Why I Am Here

Part of me didn’t want to come here, but another part had made a promise to.

This world is like the womb of heaven. It awaits its opposite to bring heaven to earth. It is how the soul guaranteed that we would enter into relationship: with ourselves, with each other, with matter itself. Our myths contain elements about this union of opposites. I see them as much in us as in the world…for we are a part of it. We are learning about the aspects related to creative energy. As our relationships often bear out, we are imperfect with it. These polarities exist in our two brain hemispheres, our two sides (left and right) mirror it as do the sexes, the yin and yang. The great secret is it has been in us as well as outside of ourselves.

This relationship is multidimensional in nature, existing at many levels at once. It is in the atom, the cell, the soul, and exists as a unifying element that can lead us to our salvation. It can also lead us to our doom if we refuse to understand it.

Presence here, to be more realized, has always meant breathing awareness into this world, into ourselves, to bear heaven to earth, to recognize a trinitarian consciousness whereby two opposites within merge and birth a third consciousness, a synthesis of the two, an ascendant aspect or quality in our consciousness that leads us each to a greater life, better awareness, and with time: bliss. Some fold that quality into higher vibrational relationships that offer redemption and cleansing. It can also be done alone, and is done alone (even when in relationship). It is along one end of the spectrum of awakening dealing with the archetypes of the divine feminine and masculine.

This redemption isn’t achieved by believing that earthly existence is somehow flawed, broken, or inherently bad. It is instead waiting for us to make it into what we will. Each one of us has a part to play. You need only listen to your own inner voice. The Buddha within points to this inner knowledge as did the Christ…and both tend to point away from physical life as some ultimate answer seems to loom. The ultimate has always been here in the power of the present moment.

The delights here are a mirror of what exists in spirit. They always have. To what degree are we each good at translating that reality here on earth? Right. There is a lot of work to be done.

I find that the way into this work is to regard our experience here as filled with possibility and adventure. The sensual need not be eschewed, for our desire isn’t a force leading to our downfall, but to its opposite, if we can realize what the forces are at work: opposites not made to snare you, but to teach you. When we surrender to them a transcendent quality in us knows just what to do.

Be an earthling, take part in its wonders, know that this is a place to learn, a place where we each agree to dream an experience that has in the past felt like a “fall” into density. I came here to raise that dense vibration up by adding something to it in my own personal experience…to experience it, to share it, and then to tell at least one or two more souls about the alchemy that our souls and bodies bear. So much shame that was not necessary.

For me, the height of the spiritual is seeing the physical as an important part in the cosmic play. This is not a place to be feared but a place to be redeemed…and we are the ones whose beliefs need to be remade and redeemed.

Physical and spirit, two ends of a spectrum. I leave you with the words of a man who got it:

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The Sacred Erotica Of Alphachanneling

Many of you know how sex can be a vessel for the transcendental. Heiros Gamos, the divine masculine and feminine, kundalini as a union of the divine within the self. Finding artists who have an awareness of the sacredness of the feminine and the masculine without falling for the mundane is pretty rare. You’d think it would be easier done given how much energy we put into the act of begetting.

For some time now I have been availing myself and those I know who appreciate a deeper awareness of our sexuality than just a moment of pure pleasure, and that is the artist whose name is elusive but whose presence on the internet is not. Found, for now, on Instagram under @alphachanneling. I say this because if you haven’t noticed, social media has been enjoying its heavy hand in the censorship arena these days on just about anything that anyone might frown upon, be it an errant crumb on the tablecloth, an unapproved of political opinion, or scientific information inconvenient to whatever the current narrative is. Or sex. Even when your channel is defined as for adults only. Even then.

When I first saw the work I saw a range of works using different styles but clearly rooted in the sacred. There is, to my eye often a whisper of Art Deco stylization in some of the work. Many are fast, gestural, and I think it is what keeps the work from being less than what it is. That’s not to say that if it were more that it would be less either….(I have a right to be inconsistent if I wish).

I suppose that I should do a little digging to find out a little more about the artist sans actually interviewing him. So I found another who did, but not before contacting him to get permission to publish a few images of his work for you to see.

“Alphachanneling is a Swiss-born American artist based out of Oakland, California….Central to my process is … channeling, an ongoing cultivation through a deep relationship I have with several master-teachers….Spiritual in practice, the images I produce are simple thought-waves … I look towards Taoism and tantra, pornography and folk art, BDSM and the divine, the mystical and the occult, indigenous and outsider art alike … Alphachanneling lives in a boundless world called the Utopian Erotic, a world of magical pussy, radiant women, bedroom jungles and temples of light.” 

Is There Great Art On Instagram? Jerry Saltz, Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2014/12/saltz-great-instagram-art.html

Since I find reviews of artwork usually tedious and more about the writer than the artist, let me get down to the work so you can see for yourself. Hang on for the ending because I will include a link you might want to save…

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This one was either the same one or one very much like it that I saw first when I came across his work a number of years ago. When I saw this image I stopped my scrolling and thought, “Hang on…someone has gotten onto the whole concept of energetic transfer.” Then sure enough, with a title like “energetic transfer” a little bell went off. Its nice to be on the same wavelength, it makes everything so easy.

Sadly, though, there is an image that this artist has been seeing too much of right along with his viewers, too, and one wonders whether the prudes at Facebook/Instagram will play the bully and selectively edit this chap’s feed:

With the announcement that the post runs afoul of their community standards….

I don’t know what the problem is quite honestly: there are images that some might want to call “scandalous” that stay up while, selectively, some are banned with this rather jolting image that belongs on the roadways and not on the Instagram feeds. It looks more like Sally Prude works on Tuesday the censor shift and she finds something she just can’t stand so she slaps on the above sticker, only to be followed by Ted, who we all know is a malcontented prude, who works on Thursdays the censor desk and goes to work hacking away at the artist’s lovely feed of spiritual erotica. It’s almost like there aren’t enough of them, taking down what they don’t like, but kind of hacking their way through the lovely jungle. Meanwhile, images of graphic violence and gratuitous sex remain on other channels. It’s enough to make a person want to start carrying around a pitchfork or something. We are lucky that this platform hasn’t gone demented and taken to censorship, at least not as I can yet tell.

So I will leave you with this one last image and a link to the artist’s site should you find yourself wanting to buy a piece or two. Maybe for your altar…It’s lovely to know that the feminine is treated as a sacred altar as evidenced in this artist’s work. Let me know what you think. Please, don’t be shy!

The artist’s website: https://alphachanneling.com/

New Interview Upcoming

I will be putting up a new installment in my ongoing effort to provide information about awakening (in the context of kundalini) through interviews. Being my busy time of the year for me at the studio, I am happy to be able to get this next one out to you in the next week.

I decided to create a battery of basic open-ended questions a few years ago for people who have experienced this phenomenon. While the questions ate limiting on the one hand, they serve to build a reference source because as each new interview is added, the same questions get asked. My hope is that the answers from my interview subjects will begin to create a spectrum of responses that may help illuminate in the mind of the reader the degree to which this phenomenon can vary from person to person while still standing under the big tent cover of awakening.

I am happy to include anyone who would like to participate in this project. You can choose to be anonymous if you wish, but I am happy to link to any web sites that you might be involved with so others can read your blog, or learn more abput what you do or up to our there in the world. Stats show a steady review of these interviews on weekly basis. Each interview is first posted and then a dedicated page is created where the interview remains at the top of the WTI blog so it remains easily accessible.

For inquiries about participating, you may reach me at info@staffordartglass.com.

Have a great day!

Can Others Feel Kundalini?

This was a question that came up a while ago and it was something I was certain was obvious to anyone who would be around me after whatever it was that had happened to me: blast of light, lightening strike, rocket engines taking off, take your pick of what “that” thing was that happened on that fateful day that left you in deep mystery about what had happened.  Well it was kundalini, that’s what.  I was asked if this energy was obvious to others and it triggered an old memory I had those first few weeks after my awakening. And the answer is no.  Those not awake will not feel your energy.  Okay, mostly. Sometimes they can.  Alright, that didn’t sound very clear, did it?

