you have been living in this illusion that you have created.  But it is a creation we have all imbibed in at one time or another.  Images of the Grim Reaper are perfect encapsulations of just how we feel about it.  We go knobby-kneed and our stomach lurch and we have a sense of panic in us even when its someone else who has gotten cancer and wont be making their way back, just a headlong hurdling into that dark (and uncertain) night. We fill Halloween with it and we deliciously lap it up because the truth is, it is more about a play, a drama, than anything that is real.

But what is real.  You don’t want to hear that one.  But I will tell you.

Death exists as a most important catalyst for change in us every moment of the day.  Death is not the thing that draws us down into nothingness, but rather is something that happens all the time in our spiritual lives.  You don’t see it as death because you are too focused on images of the grim goblins and scythe-bearing monstrosities.  I have myself died many times over in big and small ways.  These deaths were not even marked by major changes in my life where one life ended and another began.  No, death has been far more ubiquitous than that.  And I don’t want you to think that I am telling you this in a pejorative sense, or a symbolic sense.  Death is itself not something that stops your heart. The heart of death is the heart of transformation.  You see, when you learn how to surrender, to really let go, what happens to you?  We KNOW what happens to us.  We die.  We all know this is so in our bones and we even say that an orgasm is a “little death” which I insist is only possible when we give ourselves to it, when we surrender, when we let go.  When we do, something marvelous and amazing happens.  We go beyond our limits, we change.  We don’t fade away.  Nothing in us really truly dies, but we are certainly transformed and THIS is the great thing most of you miss.  You miss the wonder in death, the beauty and amazement caught up within it.  Just think, if death is really this, then what on earth has created such a disparity between what I am telling you now and what we all collectively seem to think or feel about it?  Just think about that disparity and then imagine with me that this in fact is the divide that we all share about death in our lives and our own inability to see it for what it is.  Death is not a single act, we just associate it with that because death is what ends a life before our very physical eyes.

In the past couple of years I have begun seeing a very odd looking creature in my meditations.  He shows up in my third eye or mind’s eye quite clearly.  He is this very scruffy looking…..dog.  Except this dog has the body of a man.  But no, the head of the dog didn’t even look much like a dog.  It was like a really sad looking dog…..a very narrow snout and a very scruffy and kind of long-haired creature with eyes, though, that sparkled with a type of mischief and wonder.  “What on earth is THAT!??” I thought when I first saw this thing.  It was so out there, so odd, so….random.  For a while the image just irked me a little.  It was only later as I turned the image in my head around that I realized there was some sort of god in Egyptian myth that had a dog’s head or something similar.  I looked it up and sure enough, there was a god who had the head of a jackal and the body of a man.  The Egyptian form was very clean, though.  I wondered.  I looked a jackals themselves and realized, oh yes, this was most certainly a jackal!  But why was this being coming to me?  Well it turns out that this god is called Anubis.  He is God of the Underworld and is related to death.  He is there when a person’s heart is being weighed along with the feather.  That guy.  I really haven’t had much interest in the Egyptian gods and myth, but I suppose I must have picked it up somewhere.  In awakenings it is not unusual to have these ancient forms come to life right in front of you in order to help in moving old material out of the psyche.  Maybe I needed a grand play.

Anubis would show up at odd times, random times. No reason, no message, just, “Hi, I am here!”

So it was with a friend that we talked about this at length.  I was asked  what did I think Anubis was trying to tell me where it comes to his presence in my life at this time?  The answer was that it was about death.  But clearly, this was not about the big D but rather something deeper, the true essence of death, which is more about letting go, surrendering.  When we resist death, even our own deaths, we do not die fully and thus, as I was told, do not go as conscious into our deaths as we could.  Here it was made clear to me by my Egyptian god-friend that the way we allow ourselves to die, how we give ourselves over to just letting go of things that actually helps to determine our rate of ascension.  The thing is, though, is that you do not have to wait upon physical death to experience this, no, because death is always here, you just don’t recognize it because you have created a monster when in fact death is a great and wonderful ally.

