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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Pain - Matt Kahn

Sent to me by a friend by Matt Kahn about pain. Really good perspective!


Kahuna Healing

Surrender

Sometime last year I spoke with some local healers about whether they knew someone in my area who did a combination of body work (massage) with energy work.  I knew what I needed, I just didn’t know if there was anyone who did the kind of work I was feeling like I needed.  One of the people turned to the other and they both said almost at once the name of a local practitioner in my area.  It took a while to get on her schedule, but the work she does is based on the Polynesian method of balance of the feminine and masculine as yin and yang in the body.  It embodies awareness of the meridians and points throughout the body just as the Chinese methods of acupuncture do.  It is, for me, proving to be a very useful modality at the stage I am at right now.

My first appointment went well, and some blocks were removed.  It was helpful.  I have been working on some of the last blocks in my system, a process that has taken about eight years or so since kundalini rose and began clearing me out.  As I have gotten down to the end of this, it has gotten harder to remove the most stubborn of blocks!  But unlike the beginning when I felt defeated by the hardness of each block, then victorious as the block was magically moved by the stirring energy of awakening, I now have a level of confidence born out of perspective or experience. The second appointment, though, was something else.

We began the second session by going over where some of the blocks were and what they were doing to my physiology.  This provided her some clues, and she got to work.  I am able to identify very specific locations along certain meridians which helps her to know where some of the blocks are happening. She went all over the body, pressing here and there, both massaging, getting me to breathe a certain way, and then placing her fingers at certain points.  Once she had gotten through a certain portion of the work, she then placed her finger in one spot.  As she did so, she asked me what I saw.  It was funny, because I had begun to see something rise up in my inner vision just before she asked this. This was bringing up stored memories that existed on the other side of the blocks I have been dealing with for so long. My healer was already beginning to assist in the release of this stored material.

I found myself going back, back, back, further through time and deeper into the blocks in the root chakra.  Having to do with survival, abundance, nurture, care, and love, I felt like a toothpaste tube being squeezed out.  I saw my feet on wet sand as a child, an experience from early childhood in my home in Florida.  But then as I moved through these old blocks, I found myself looking down at feet that were not my own.  Different feet were running through a rainforest.  This was on a Pacific island.  A very old story unfolded that explained so much about the trials I experience in life.

Letting it go was the single most important thing I could do.  Somehow, in perfect timing, I was given this gift of a Kahuna healer to reach into a place in my past that was Polynesian.  This was not something I was experiencing that was by way of suggestion (that I was Polynesian), but rather through a complete and perfect form of serendipity. I needed something from that old world in the new to help bring it all up.  And there she was, my massage therapist, an amazing person for her insight into a system that seems to wed a range of sensibilities into one practice. Furthermore, this person lived right around the corner from my home, which has been how my most important finds have taken place, such as my Qi Gong teacher who helped me so much in releasing blocks, who lived the same distance from my home as my Kahuna healer does (almost exactly the same physical distance).  This, instead, points to the amazing nature of what lies ahead of us in a journey of this type.  Some want to call it miraculous, but instead of miraculous, consider that it is pointing to the potential for the universe to bring you exactly what you need when you need it (even if it means having a Polynesian who just happens to do healing work right around the corner from you with a healing modality that is perfectly suited to your own healing).  Rather than the universe working against you, it can also work FOR you in remarkable ways….

For anyone who feels stuck with clearing out old material, I suggest body work by a person who is intuitive and sensitive.  This Kahuna healing work was perfect for me, since it brings into the moment all of the things that help to move these blocks. What I have struggled with for over a year was released in that two hour session. As it sure seems that I have saved the hardest blocks for last, getting this kind of compassionate care has been so important. My healer looked at me afterwards and asked inquisitively, “Have you had releases like you just had in your process in the past?”  I had to explain that I had a couple that were as dramatic as the one she witnessed, but most of them were almost non-events since I was not experiencing the trauma that made up the block.  It seems that for these last bits, I almost NEED to feel the highly charged energy, to bring it into awareness in order to understand where the fault has lied within me (how I bypass the feelings that are so foundational and thus are root-related and that get stored as a result of this)

Its been two days now and I still feel tender, and I feel new.

The releases were so deep that they have left me feeling….at odd ends….which is something that I am used to by now. I just don’t sweat it as much now. I feel a stronger or renewed sense of my own energetic integrity and how important it is to no longer allow people into my field who mirror the pain that I have now released.  Up until that time, however, I continued to be vulnerable to this intrusion of sorts simply because that was just where I was, sharing the same “samscara” or soul scar. In a very real way, I was like a heroin addict hanging out with other addicts.  We kept each other going on this merry-go-round of dysfunction.  While I may have known all along that it was not healthy at all for me to be connected to these people energetically, I was also powerless to do much about it deep down.  To gain back the power of my own will, I had to cure the fault or hurt I had stored in the first place.  This naturally moved me out and into the new. Unlike a sudden arrival, though, this is one step of many steps, a kind of continuous spiral of evolving, healing, and becoming. It continues to be a process.  There is still more material to release, but I am now better equipped to feel a sense of quiet within myself without someone banging on my inner doors or sneaking in through the back way.  This is critical to do if I am to continue to heal, which is to remove all of the negative influences that serve to keep the new at bay and the old constantly reinforcing itself.
After these kinds of clearings, I just kind of observe, feel, and wait for my system to reach its new balance.  I have been living with this junk for so long, it might take a few days or weeks to reach stasis again.  But its good. Since you might be curious to find out more, here is a link to one of many Kahuna sites…I highly recommend this modality for anyone who is dealing with hard to remove material.
http://fionahouse.com.au/therapies/kahuna-bodywork/