Clearly, no one was feeling my energy. I literally thought that I had a giant neon sign over my head that first month after the energy raised.  I really felt exactly that way until I realized, no, no one was picking up on this!  What a relief!

Except that as time went on, I began to see clusters of curious behavior that suggested that some people, not everyone, was feeling something. I wasn’t sure at first, so I did what I always do: I sat back and observed to see if I could gather enough data on the subject that would inform me more one way or the other.  All of this took a while, it didn’t happen overnight.  So the answer here is that in some cases, yes, some people can.  Mostly, they don’t. Clear as mud?  Read on.

This is why it may be that you might want to be aware of this when or if someone starts acting weird around you.  It seems that there is a range of reactions in my experience.  It tends to be either a bliss response (or approaching that-say an unusual attraction or enthusiasm in your direction) or the opposite, which could present itself along the lines of anger, upset, frustration, and fear.  I am telling you this because it has been an observation of mine and it might help to clarify some odd instances of how some people will react to you.  I have had both.  I really wish that it was more nuanced, but in my experience it usually isn’t, at least for me.  People here are not mature enough to know how to deal with the energy that could catalyze their own flow of prana in themselves.  I am hopeful that this trend will change and I think that if it is going to change, now would be the time in our history that it would do so (fingers crossed).  To do this, I think that we need people who are more accepting and surrendered in their lives.

In my garden…

I think that the best thing to always do is to remain neutral when it happens.  Someone is responding to something in you a certain way and my sense is that it can move them to extremes.  I now prefer to keep my bliss to myself and not have hitchikers or hijackers along for the ride. For those who act more peaceful and give me that look that tells me they are spellbound, I have to realize that they aren’t spellbound by me at all, they are actually responding to their own insides and how it makes them feel.  Yes, in some cases they may think it is coming form me, and in a sense they are right, but what they feel as a result of that actually has more to do with their own capacity to feel what they are capable of when it comes to a flow of prana and the bliss it can bring.  In short, when someone is feeling prana that might be attributed to me they are feeling it in their own world on their own.  It is like how we are all breathing the same air.  Is the air me? Is it you?  Well now perhaps you can see how silly it might be to think the air comes from someone like myself or anyone for that matter.

I will add one caveat to all of this, which is that you can project this energy to a person. The energy body is not limited to location, and this is why people can do reiki atunements, or why the power of prayer can make sudden changes in outcomes.  We can send energy to people, yes, it is true, but I don’t know that we really know everything there is to know about how this even works from an energy standpoint, we just knows that it can and does work. Are we sending energy or are we communicating with that person’s own higher self or energy body and they accept the idea that there is more energy available to them?  I say this in the way I do because it is like me bringing you a bucket of water that I just filled from a boundless ocean just fifty feet away from us.  Do you see what I mean by that? Am I actually sending energy or am I sending the suggestion that more energy could be available to them, and because they pick up on it, they do….and they do this based on my own thought of sending X amount of energy to them? And who knows, it could be a bit of both.  I really wish we were further along in our study of this energy than we are.  I suppose we could set up experiments to make some important determinations about how this all works. Okay, I know, you probably think I am just splitting hairs, here.  You might be right, but this is what I think about because I have always taken this attempt at being objective and asking lots of questions that maybe most don’t think to ask, but might be worth looking into if only for curiosities’ sake.

The best thing to my mind is to always bring it back to the person so they don’t focus on you as the source when these odd interactions happen.  There are gentle ways that you can do this and it all has to do with intention.  If they can feel the vibe then they can also pick up, perhaps subconsciously, your intention which might be that while you might inspire the energy, the energy is theirs.  If there is a conversation, keep bringing the talk back to how great it is that they are feeling what they feel and how it is something that they are doing and how great is that?  I have had people ask me if I was doing something to them.  I said each time that no, I was not doing something to them.  Instead, I would say, I was just serving as inspiration, nothing more.  I think this is correct and also keeps everything appropriate.  People can get hung up on the small truth and not be able to see the bigger truth that is looming.

I went through a period, a very definite one, where I was literally turning heads.  This started to happen when I was myself at peace with the energy flowing through me.  I just let it flow and didn’t worry about it. As a result, I felt so much better.  It was a breakthrough for me, actually.  I was able to embrace the inherent sensuality of the experience without feeling like I needed to tamp it down or feel shame about it. Its odd to think that I once felt shame about something so incredible, but I did.  But once that was being released,  and this happened quite suddenly in my life, I noticed how all of a sudden I would have these really quite comical things happen to me with the people around me.  It was the double-take or the rubberneck effect as I think of it. Maybe you have experienced this.  I might be walking down the street or driving in my car and I would see these people craning their necks to look at me.  In many cases these were people looking in my general direction with a look like they were trying to find something.  I had many instances where a woman would walk past me and would turn on her heel to scan the street in my direction as soon as she passed me, with a looks like she was trying to find something but had no idea what it was she as looking for, only to give up and keep walking. It was worth a giggle or two, yes.  I knew it wasn’t me, it was the energy.  If it had only happened once or twice it would not have meant much to me, but it was happening multiple times a day during a particular period in my process.

I have also experienced the dark side of what this energy can do to people.  I knew two people who quite literally wanted to destroy me because of it.  Both behaved nearly identically and instead of being able to part as friends, they had to demonize me just to move forward.  I also saw that as I removed blocked energy one ex would go into fits of rage within a 12 hour period of each block that I removed.  I have written about this before on the blog.  I counted nine times in a row where I had released blocked material and the person I was with would go into this rage meltdown each time within about a 12 hour period each and every time.  It continued to happen, but nine times in a row was enough for me to make a causal connection to what was happening.  There was NOTHING that I did to cause the person to go into a rage meltdown.  It was always something that she had somehow procured within herself as the source of the problem.  You just never knew who she was going to focus her rage at at any given time.  So there is that.  Usually in these cases, in my experience, there is always some kind of resistance in the person that precludes them from embracing whatever this seemingly disruptive energy means for them on a personal level.

People who are resistant to change will tend I think (just my own opinion thus far) to go into the negative range of expression or reaction.  Either you realize this and seek to engender a more compassionate understanding and patient approach with encouragement, or you just leave well enough alone.  In my case, I knew that nothing I could do would amount to any substantive change in their reaction.  And it is just that-a reaction-so don’t beat yourself up about it. It really isn’t about you.  It is very easy to hop on their karmic merry-go-round and then get caught up in their own pattern, which can be very hard for you.  It is sometimes better to leave well enough alone.

Those are my two cents on the matter. I think that if you yourself go in the direction of using it to your advantage, this will only result in bad karma, so please don’t do that.  Let it be what it is, a sign, an indication, but nothing more.

There is another instance where your own energy is affecting another person and this is what I would call the twin experience.  Some call it twin flames or twin souls or rays, take your pick. In this case, two people have become effectively entangled in their soul energy where a significant degree of telepathy is involved. These in my experience have always been karmic in nature even though those who have been so affected will hold out for this being something divine. While it leads to our divinity, it is a connection to the soul-self which operates under a very different sort of premise than the self in time and space (in this lifetime).  As a result, there is an overpowering draw to that person that goes beyond mere location and transcends the physical senses. It feels significant, and it is, but it is what happens when two people become connected, and it is always because of karma.  If anyone can illustrate situations where there is no karma whatsoever in one of these connections, I would like to learn more about that case because I have yet to see an instance where karma is not involved as the trigger into the experience.  It isn’t that I am narrow minded, it is that I have looked and observed and experienced this phenomenon and at no point have I found a compelling reason to say that this is a horse of a different color beyond karma being one important element in kicking off the connection.  So I am open to having my mind changed, I just haven’t seen it happen yet.