IN a waking dream, a guided journey, I looked at this Anubis as he had settled down around me staring at me from across a distance just outside my studio.  It was dark and I lay inside my studio on my bed, wondering what this was all about.  There was a giant pile of chairs all heaped up and I was asked what this all meant to me.  I thought about this and realized, this was about resisting death, resisting change.  So simple an image; I was sitting, waiting.  I was not standing up, I was sitting down and these chairs represented every act of resisting change.  There were a lot of these chairs, and I tried not to be too off-put by this reality.  But as I did this, I was asked if I could use the sheer force of my will to cause these chairs to burst into flame, to use my own life essence, my breath, to fan those flames so the pile might burn higher into the night sky.  There, I turned around this pile with Anubis on the other side of it, staring me down.  He grew more and more intent as there seemed to be something to be gained by this.  What was it?  As I followed the flames into the ink of the sky, I began to feel the sense of surrender flowing around me.  This feeling we resist.  We resist out of a kind of animal fear, an egoistic impulse over change coming to us in the same way that death itself is inevitable.  I knew I had to give myself over to it.  As I did, I felt myself wonder what would become of this that I was letting go and as if reading my thoughts Anubis spoke and said “These things are mine!” and I then understood, whether real or not, the form of Anubis was a means by which we let things go.  But this time, I did not have to wait upon physical death in order to experience this.

There is a lot made about “giving it over to God” in the Christian tradition, and I think that no matter the form it takes, this impulse in us or ability to let go can be facilitated by handing it over to something.  But what are we handing it over to?  I think we simply hand over our fear, we make the conscious effort to merely say that we are going to take a leap of faith.  If we do not trust ourselves, then we make a larger form within us to take it from us for safe keeping.  But like all death, we can release a great deal of things in order to unburden ourselves, and if we are lucky, we can also do this upon our physical deaths if we make ourselves available.  It is here that we learn important lessons, but all of life includes death in small and big ways.  It is fundamentally about a surrender.  To die well is to be able to let go of the river’s bank and surrender to the great unknown.  And perhaps, in a way, by mastering our fear, the lesson is purchased at that much of a greater price by our willingness to hand it all over.

I know that in this death I am able to transcend my own self-made (and very conceptual and even emotional) limitations.  Just as we do finally die physically and enter into a new life through a ribbed tunnel into the light (which do I need to even draw the similarities this has to our entrance into this life here through our mother’s Yoni?) we enter into this new world, finding ourselves renewed, refreshed, and more alive.  But you see, the world is full of events like these, and my own life has been in my awakening one of many deaths where I transcended my own self-made limits in order to feel refreshed, clearer, and more alive.  I am here doing this, sometimes daily.  Sometimes its weekly, monthly or yearly.  And really the only thing holding me back is one simple thing, which takes me back to the beginning of my post; fear.  When we transcend that, when we learn to just let go of all that is limiting us, we move easier through this death into a new life.  And layer by layer this happens, and each time it is the same; we struggle and fight perhaps in similar way as we do resisting death or even birth which is itself a death of what we knew in our mother’s wombs.  We are each moment offered this promise in the present as moment by moment we die to what we are and are born into what we can be and really already are.  A wise person once said to know the end, see the beginning.  It is here on this kind of wheel that we grow to know and realize just what amazing creatures we are.

Lying within this exists the tools for your own transformation.  When you touch this experience you realize over and over, perhaps only gradually like a dawning, how this becomes like many deaths.  Awakening is itself a death that is followed by countless deaths which are releases of old pent up psychic material.  But in doing this, we free ourselves in ways we could only have dreamed.  But it is this capacity within us to go beyond our own perceptual boundaries to experience the essence of spiritual alchemy that is our own saving grace. It is through these kinds of deaths that living become more tolerable, wonderful, and sublime.  When you can see death for what it is in its essence, you will begin not fearing it so much.  You will be more free.  The other side of all death is acceptance, otherwise we have not fully died and remain for the time held by our old limits.  We can each transcend them!

As the fires licked up into the vast darkness of the sky, studded with stars all around its bright red edges, I felt this pull from the heavens as Anubis waited for me in a great Void.  Instead of resisting this pull into the unknown, I felt myself deliciously pulled into it upwards.  It is into that great uncertainty that exists within us for the moment that this uncertainty is mastered, transformed.  Leaping into the heavens, into this vast nothingness that I felt I perceived as real that my limitations here on earth were let loose.  If you want to know the essence of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead and how it seeks to raise up those ready to die, you need only know that when we seek the highest vibration, we also seek the highest that death offers us.

Help!

All through my life I have made a careful observation that as my own capacity to hold onto larger and larger amounts of energy, my own awareness would clarify and seem rejuvenated.  I knew the secret lay in how to move more energy through us, this vital force.  I didn’t know it then, but I was effectively seeking awakening. The thing about awakening, though, is that it can be a bit like what happens when you let go of the brakes on a car that you have been keeping them on for so long.  There is this lurch forward of this force, this vital force in you that wants to be FREE!  And so you get these rather scary or upsetting awakening experiences sometimes that can make a person feel like they are suddenly out of control.