These are unusual instances and are unique to the two people involved, although there are many cases where once someone has had one connection, they may wind up with another, or several.  Again, all have karmic material at its foundation. That isn’t to say it is bad, not at all.  It does present challenges, though, very real ones, and you should be aware of this.  It can lead to loving their soul but having real challenges that are nearly diametrically opposed to that soul which feels perfect to you about who that person is in their present life. This leads to a conundrum for people in relationships like this.  It is, to my mind, a call to learning how to step into the soul-self in a more embodied and authentic way.  This takes real work to do and it can take a lot of time and requires a lot of patience.  The soul, though, will always seem beyond your reach in this lifetime for the simple reason that it does not exist in time, but rather projects parts of itself into time in order to become flesh.  In so doing, there is a new version of the soul created with a personality and a body, all of which were chosen in order to hopefully achieve certain specific goals. The soul does not appear to have any of this. It just IS.  I suspect this is why we reincarnate in the first place, which is to work through things that the soul cannot in its no-time-space state.  There is a song that says, “In heaven, nothing ever happens at all…” and there is a certain truth to this.  How do you have things happen when there is no time or space?  Where is there to go when you can be aware of being potentially everywhere and everywhen?  It seems the soul needs these projections in order to focus itself more narrowly, to take on roles, conditions, and the mask of personality in order to work through certain dramas central to its needs and concerns, whatever those might be.

Those are my two cents on the phenomenon, and it isn’t to strip it of its meaning or importance, only to leaven it with what I think is an important ingredient so that we don’t have a blindside to some important aspects of the experience.  There might just be a very real reason why you react and respond to the Other the way that you do especially when it is a negative reaction.  That bit of resistance that you are feeling is pointing out  the work you need to do most likely. I think this is the only way these unions will ever see a significant level of peace within them, which is to say they could be a call to change, real substantive change.  Otherwise, you will be caught up in the maelstrom of your own triggers, all karmic in their foundation, and it is possible you will be something like those people I discuss earlier who would go into melt-down after melt-down.  If you have had an experience along these lines, I am all ears (and eyes).  I am open to learning more, so if you have something to add, I would love to hear about it.

Blessings, P.

Mirror Mirror…

I promised a short post in my previous post, so here you are.

People say that the people in our lives are a mirror of who we are.  I have found this to be incorrect.  There are indeed cases where ou share similar characteristics with some of the people that you know, but this in no way is an absolute. I have met people who were not at all like me who have made their way into my life.  I have met people who fought against what was right.  I have known people who have engaged in behavior I have never engaged in and that I find abhorrent.  I have known people who threw the ones they loved under the bus emotionally just so they could get at another person.  No, I find that the people who have been in my life want to be like me even as they are unable to hold or anchor the level of embodiment required for the behavior to match the innermost values that I espouse.  Sometimes people are anything but a mirror.

In truth, I knew someone who abused my children emotionally who claimed being abused byme and to others in my family (it turns out that when it comes to family abuse, this type of abuser claiming being a victim is very common).  I met another person who did much the same, this time in the context of a soul connection (some call this a “twin” soul or twin flame).  The forces that create our subconscious attractions are not based on who we are, but based on something that has not been completely processed.  The people who hurt me this life were people who hurt me in other lives.  The truth I found was that this was not some cosmic tit-for-tat but rather part of a pattern that has not yet resolved itself.  My end of all of this is in being able to walk away from people who were nothing more than bullies.  My weakness has been in being able to just let it go.

No, the people who were claiming something that was being done to them when they themselves were engaging in this behavior were people who wanted to be like me but had no real means to do so.  Have you seen this in your life?  Maybe it began with a powerful form of admiration and devolved into something that made you feel like somewhere the tables had been turned on you.  I applaud anyone who seeks to heal and improve, but my experience has been that some of the people I have known needed a significant level of integrity that they just didn’t have at the time.  The problem for me was that in the process of their trying to develop it, they walked all over me.  No, these were not people I would have normally ever have wanted to be with-and in time I grew tired of the excuses and the dysfunctional behavior.

The “magic” of a karmic connection is that something unresolved in one lifetime gets turned into something that feels cosmic in another life.  A murder of you by this person in one life becomes your undying admiration of that person in another, marked by an incredibly intense level of yearning for that person. There are scores of people who have all experienced this same phenomenon with similar kinds of stories, and they as all the same kinds of questions.  One group calls it an “alien love bite” and I completely understand why they would call it this (even though I am not convinced that there are aliens involved in the way that they say they are—I think that it is more complicated in a way that actually reveals to us an aspect of how reality works but hidden from our view).  If anything, when you feel this intense draw, maybe its a sign that you need to look at the issues alive between the two of you, absent the draw.  The deeper I looked the more I saw how different we were.  If anything we were compliments.  That means opposites.  Compliments are opposites that attract.  In this case the differences are karmicaly based.  Have you ever known someone you were attracted to but you also found that you butted heads at the same time?

Sometimes a mirror is not a mirror at all.  Sometimes its just someone who simply hasn’t done the work and can’t face the fact.  For myself, I am learning that this rarefied energy is not a good sign. The good sign is the gentler draw, the gentle form of admiration where your energy doesn’t feel like its being hijacked like so many in this group of people have been describing.  The persopn in front of you isn’t always a mirror of you.  Sometimes they are anything but.

~Peace~

The Lie And The Shadow Self

The story of the night in shining armor has a shadow side that we often prefer not to look at. 

I was one of those people-pleasers who grew up with all the right family dynamics to bring this trait out in me. What begins as a desire to make the life of a depressed or bereaved parent or sibling’s life better can set up a pattern that gets carried into relationships later in life. Most of this is unconscious behavior, so it is neither recognized as it’s being felt or acted upon nor experienced. This is most often experienced as what some call the “karmic merry-go-round” where certain behaviors and personality types come into our lives repeatedly (hint: we are attracted to them without fully knowing why…and this is why I say “karma creates chemistry” for all you twin flame and twin-souls out there).

 For every man who wants to come to the aid of a damsel in distress, there is a woman who wants to be saved. Notice I didn’t say “needs to be saved.” We do these things because they satisfy a deficit in ourselves. The deeper problem is that there is a brokenness in both people, allowing themselves to be drawn into a relationship that is highly codependent. The question becomes, why does that “knight” need to save anyone, and why can’t the woman save herself? The answer, or part of it, lies in our inability to be truthful about how we feel. The man probably feels innadequate in some way and saves people to make himself feel better about himself. The woman, incapable of accepting her own feelings of inadequacy, relies on others to fix things she believes she is powerless to affect.  Both are relying on someone else to give them what they lack within themselves. I don’t need to tell you that such relationships don’t end well unless both are equal in their respective need or dysfunction. The moment one grows or changes is the moment this delicate house of cards can fall.

It’s common for us to point to childhood as the genesis for these behaviors, but this is short-sighted when you bring in the issue of karma. In all of my experience in releasing karmic blocks, all of them emerged from a central point within not just me, but within my larger being on a reincarnation-based scale. What I am saying is that many of these glitches come about not through a linear progression of lifetimes lived, but outside of time and most often trouble multiple lives at once.I say this because I have had access to numerous lifetimes and I have seen how these issues often repeated in some lifetimes (but not all). The themes predate life here, ad in going to their root, I did not find a Genesis here, but “elsewhere.”

 It appears that we come back over and over to work through a number of different themes, some which can be very different from each other. 

Some cycles in reincarnation can be fairly straightforward in the sense that a soul comes in as a woman, man, father, and mother. These encompass the entirety of our possible relationships (including siblings when we are a part of a family). For others, a soul with a more expansive interest will come back in a variety of cultures in order to get a larger perspective. It’s possible to develop many major currents in karma as well as sub-currents.  All of these come in with you while the soul is drawn to the very factors in life that will help activate these patterns, even when they are negative. Once a soul on the planet begins to be self aware, these deeper patterns begin to be more noticeable and they can be worked through. Healing these patterns actually can have an effect on past lives as hard as that might be to believe. I have seen this happen in my own experience when my spiritual guardian awakened me in the wee hours of Good Friday seven years ago to show me a vision of how all my past junk was being shoveled out through my lifetime now. I stood outside in the cool night air at 4:00 a.m. as he motioned for me to look off to my side. I saw a long hallway appear going off into the woods behind my house. He told me to watch and the hallway tilted downward while the other end tilted up and I saw the doors to each room (a lifetime) fly open and the refuse contents all came sliding out. Hopes, dreams, fears, upsets, all repressed emotion the self was unwilling to deal with, all of it, came sliding out. Sandalphon turned to me and explained that this was part of why I had come here, to be that life where this material was cleared for lifetimes. This wasn’t just from my life as a child, this was from my soul, a pattern that was being made right again. If you understand how something you do here and now can impact your existence both forward and backwards in time, its easy to get very “hungry” for wanting to clean that kind of mess up in your life.

The result of these changes I was going through in the early stages of my awakening put me on a collision course with my then-spouse who was unsteadied by the forces at play in my awakening. Angry over the changes taking place that made me less reactive to her codependent behavior, I had to move forward with the forces in my awakening regardless of the ramifications it might have had for my old life.
I learned that I was drawn to these damsels who, I would learn, were engaging in a form of destructive behavior known as projection. Projection is a type of lie we tell ourselves, a lie that we completely believe….

Projection is an observed behavior that both Freud and Jung wrote a lot about. Jung ascribed the need to project to the Shadow Archetype in the self, a part of us that does not reflect on itself. Jung explained that when the person affected by their shadow self has a deep enough fault or a deep enough misgiving about a fault they have, they will turn this on others and believe that the fault lies with the other person. This is more than blaming, it is the result of a rift within the shadow self that can make this possible. While we all appear to project from time to time, those with neurotic tendencies or who are pathological, will most often do it regularly. For people such as this, projection becomes a way of life. I know because I married one and because of how traumatizing it was, I was drawn to yet another person a few years later who had all the same traits. Because I was awakened, the karma fueled a powerful connection which I attempted to work through a number of times with no success. People like this woman who are serial projectors are said to have either narcissistic tendencies or have a condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder. My first clue about this was when I drove with a friend to a neighboring state to pick up a car she had bought online, and while we were going, I talked about my ex-wife. My friend, who was a licensed counselor, said that my description of her behavior was consistent with BPD and narcissist tendencies. 
As a result of our discussion I did some research into these designations and found that I had not just one run-in with this kind of person, but two. Remember that merry-go-round I mentioned earlier? That’s what I mean. I was drawn to another person who would repeat all the same behaviors as my ex-spouse! And the crazy thing about it was after a few weeks of knowing this person and seeing how she let down her guard and began showing her true self, I had already begun to suspect, even was able to predict what range of behaviors I was likely going to see come from this person, assuming at the time that this was a karmic connection modelled on my ex-spouse. And I was right. To make all of this even more entertaining, I actually thought I needed to work this karma out with this person so I could put an end to this extremely hurtful pattern once and for all!

One of the most difficult part of being with these kinds of people are the lies. In fact, when I saw how both of these women were psychopathic liars, I was accused of being a psychopathic liar. Living with someone like this is like living in a hall of mirrors. Everything that is theirs gets put onto you and then they begin isolating you and trying to alienate the healthy people in your life so your relationships with them are ruined. 

My wife said I didn’t love my children and said this directly to them numerous times. It was a cycle of denigration that had a destructive impact on my life, my sense of wellbeing, not to mention how it effected my children and how it strained, unnecessarily, my relationship with them. It was a nightmarish kind of experience. This second person said I was online seeking to seduce women using my “kundalini powers,”writing publicly and creating an air of drama and conspiracy.  These were the tame lies, and they got worse from there. All of the lies she told appeared to me to be efforts at character assassination in order to isolate me from friends and family, or from colleagues professionally. The really crazy part to all of this was how this person worked in a professional capacity dealing with issues of harassment in the workplace. Talk about a fox in the hen house. 

What makes these lunatics believable is how functional they appear to be. How can they be psychotic when they hold down jobs that require a degree of responsibility? In truth, the narcissist and the Borderline personality type have a public face and a private face. No one saw how the Borderline personality would behave at home, ranting and raving at family, or at themselves. “I talk to myself like this to calm myself” she would say when we would get out of public and into private. The truth was, for as composed as she seemed, she was really repressing a huge amount of emotion second by second and on a few occasions would simply go into a temporal meltdown that would be the reason why she would have to leave a public place because she couldn’t hold it together long enough. 

All I ever saw was that this behavior and the words she used were not about finding peace, but as a way to keep the tension in place. We say that venting helps, but all venting does is it serves as a way for us to justify our upset. If venting is done without being defensive then, yes, it can help release stored anxiety. But this wasn’t what was happening. She was putting her neurosis onto me.When she claimed I was hiding her presence in my life by not friending her on Facebook, I was instead not wanting her to have access to my friends for fear she would use them as she had used me in her need to shirk her responsibility for her feelings and reactions. I feared that she would do to my friends what my ex had done to my children. She complained about my not introducing my family to her, but the truth was, I suspected she could use them the same way my ex used my own family members to try and distance and alienate them from me. The jealousy I’m talking about here is beyond anything anyone would call within normal bounds. It was scary. The “clusterfuck” of emotions she claimed marked my emotional state were the result in large part to her own raw emotions and upset, which was vented directly at me. She would get upset if I looked a female cashier in the eye and thanked her by name for checking out my groceries. I was dressed down for being playful with wait-staff at a restaurant. Behavior that was just me being nice suddenly took on a sinister tone. I found myself being punished for being me. What was happening was that she was putting her own hard emotions on to me , the guy so eager to help. The result always felt like having someone pooping on you and then saying what a mess you are. It was beyond upside-down.

It’s hard because people like this do not see how they are creating the crisis they claim others bring to their lives when it’s all their own doing. In fact, the victims of this form of emotional abuse often wind up being enablers by being afraid to speak out against these kinds of people. I was accused of having sexually assaulted “all” of my female art students at my work. When I confronted her with this lie, she pointed out how she had not used my name which is the definition of slander and libel. She then said that had a Constitutionally protected right to write anything she wanted. I have the email. 

The problem is that in our society when a woman makes an accusation like this, people tend to believe the woman. In this case, it was another in a long line of lies. People don’t stop to consider the pain that this causes men who are often stuck in roles that expect them to just “suck it up” and go on. It’s a deadly double standard that assumes women don’t lie about these things. My experience has been that they do, and do so in spectacular fashion.

So how do you make sense of all of this? How do you deal with people who project? What are some of the symptoms and the backgrounds of people who engage in behavior like this?

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism in which individuals attribute characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to another person. For example, a husband who has a hostile nature might attribute this hostility to his wife and say she has an anger management problem.
In some cases projection can result in false accusations. For example, someone with adulterous feelings might accuse their partner of infidelity. Considering how much the woman I knew engaged in affairs while being with other men, it began to make sense that she was putting on to me her own inability to control her sexual appetite. She claimed that I had broken up her marriage when she actually said to me privately that she divorced her husband because she was not happy with him. She said that you don’t go looking unless things aren’t alright at home to begin with (I have screenshots of those texts). Months later, she was blaming me for her own broken marriage. She was also claiming that I too was married at the time, but I was not. I had been separated for over two years by the time I met her and my divorce was finalized the following year.

According to the psychiatric community there are types of projection. Like other defense mechanisms, projection is typically unconscious and can distort, transform, or somehow affect reality. A classic example of the defense mechanism is when an individual says “She hates me” instead of expressing what is actually felt, which is “I hate her.”

There are three generally accepted types of projection:
Neurotic projection is the most common variety of projection and most clearly meets the definition of defense mechanism. In this type of projection, people may attribute feelings, motives, or attitudes they find unacceptable in themselves to someone else.

 

Complementary projection occurs when individuals assume others feel the same way they do. For example, a person with a particular political persuasion might take it for granted that friends and family members share those beliefs.

Complimentary projection is the assumption other people can do the same things as well as oneself. For example, an accomplished pianist might take it for granted that other piano students can play the piano equally well.

What Is the Purpose of Projection?
Sigmund Freud believed projection to be a defense mechanism often used as a way to avoid uncomfortable repressed feelings. Feelings that are projected may be controlling, jealous, angry, or sexual in nature. These are not the only types of feelings and emotions projected, but projection most often occurs when individuals cannot accept their own impulses or feelings.