All of this is about an emergence of our own inner energetic potential.  This potential makes it more possible for us to vault ourselves into other parts of who and what we are, in effect, to broaden our awareness through energy.  But what happens when an emergence of energy becomes a flood of energy, which feels less like emergence and more like emergency?

The thing to realize in awakening is that when things turn bad, it really is all about you.  You have complete control over the quality of your awakening experience, and you will know how easy it can become when you learn to do one thing; surrender.  Then let go.  Not just conditionally or part way; let go.  Then let go more.  I promise that relief lies in letting go.  Ego represents a big hurdle for this energy, so it must step out of the way.  I am not a neurologist but what I observe is that the same part of brain function that is involved in left brained and rational thought is very closely aligned with ego.  It may be that significant parts of how we identify between objects and things in our world is processed through the left brain portions of our left hemisphere.  But by identifying overtly with object-based reality, we also lose sight of the deeper aspect of reality, which does not lies at its surface.  Ergo; high ego function, low ability to really grasp the breadth of the experience and process the energy properly whjch always leads to issues related to tension, anxiety, and fear (and this is the substance of spiritual emergencies or kundalini syndrome and other terms like that).  Once you are able to let go of the need to identify so strictly in an object based way (which also includes “I” and “me” and other such objects of a highly specific and individual nature).  In some cases the energy can and does barge right over ego and the rest of the self.  This can throw people into state of anxiety and fear.  Again, all of this is as you make it.

The most important thing is to be honest with yourself and own your experience.  When you feel fear, realize it is YOUR fear and you are here to conquer it so that you can live life without fear.  A little energy in you is creating fear; what do you think the rest of life is going to do to you?  Master the disaster.  The only disaster is the one you have created in your own mind.  Fear is the greatest enemy.  Conquer it.  I think learning how to cope with this experience is unlike any other means of coping.  I do think that there really isn’t anything on the planet that prepares us for this type of experience when it comes.  However, I think that an ability to meditate might be good, although the weird thing was that I found the way my brain states changed, I felt like I was in a near-constant state of meditation all the time….so I am not so sure saying mediation is the answer.  Letting go is the answer, and sometimes, doing this, it can feel like death.  However, learning how to die in this way is the way through I think.  It leads to conquering death, which, paradoxically, is something spoken about in the old esoteric circles having to do with alchemy and a other mystical things.  Its not that we don’t die, it is that we reach a place where fear does not rule us like it once did.  We can also begin glimpsing over and over until we get the memo that this is not all that there is.  This something more, its right here with us like an invisible friend reminding us until we get it and the fear washes slowly or suddenly away.

So having said all that, I will be good and include a resource for you that might be of some help.  Go to SEN and I hope it provides you with food for thought.

This is the first important step in awakening which can determine whether you live in fear or you learn to be fearless.  When you have conquered your backlog of fear, awakening will turn from dark to brilliant.  Life is as you see it!  If you bring love and compassion, you will feel this.  Bring fear, and that is what you have.  Open your hand, say yes to life, don’t close your hand or your heart to life.  Here’s hoping for wonderful experiences for you in your life!

Good luck on your path, where ever it takes you!

You Are This

©Parker Stafford

How beautiful it is to watch a flower, first a closed bud, swell and open to the sun and sky.  It does so leaving itself completely open and vulnerable, and yet it shows no sign at all of trying to hide or close itself up from life. Looking at nature, I take hints from it on how to be.  The flower blooms because it must in order to live, to be, to become.  I am like this! I know it is so.  I grow sad, despondent, dark and scared if I do not continually open to the greater reality that is before me and that is present in all things.  This is not some intangible anymore. It has been much like a tuning in of a new channel.  It is a choice.  I can see my hurt or I can choose to see my happiness and count my blessings. Take a cue from nature and from flowers, for you ARE this.

A Modest Approach To Transcendent Spiritual Work

We are taught in school and in our world culture that the mind is the way through solving all our problems.  We have done this because of a left-brained tendency for ages that has followed the march of linear rational thought and also an over-dependence upon masculine awareness, energy, and consciousness. Now come the cooler more fluid irrational, right brained things….the feminine, the counterpart to linear rational thought.  This is part of the balancing act that is taking place right now and right here on the planet.  The coming of the feminine.