In modern psychology, the feelings do not necessarily have to be repressed to constitute projection. Projection can be said to provide a level of protection against feelings a person does not wish to deal with. Engaging in either complimentary and complementary projection can allow people to feel more like others or relate to them easily.
It is fairly common for people to engage in projection from time to time, and many people who project their feelings on occasion do not do so as a result of any underlying issue. In some cases projection can contribute to relationship challenges. Projection may also be a symptom of other mental health concerns. In my case, projection was part of a personality disorder.
Projection and Mental Health Concerns Projection, one main mechanism of paranoia, is also frequently a symptom of narcissistic and borderline personalities. A person with narcissistic traits who does not respect their partner may say to the partner, “You don’t respect me or see my true worth.” Some individuals with borderline personality may be afraid of losing the people they love and project this fear by frequently accusing friends or partners of planning to leave. However, individuals who project their feelings in this way do not necessarily have either of these conditions.

A person in therapy may be able to address these projections with the help of a qualified mental health professional. When a person can explore the reasons behind any projected feelings, it may be possible to prevent or reduce occurrences of this behavior in the future.

In the end, there is no “working” with a person like this. Instead, you learn when enough is enough. I thought I could heal a troublesome pattern, but I learned that this is not possible with someone with neurotic and delusional traits. In the end, it was far more productive to work out my stuff instead of tossing my junk into a cauldron with another person’s junk and expect anything good to come of it. But I knew this already. I was stupid. I was foolish. I learned you can only do this work quickly and productively on your own. Everything else is an invitation to the tar pit of karmic entanglement no matter how much that karma revs up your pranic engines. The result is I am genuinely happier, feeling safe, free, and ready for the next big adventure I’m about to embark on, and it finally looks like a dream come true.

References:

American Psychological Association. APA Concise Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009. Print.

Corsini, R. J., & Wedding, D. (Eds.). (2007). Current Psychotherapies (Eighth ed.). Brooks Cole.

Perry, J. C., Presniak, M. D., & Olson, T. R. (2013). Defense Mechanisms in Schizotypal, Borderline, Antisocial, and Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Psychiatry, 76(1), 32-52.

Projection. (n.d.). Changing Minds. Retrieved from http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/coping/projection.htm

Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part II

This post is the second installment that is best read in series about how karma creates chemistry and how we can open our lives up to a new horizon, literally a new kind of life by clearing the karmic threads and “debts” which we owe to ourselves as drops in the vast ocean that is consciousness…

 

So I was thinking about how I was able to clear up the karma from this “soul twin” that I had in the beginning of my awakening. I was thinking, too, about  how effortless it was to dissolve the connection that had caused me so much angst as well as bliss.  Mind you, in the beginning, there was this expansive love that I felt as well as this fiery quality that was part of the rush of prana that is kundalini.  This was not an effort at making myself a recluse, but rather that I felt, knew, that this was not all there was.  Most everyone I observed in the “twin” community seemed fairly situated in what I was rapidly feeling was the mythos of the twin flame and comfortable with this view as the twin as “The One.” It was natural, afterall, I had been there, too.  But things were changing for me and I was no longer content with what I saw as a delightful fairy tale, a beautiful story, certainly, but not one that reflected reality.  Yes, I felt the depths of soul love inside of me and I shared this with another, but I also felt the earthly self, both where I was and where she was.  We were oh-so human.

How to deal with this dichotomy, I thought? It seemed to me that this disjuncture was the proof that there was something more at work.  What the twin community was doing, it seemed to me at the time, was the same thing we do when we are putting a puzzle together.  You know those puzzle pieces that LOOK like they fit, but don’t?  I mean those pieces that look exactly like they should fit, but the shape is off so very slightly that you are kind of stumped in that moment?  Yeah, like that.  Now I was watching as some of us were just jamming that puzzle piece into place and saying “good enough!” and going on with it.  I just wasn’t one of those people.  I am a big believer in letting a mystery BE a mystery, yes, certainly, but there is also a time when you ought to use your mind some to roll this thing around, especially when the “mystery” isn’t fitting into any of the discussed paradigms set forth thus far.

I thought about this and wondered what a later soul connection might have involved, and this time around, for soul connection #2 it was similar, but different.  It also involved a miss-identification of responsibility for a host of issues that caused me a lot of hurt and pain with this person, to be quite honest.  I was snagged by this person with her dishonesty, which was very much like my wife before my awakening began.  In fact, I considered at the time that this #2 connection might have been a way to work through what my ex-wife and I had not worked through. They were so similar in some important ways.  Sounds dysfunctional, doesn’t it?  Well, actually, it has turned out that since the two of these people were sooo similar that it has helped a LOT in working through the remaining karmic snags for BOTH.  Despite the fact that something in the back of my head was telling me that what I was being drawn into and WHY I was being drawn into it might well be bad for me.  Different stories, yet so very similar.

The Universe Becomes Your Mirror

In an interesting twist, I have been having a lot of problems popping up with my ex-wife as I have been headed towards the end-game of this soul connection, trouble that she has been initiating all on her own.  This has always been telling to me because whenever I was working through some karmic material it was as though they could feel it and would pop up out of the blue.  The timing on this has always been bizarre, at least in the beginning.  Lately, I just see this kind of behavior as proof for how we are bound by common material and that we can indeed all feel it whether it is conscious or not.

I chose to remain neutral with my ex-wife, though, in this last series of interactions, choosing not to engage her by pointing out the error in her way of behaving (which has always been over-the-top mean and hurtful).  This tack or approach has proven to shake things up in me just enough to help release some significant karmic material in both cases, ex-wife and connection #2.  In this case, the release was sooo simple. God, just to think about how much hand-wringing and worry and concern there had been about approaching this day there had been!  So much self-doubt, so much loathing of myself for being tied to these hard people! The release happened with #2  I when I was able to see an admission that one of them had emotional problems.  All I ever really needed was that moment of honesty from them, that “come to Jesus moment” that never really happened, and probably wouldn’t happen.  This had kept me active and turning on this karmic merry-go-round.  And this moment was not one that involved me talking to either of them, which was actually really nice.  Poof.  On my own, I got the one small thing that I needed that flipped the switch on all of this.  And now?  All of that hard stuff is just gone. I feel different.  I look different.  I now realize that the thoughts that I once had that I often dismissed as just a fairy tale way of being were in fact the depths of who I am, the beauty that was waiting for me on the other side of that garden gate.  One side was thunder clouds and uncertainty and the other side was bright and hopeful without a need to convince myself that anything was anything except what it was. Now, whether dark or light, I just don’t see the dividing line but feel the bliss of simply being.

I will also add that along with this hard behavior taking place as I reached the home stretch in all of this, that I was approached about two months ago out of the blue by a guy I know only peripherally, asking me if I could help him with his business.  As I was working with him and his employees, I felt deep into the energy of the group and found this troubling but interesting swarm of energy there.  I just worked for weeks and felt into it as I went about my day.

I found that there were all of these similar energies that all went back to the male wound.  For the first two to three weeks I only felt the energy.  I really had nothing to go on beyond what I was feeling. But by the third week, people were suddenly opening up and telling me exactly what I wondered about on an energy level.  All of this felt so familiar to me, but I had no hard physical history to pin it to. Without saying a word or asking any questions, except in my mind, they each began to tell me just what I needed to know.

This time, instead of working this like a problem, I accepted it without feeling a need to fix anything.  The interesting thing that happened was that I went from repulsed and upset the first few weeks, to feeling a strange affinity for these men.  I understood where they had been because I had been in similar places, too. I think we all have in one way or another.  It was as though life was giving me this opportunity to step deep into this chasm that was the inner life of these men in order to ponder my own wound, what is called “samscara.” But the brand or nature of their wound was so similar in so many ways to my own. This was tricky…..be in the world, but don’t be of it.  Step into the abyss but remain untouched…..no….not quite….surrender and accept all of it, see it, feel it, know it and don’t feel a stitch of resistance.  Yes, that is much more accurate.

It was at the moment that I began to accept them that the changes began to take place with my ex chiming in with her junk, all in perfect timing.  The distance between these men and their admissions about their past happened within 24 hours of my ex texting me and trying to “yank my chain.”  I remained stolid and calm.  It all passed with some hurt on my side, but no reaction, which was the big difference.  In the past, I knew that she took some pleasure from getting a reaction out of me.  As long as I reacted in pain, it confirmed to her that I was just as messed up as she was.  It was her way of keeping me in the boat.  But wait, no, it was me allowing myself to be controlled, effected, and enmeshed.  And THAT was the difference.  I had control now. Hurt me all you want, or try to; it just no longer works.  The first few times, yes, it still hurts…but the behavior and the energy is actually changing, and this was part of how I just stepped out of that old restrictive suit of clothes that made the man who he was.

After this took place, about a week later, another layer was unfurled and this time there came the beginning of a series of releases. I was able to feel the energetic side of the block releasing from my right lower range of the meridian when I got out of the work van at our work site several days ago.  This was between root and sacral chakras and was not felt IN the chakra like so many releases in the past.  This one was stubborn, bug in, and I felt the root block more as points within the meridian line on the male or solar side of yang energy (based on the Chinese medicine system). Then I was able to read about an admission from this soul connection and it all resulted in this perfectly timed matrix of effects that felt like a landslide or cascade of inner releases that brings me to where I am now. Poof. Gone.

Energetically, I feel different and my thoughts are different, too.  I am no longer obsessed with loss and lack churning inside of me.  Poof.  This buoyancy has resulted in my feeling like I can reach something that I didn’t feel….worthy of.  Can you believe that? With this hard energy weighing me down, I just didn’t feel like I could reach it easily.  Everything had this cast over it that had an edge of the negative. With a root-related block this type of thing relates to issues of nurture and abundance.  If the block is big enough, it can result in problem taking care of ones self or creating abundance.  I knew that my block was partial because of how events happened in my life.  I had always used creative visualization for the important things in my life: school, job, career, and children.  They all came as I had asked.

In my life I have always been able to manifest pretty big things in my life, but they almost always have some kind of hitch in them, sort of like the wish the genie grants you that you always wind up regretting.  Now, though, I know that we no longer have to regret the wish because the wish is now forged in the clarity of the soul’s purpose free from these troubling alliances having to do with loss and lack and hurt and pain and all the rest. This corresponds to the root now being clearer. I should now see a new level of clarity to what is brought into my life through our ability to co-create our lives.  I also find that any problems that come along just don’t flatten me like they had before.

Today as I opened a new book I bought for myself as this change was underway, it revealed a quote by the Buddha that spoke about how releasing the karmic bonds that hold us down to the earth…..free us so we can fly like eagles who can leave this world or be untethered by the concerns that weighed us down.

I have been hoping for this moment for years.  Years. Me an my dear friend Ali  have been talking about this idea which she brought up in our early discussions back in 2008 about how karma creates chemistry.  I wondered at first how anyone would believe such a thing as this?  At first, it didn’t make sense to me.  What I felt in connection felt natural, not fabricated, and this karma=connection sounded a lot like that. There was something about it that didn’t make sense….but now what I know is that the reason why it did not make complete sense at the time was because I was seeing through  distorted lenses, that my way of sensing and seeing the world was itself….bent. I was myself captured by karma and you cannot fix an old problem using the same thinking that created the problem in the first place (thank you, Albert E.) And this is something that you will need to know about yourself if you find that this also makes little sense to you. I wont ask you to believe me, just file it away and then get on with your “work” and when the day comes when it happens to you, let’s talk.

When I  explained how karma created chemistry to my second soul connection, she did not believe what I was saying.  I hadn’t either.  It just didn’t seem right, based on how the energy felt. It felt like a “foreverness” that you just don’t want to ever let go of.  There are lots of people similarly hooked in the twin phenomenon that keeps them engaged but not healing the blocks.  But do you know why this FEELS like a forever thing?  Do you really?

The Reward Cycle

Dopamine.  I know it sounds simplistic, but it is really that simple.  Our reward centers physically are designed to give us that peasant reward for just about ANYTHING that our mind/brain believes is a good thing.  Sex is one of these things, but there are loads of others. Prana creates bliss and as it is identified, the mind sends a signal to the body to produce dopamine among other things to reward us for something that is actually very good for us.  The idea of connection with another person whom we love generates this rich chemical landscape that keeps us coming back, though, and the connection itself is most often karmic.  This means that on the one side you are feeling prana flow, which is good, but the karma is in there, too, which is a kind of soup of both shadow and light, so you get a bit of both.    If you have a lot of negative karma surrounding an issue, then the chemical train gets colored with that karma and you have the potential for bliss along with the chaotic emotions that are still suppressed within the psyche. This is the double-edged sword of life.  You have the dark and the light.  Learning how to navigate through all of this is what yields victory in clarifying and cleansing the self. There is this very insightful saying in the Gospel of Philip that says in essence that God is a dyer of souls. When God dyes a soul, it goes in one color and comes out white.  This is to say that the dying work that God does is to clear us of all color.  This is not to say that we are colorless. We do not lose our character or personality, but that we lose that which made it hard for us to see the divine within.

Dopamine also does something else where pain and trauma are concerned.  When it is created in the body, it helps to eleviate the pain so that it does not burn deep grooves in our minds.  It helps us to move on.  This is one reason why kundalini works on emotional blockages so well; the body is pumping out a LOT of dopamine (and there is evidence for this state at various stages of the awakening process that I wont go into here but I write a lot about it on the blog).  This is also why people who have PTSD or other types of trauma-based issues will often turn to opiates to soothe the pain.  In fact today as I sat waiting to pick my child up from an appointment, I listened on the radio about a woman who had begun using heroin as a way of dealing with her pain.  She spoke of how it soothed her, made her feel like she could cope.  Sadly, by doing this, she was actually shutting down her body’s own native ability to produce the compounds necessary to make her feel the way she needed in order to heal. Dopamine does this, it is the body’s own natively produced opiate and I can tell you that once I identified what it was I was experiencing that was making me feel so peaceful and smoothed out and wonderful and dreamy, I was able to see how a strong “dump” of dopamine into my system also corresponded with releases.  To put it simply; you just don’t CARE about the pain anymore.  When you do this, your brain and body can simply release the old hurt like that: poof!  The mind stop supporting the old programming and the brain and body are now charged and ready to take in a different story.  The result?  You feel instantly transformed. You are literally reconnecting the brain and the body in new ways, creating new pathways for though to flow.  At an energetic level, the change is felt in a myriad of ways as well.

The dopamine cycle works for a host of reasons, from building a strong family unit for the rearing of children, to the benefit that being with another gives to us as a couple as well as the cohesiveness of a community. There are other compounds involved like oxytocin (which is both a hormone and a neurotransmitter—think on that one for a minute!) a little adrenaline, estrogen, and testosterone.  Once our mind/brain has identified something as important enough, it sets up a reward system for it.  And we can become addicted to it in just the same way we become addicted to the very behaviors that keep us enmeshed in certain karmic merry-go-rounds.  But is this bad?  The curious thing is that some people, in order to get the dopamine blast into their systems will use some behavior that will trigger it.  The important part is whether you are using something else to make it happen, or are you choosing to just feel differently, which is itself the spiritual compliment OF dopamine.  You see the difference?  If its, say, sex, that creates the dopamine reward trigger, then you can become a sex addict.  The sign is that sex is an empty experience for you at some point because after all, you aren’t in it for the experience that sex can give, not really.  You are after the high of the dopamine. As a result, sex addicts wind up having a feeling of emptiness in the wake of sex. It is a terrible place to be.  They need to move the dopamine cycle, the reward cycle, so that it is not divided from the self by any degrees of separation. The trick, people, is to learn how to trigger dopamine production in your body so that you get a nice flow going all the time at a low healthy level so you mirror the physical state of peace.  We have forgotten how to do this, or that the body will respond in a fraction of a second to a desire to feel bliss by pumping out dopamine. We are a generation of pill poppers.  This does not solve the problem, it only masks it.  What is curious is that it appears that when your body is producing dopamine for no other reason than to feel good (not just for a reward cycle) the body does not appear to become addicted to it.