The one thing that you can do in your own inner work to help to anchor some of these aspects that we associate with the feminine side of consciousness is to allow things be a mystery.  Stop trying to SOLVE every problem.  It is a curious reality that when you, little you, earthbound self-you stops trying to solve a problem, it actually is offered up to your higher self and the higher self works on it.  If you do as some Christians have done, which is “give it up to God” you will actually find the same thing I am writing about. Being able to do this also does something profound to you; it allows you to relax.  It seems counterintuitive that by stopping all thought and worry about something that is nagging us that we are able to resolve it so much easier, but it is true.

To do this you must make sure that you do not have any competing beliefs that will get in the way of this working.  If you find yourself interested in the idea of letting go of something and letting the higher self work on it but find that there is something in doing that that worries you , concerns you, or that you find yourself saying “yeah, but…” then its likely you have a competing belief that will get in your way.  If you do not believe you can, then you wont. Clear the path and your purpose will be clear and powerful.  This is part of your work. You are clearing a path for a giant to enter your life and do work for you.  And it can.  If you just allow it.  This is the giant that has stepped into the room with me when I awoke.  It is the vastness that came in when Buddha awakened.  It is the part of him that “awoke with him.”  You are the universe.  You are yourself, yes, but tied and woven into its very matrix.  You have some pretty powerful stuff on your side.

Somethings just aren’t always something you can make sense of or solve.  How you feel, how you respond, or how other people have responded.  You may not always know the reason in a clear way.  But there is a part of you that can help to resolve it.  The answer may not always be the one you THINK you should get, but its the best one for you NOW.  Otherwise, its just as strange as our giraffe showing up in the photo above…

Another problem is that if you feel like you are supposed to solve the problem and that by letting go you are somehow engaging in an act of heresy or irresponsible behavior, well then, you have some inner issues to work on. Some of these can be niggling small.  Slivers, really.  If the power of the sliver is stronger than the power of your own intention, it is enough to counter anything you seek to manifest.

So let go.  Be vulnerable.  When you do this, you tell the universe that you are ready for it.  You are signalling a great deal of receptivity to it.  By doing this, things have a way of coming to you.  Be ready for miracles to happen. Don’t be surprised when you hear the footfalls of giants in your life.

It really is hard I think for many people to realize just how incredibly limitless they are, that the resources that they have are so significant as to render any problem or issue impotent and healed if only we could stop sticking  our fingers in the dyke and trying to hold back the vast rush of the universal energetic that is our souls. You wake up one day with the realization that all you are is a particle of water,  drop, really, but that there is this curious capacity you now have for merging your awareness into the drops of all other drops until you no longer see drops but feel vast seas and oceans surging and moving and flowing and this is all within you.  This is cosmic consciousness.  And I am sure someone like Buddha or someone similar had something to say about drops of water and oceans.

Once you feel this it is so authentic, you don’t need a teacher.  You simply need to remind and encourage yourself to keep pressing forward into that place where you can let go and surrender.  When you do, you signal you are ready for more.  “More” has a curious way of coming. The trick in all of this is not to worry over HOW the answer will come. Don’t worry about that.  I mean, if you do you might be entirely overwhelmed by the big footed movements of the giant as it comes crashing and moves all the furniture in your life….Your job is to remain simple and in the moment.  When you do this, you make youself available, ready, and receptive. Instead of being some kind of adversary, you will find that the universe has fallen in love with you and all the problems you have had or think you have aren’t the result of the world beating you up, but something inside of you that was off kilter. This type of awareness, this feeling of the universe falling in love with yourself is just the place where things can be seen in an entirely different way.  It is a radical shift in awareness and seeing/being. If you just let it.  Let yourself be seduced by it.  Go ahead.  Try. But in reaching that place, don’t seek to put controls on it.  Be like a child who has no expectation of what is going to happen.  When you do, you can better be led by this powerful force.  When you can’t do this, your awareness quickly shifts and drops right out of the sheath of awareness that is this state of higher vibrational being. Knowing when to activate the more receptive parts of your being with the more action oriented parts of yourself is a delicate balance, but when it comes to larger things, receptivity is a powerful approach that can lead you to unexpected places.  There is great power in this silence, this receptivity.  And in the end, you may not HAVE an answer to your problems because, well, those problems were just so gnarly, who would have been able to understand them once the transcendent comes knocking on your door?  It becomes like some distant foggy dream.  Sometimes things just need to be kept that way.

In this case, an empty mind is a very good thing.