Sometimes the glitches in our karma can go on for lifetimes.  The trick here, the whole point of all of this inner work, is to choose the beneficial positive karma over the negative ones.  If you watch people who are obsessively upset, you will see that they are actually enjoying being upset.  They spend so much time engaged in explaining why they hurt and why.  Most often, they are pointing to some source outside of themselves as the culprit, when all along the culprit is  within. Through a simple turn in awareness, the true culprit is seen for what it is.  Doing this work accomplishes this.  And the result?

For me, when this last wrinkle unfurled in me and the hooks dropped away, I felt….a series of new feelings that felt authentic and good.  My energy felt buoyant.  So simple, so clean and so clear.  I didn’t feel this clenching tightness that could also be associated with sexual tension in an intimate relationship.  When I say tension, this was a tension that felt a little over the top and was a kind of warning signal even as I was unable to change it until I healed the karma at its deepest level. The really interesting thing was how supercharged my sexual energy felt in the wake of this.  I was actually concerned that it would all just go away.  As kundalini/prana cleanses the body/self, the energy is less chaotic or intense.  I worried that I might lose this intensity.  I identified that the intensity made me feel vital and alive….I just didn’t like the hardness.  It finally felt like a flowing powerful form of energy that was unencumbered by these tight or tense spots that I knew were there but was powerless to do anything about (until they were healed).  Like some silent reminder, they let me know in each moment that they were there, these tight spots, these blocks. But in the end, it was much-ado about nothing.

The “Reset”

There was a point in my awakening when I had what I call a “reset” of my energy field about a year and a half into my awakening.  This “reset” helped me to more clearly relate to the blocked energy that still remained in me. How this was done was completely unexpected by both me and my healer.  She was told by her guides to simply follow their guidance and take on my energy for a moment.  I was on the phone, doing this at a distance, and didn’t know that this was happening.  She told me to hang up and just breathe deep and wait.  I felt a sudden lightness to my being that was very nice.  Peaceful.  But after about one minute, I felt my old energy come back down around me.  The only way I can describe it was that in taking on my energy, by entering into my energetic capsule, she was able to lend or imbue or surrogate a much needed form of awareness that I was able to inherit as a result of this exchange.

What took its place was….not easy. At all.  I think if I had known what was about to happen, I would not have gone along with it.  What it felt like was a screeching clamor of metal like the sound of a freight train wrecking all around me.  It was accompanied by a deep and abiding physical pain that remained with me throughout my awakening until I released the remaining material. Okay, so that sounds really bad.  But actually, it wasn’t.  This was NOT physical pain.  What it was, was referred pain.  This was soul pain, a pain I had been blocking from my awareness….even in the midst of awakening.  Yes, I was aware of this pain, I had felt it, but I had simply dialed the volume down.  My healer dialed the volume back up so that I could hear what was happening.  I was, simply, much more aware of what was happening to me. And this sped me along on an accelerated path because the pain I felt in my heart was really hard.  But when the pain was released, as the blockages were released that following year, what followed in its wake, was a wonderful feeling that I keep with me to this day.

This level of awareness based on this “reset” has been of huge benefit to me because it has enabled me to see or feel into my energy body that much more deeply so that I can detect even the smaller things in a much more vivid way.  It will, in time, make me that much better of a healer should I choose to go that route.  It was this awareness that created a sense of pain in one of my meridians that helped me to pinpoint the exact area a year ago so I could show my Kahuna healer where to concentrate on in order to begin releasing material there through energy medicine and deep tissue massage.

And?  Poof!  Gone was all of the obsessing over this person I felt connected to but who I knew had been hurting me and would continue to do so because of her entitlement to being trapped in the meme of victim.  I had been told that I just needed to forgive this person…..but in the end, it wasn’t forgiveness that did it.  What did it for me was in being able to see things so clearly….something that I KNEW but that I seemed to hear from them as being the truth.  That was my hitch; I seemed to need to know that they knew.  I know that seems weird, but for my brand of karma, that was just what the doctor ordered.  Quietly, I was able to simply slip the bonds and soar.  Now, how it does it for you, what YOUR trigger is, I can’t say.  For me, though, it was like someone finally saying, “I know that what I was doing was messed up….I know…..and I am sorry about it…” That was all I needed to know, that yes, they knew that what they were doing was off. And now?  I feel no draw to this kind of thing at all.  It is as though I have transcended a murky layer in the ocean and am now in a much clearer place.

Having said all of this, my own energetic awareness shows me that there is still more murk in the root chakra, but it does not seem to be so entangled with others and this blame game that I have gotten tangled in.  I for one am glad to be free from it.  Come what may, at the least THIS part has been cleared, something I have been working on clearing for years.

How It Works

Until such an event takes place where you can resolve the “hitch” or the “hook” of the karmic connection, you remain on the merry-go-round caught in a recursive set of behaviors due to a suppressed set of emotions that are begging to be healed.  This can be done by a simple moment of honesty.  In this one important wrinkle, I was waiting on the honesty of another in order to feel the sense of release I hoped for for so long.  And for me, in my case, it released a whole series of difficult to live with feelings.  Now, free from all of this, I can FEEL myself unencumbered by the weight of another and their feelings of incompletion.  I simply had to know once and for all that this was not mine….but had been making it mine in this codependent cycle that was my karma.  Now with this new clarity of self and heart and soul, I ask myself: what am I going to do now? It will be interesting to see what manifests in the days that come.  With the karma gone, so too is the old chemistry that was caught in the dark goddess.  I am ready for the one who dwells in the light.  And the ONLY reason why I am going to the trouble of opening up like this is because each of us can reach this same place in our own time.  It is possible!  Whoot!

There are numerous methods that can be useful to you in assisting prana in doing its work re-magnetizing you to your larger authentic self.  I have done all of this work without traditional methods like yoga.  While I esteem yoga greatly, I know that it is but one of many methods that can be used.  Ultimately, the goal is doing what makes you flow and open up to the energy.  Breath work helps a lot, including alternating nostril breathing, something I created for myself that I call “Active meditation” which involves working on moving energy in my body and dropping into a deep state where I can feel the buoyancy of my lovely energy that connects me to the universe and reveals to me how the presence of the All is hidden in the atoms and cells of my body.  Centering attention on centers where you feel resistance helps to clear flow, as does movement, ANY movement from dance to things like Chi Gung, deep tissue massage, energy work, reiki, and more.  If you are dealing with awakening, drop into your deeper self and ask yourself what you most need to know.  Try it; then await the answer.  I will bet that you will wind up with resources coming out of your ears….people handing you books, people showing up to act as mirrors, teachers, guides, any number of things can manifest themselves. So trust in the power that is yours and that is also part of the universe.  You are, after all, a part of it and it is part of you!

नमस्ते

Proofs: Karma Creates Chemistry – Part 1

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

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

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

But the same is true for karma.  Whoops.

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

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

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

So the “proof” part….

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

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

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

 

 

The Twin

We hunger to know the experience of being so one with another that we feel what they feel. This idea, this desire to be so close to another is one that is deeply embedded in our makeup. This idea there is that “one” out there that we are destined for…..

Whilst dreaming and hoping for Mr. Cosmically Right and Ms. Cosmically Right, we lose something important in the mix. When we follow a belief, we follow dogma. In so doing, we diminish ourselves often unknowingly, setting clever snares for us which we will have to undo. It wont matter much by the time we realize what happened, but it can leave many running in circles thinking they have found the holy grail of spirituality. In a way we have done that. We have this cup that runneth over and it is in us, in each of us. To find it in another might be the snare I was mentioning. I wish I could tell you what everyone else is telling you about the forever of all of this but the truth is, we have all loved many times and we will love many times more. You have lived more lives than you can count. You have loved so many children, so many brothers and sisters, all who have turned to dust thousands of times over and will do the same procession from flesh to dust for many more lifetimes after this one where you are reading this.

So yes, the twin experience explodes just about everything you could hope to know about how things are supposed to go. Yes, you feel them from the inside out. they can be on the other side of the planet. Bound, connected, two complimentary pairs merge into an engine of creation. The thing is, the painting is only as good as the effort used to create it. I ask; what are you creating? Are you falling into bliss or are you allowing bliss to shift and melt you, to heal you, to undo you, to bring you back to zero, what the Zen masters all describe as that place where we return to the primordial condition. For me, kundalini awakened. It began to undo me and as it undid me, it also served to build a stronger field of energy that seemed to bring just what was necessary for the moment to serve in life and in fulfillment and in undoing and healing. For as little as some might be able to see it or to know it, it exists….for each of us.

It is time to return to zero. The twin experience is something that points to our potential in a world that is waking up. We are exploding the illusion of space. We are exploding the illusion of separation, of singularity. We are more than we seem. Let this be what leads you forward because to think there was and is and will only ever be One love will keep you from knowing love in its fullest. You will be somehow waiting and robbing who you are with now of the love that they could surely know. Life asks little else of us except to give to it our all.

So do so. Let mystery be mystery, but let it guide you and do not be so quick to make up your mind. It points to our capacity to see beyond here and now. It points to our being something more. I ask you, what is this something more? There are lots of stories about the twin soul….but what I know is that the truth is far more mysterious and wondrous than anything we could imagine. We are here to love and to learn how to BE love.

Be it!

Stuck

It is easy to get stuck and not even know it. In fact, being stuck is defined as a lack of awareness. In that lack of awareness, you can believe that what you think feel and see is true. The problem is, belief serves to filter what we experience. That is not to say that a belief that aligns with the universe will trip you up, but a lot of beliefs that do not align can. I am not even going to talk about false belief. I am not interested in any kind of righteous crusade. Thing is, it is entirely within our capacities to be shown the truth IF we are ready. The problem is, the more dug in you are, the more stuck you are. The more stuck you are, the less ready you are to see the mess you have gotten yourself into. That kind of gives you a bit of embarrassment, no? Ego dislikes being wrong. And yet, being like children, we open our eyes to the promise of what is and let fall away that which is inferior. When you do this, you will find, perhaps to your surprise, that you have been grasping chaff, not wheat. To turn around, to become unstuck, you simply have to be ready. Since belief absolutely governs behavior, the very lens through which we view the world, be aware of what your beliefs are. Examine them, for they will most certainly rule you whether you like it or not. Through ego, we take this all on, identify with it and then it defines us and masters us. LIke Buddha said, believe nothing until you have made sure such a belief holds water. And here is the thing…..when you go through a radical experience like awakening, everything may be new to you and thus it is easy to form all kinds of wild ideas about what it is that you think you see. We are each a babe in the woods on this one, so do not make your mind up too soon. Let the landscape shift and change; if you awaken, this will happen daily, weekly, monthly. Moment by moment, it will happen. Let it happen, and let the change come. If you try to grasp it, it is like a chimera that is a snake one day and a griffin the next. Thing is, in each moment, in each form, there is a kind of relevance, and yet, it is only a smaller part of a larger story. This crash course will take some time.

And there are a lot of ideas that propagate. Be grounded, let your kite fly high into the ether. A kite, which can go far, also does so by having a tail weighing it down. Remember that. I once believed, because of how my awakening moved forward, that what I was experiencing was a twin soul. I had reasons to believe this. And yet, over time, the stories about it simply no longer held any water. You should know, though, that I am one of the most hopeful people you will meet. I am not a cynic in my bones. We do need to exercise some reason while letting that kite fly high. What I thought was a twin was the effect of energy that attracts more of itself. When you feel that similarity, it creates more energy flow. that energy flow creates bliss because the energy IS bliss. Prana is itself bliss when you remove enough blocks that impede its flow. This is why kundalini is often felt as bliss; kundalini is the verb that is moving us within a sea of energy. But energy attracts more of itself. This is not always done at the highest vibration, and when we are attracted to others based on what is yet fully healed, we wind up reinforcing more of the same energy. It becomes a cosmic tar pit where the more we try to wrestle with it to “fix” or heal it, the “stucker” we become. Most of the time you will find there is some measure of an argument in the feeling….some stress or tautness to the energy. That is a sure sign that this is old junk. Yes, it moves energy, but yet it also moves it through less than clear lenses of our being. It is a coin with two sides. We are here, I observe, to clean it all up.

But the twin experience did feel amazing. But what I also knew was I was experiencing kundalini. There was a trick here…..and it is not a good one. We wind up telling ourselves that we are feeling all this energy because of another person. Well no, that is not so. We are allowing ourselves to open up and flow….and perhaps being in relationship helps this. My observation was that when I determined that the stories were “off” about what a twin was, my own soul responded by changing my kundalini experience in a dramatic way. Boom. Just like that. Something deep in me said something was not right. As I focused on this, sources that helped me to bridge my own cognitive gap appeared as if by magic. Poof! In the world of awakening, this becomes a known effect as life becomes ever-more magical. I found that by asking the question, I learned a lot in the answer. If the twin soul experience was one where you only had one, why did I experience it beyond my first twin. How can I have had more than one twin? That is simple; I was now in a new world where mind was more aware of the energy that was moving through it. Further, I could feel it from a distance. Thousands of miles away. But that is hardly magical, it is just how energy works. Reiki practioners can heal from a distance, so none of this should be so surprising. It is just a new experience. But we often want to mythologize the experience. it isn’t that the experience isn’t significant, it is just that the signal has been amped up much higher. We carry more energy and along with that comes some phenomenon that has not been noticed since before the amping began. We are now stronger receivers and senders of energy. As such, it also means, you have to be much more aware and careful about where you go, where your thoughts go and what you choose to embody. It is a new world, a new dimension. It is amazing, wonderful and amazing…..but it need not be mythologized.

The thing we do not always realize is that when it comes to karma, we really did make a choice about it. We CHOSE to feel a certain way and this choice did not involve another person directly. Oh sure, there may have been a person there, trees, rivers, buildings…..but the decision to feel or act a certain way, that was our own. And in developing a stumbling karmic block, we wound up reencountering this same thing over and over until we each learn to heal it. Let it go. Until that happens….same taughtness, tightness, struggle, issue, chip, splinter. It is there, no matter how seemingly small. By seeking to see the speck in your neighbors eye, you miss the beam in your own. How true. Like with the twin experience, I realized there were all these people who had twins, some even faced the fact that they had experienced more than one of these so-called “twins” yet continued to believe in the mainline story. All the while, these people were stuck. They sought to go for the bliss of what a close friend once termed the “foreverness” of the experience instead of doing the work. In fact, when I logged on to a twins board years ago, I saw people who had been in the same place for years. Had they changed? Had they helped to move the old karmas? Some twins seemed as dysfunctional as ever. I was staring into a vast mirror. I am not perfect, no, far from it, but from time to time I have this thing I have slowly learned to listen to (even as I have often ignored it much to my peril in the past), and it has helped me immensely when I have. And it has hurt me when I haven’t. It might be that an idea appeals to us in a reasonable way, but if that idea or belief is off in any way, it can lead to being stuck. I am now at a place where I don’t know the truth, but I suspect that this may be the best place to be….which is like a child who just does not know and is fresh and open to new change. I pray for that change daily. And doing away with old beliefs is not like shooting a beloved pet. It never dismisses any of the awe or wonder that life presents. I am living in a whole new world, afterall. That will never change. I have been forever changed. We just can’t know fully the big picture until we first get down to the zero point, the place of complete surrender and erasure of all old programs installed. Don’t be afraid; wiping the hard disc means room for that which now aligns with the universe. I seek humility, believe it or not in this enterprise. Becoming unstuck is merely an intent to know differently. It is not an affectation, a fad, or an idea. It is a fundamental willingness and discipline to follow what an old belief may seek to pull us away from. Sometimes we can become addicted to our old beliefs and obviously, this leads to addictive behavior (naturally, right?)

I seek the love that overarches all of this. It is big and sometimes I miss it, but it is there and I want very much to “understand” it. It is bigger than anything I have thus far experienced. Something in me says it is a great mystery, but one that we comprehend more like how poetry is grasped than a fact is known.

All my hopes…