Beyond Belief II

Once I caught on to what had happened to me had a name (kundalini/awakening), I came across some work by U.G. Krishnamurti.  A friend lent a book to me of some central thinking from his life.  I remember feeling how spare his view was about all of this.  A pathless path. As humans, we like to fill our lives with the things that serve to decorate our lives.  We are all about the mental jewelry, right? Inner and outer kinds.  So it felt kind of bereft of a certain human feel to what he was saying.  But the thing is, the wonderful thing about all of this, of awakening, is the less you believe in something, the more open you are to what is true….potentially at least. You now have a new channel into this world that is all around you.  It is like a umbilicus that nourishes you, and it is the universe that is sustaining you.  Instead of letting belief get there first to muddy the water with centuries of error and opinions and half-glances and incomplete comprehensions, you can get it directly.  And perhaps, too, you might also have your own half glances about it, but it will be yours, and it will grow organically like a flower bud opening.

You look out from the eyes of your body here and feel the rush of the universe inside of you….and you know that as the soul of the world moves through you as light forms, you are feeling the goings-on that is all around you at incomprehensible distances.  This is part of the overwhelm that many feel when they “rise”(the rise of kundalini…)  or resurrect into this new life.  It is an inward inner-net of life.  It would not be stretching it to say that you have unlimited information at your fingertips. This is where the siddhis come from in the Hindu tradition as they describe one facet of awakening, which are abilities.  Now on the one hand, they are just this, and should not be given too much weight, but only the same weight you might give them as you give eyesight, hearing, or anything else: they are there now to help bring more information into your life.

In the early days of awakening, I used my desire to know to penetrate deep into this “inner” world.  By allowing consciousness to accelerate, you can do what I have done.  We all can.  When I read the words of Edgar Cayce, who did thousands of readings for clients using a method of going into trance (code for an acceleration of consciousness!), he was able to access what he described as an unlimited library of information. I can’t say that I have seen it as a library, but the image is useful to point you to the place where you and the universe meet.  I discovered remote viewing before I even knew what it was.  Seeing objects from a distance, describing the interiors of people’s homes who I knew, or feeling into the marrow of the multiverse, I was most interested in knowing directly, personally, what the stuff of the universe was.  I didn’t want an article of faith.  I didn’t trust that people always got it right.  I wanted to enter into a personal and intimate relationship with the soul of the world.

The universe is thus inside of you.

You do not need belief in order to experience the divine reality.  This reality, in truth, is merely an expansion of your narrow focus.  It has simply unfolded in important ways.  In many ways, the right brain, in its capacity to glimpse the big picture, is adept at processing the information that is streaming into you in a moment by moment basis.  Why one person picks up on it and another does not is not because of ability, or due to divine favor.  It is simply due to less things being in the way of this stream of energy, life, and information.  You can let it flow like a river and just watch the surface of this water sparkle or you can dip your awareness deep into it and “grasp” the stream and examine it.  In doing this, I have found worlds in a drop of this energy, this water of life.  A world explodes into view and is so powerful you have to let your imagination take center stage in order to help to construct what it is that it is trying to tell you.  Imagination is incredibly important, central, in fact, if you want to let this world teach you, speaking to you to reveal its secrets.

You don’t have to believe in anything to inherit the universal truths.  You do not even need to believe in a deity. You don’t.  You just need this connection, this umbilicus that nourishes you and fills you.  The trick is in waking up and shifting focus. The energy will itself accelerate your consciousness.  Some call this an “altered state” but accelerated is much more accurate, so I use that.  It is literally like being swept off your feet by a wind and finding yourself flying where before you had to walk. And really, you can know just about anything that you are clear enough to have come through. As long as you remain totally open without your blinders in the way, you have so much to learn.  You can learn about grace, about how this energy has animated worlds, vast universes, and how it has seeded all of matter with sentience. It can show you the relationship between how this energy filters down into matter and turns itself inside out, transforming itself into countless things.  When you see things like this you see just how free-wheeling creation is. Suddenly the world stopped being dead matter and became this thing that was alive with a vitality that was incredible.  At the atomic level, this creation is taking place constantly and at time scales that are astounding.

If you take a second and then divide that second into 300,000 even increments and then slow that one increment into an hour, what you would be able to glimpse would simply amaze you. You might see just what I saw, which is that matter is not solid at all, but is being supported by way of a stream of quasi-particles that move from energy to matter at ridiculously fast speeds, Speeds so fast, I don’t know that we have yet detected them. And someday we might have a way to glimpse this so science can know it, too, but for right now, consciousness as it exists in your body is perfectly suited for being able to move into these time scales and see the world that explodes into view.  With no mass, your consciousness can become small, large, slow in time, or fast.  It can also move through time as it does this, too, which is helpful when you are examining the “insides” of all that is. It might seem impossible, or like some drug trip, but I assure you that it is not.  This is the potential we have in our hands.  We can use it to heal the planet, to change how people see their world from one of dead matter to more than sheer miracle, but zillions of miracles happening on each needle-point stretch of space that is wrapping itself around your flesh.

I know it sounds a little out there.  I know.  And yet, my experience along these lines was described perfectly in a thousands of years old document found within the Vedas where our ancestors used their newfound awareness in awakening to glimpse vast cities inside of their bodies, where cells exploded into view and revealed to the onlooker that the cells were themselves made up of still smaller particles.These folks were all over it. Old school.  And they might not have the technical vocabulary like atoms or compounds to explain it all, but they did very well with what they had.  And you have it. We all do.  This is the good news.

So yes, I read from time to time of others’ experience….not to know some truth, but to gauge where I am, and to try to pick up new awareness.  It usually comes when I am not even looking.  I’m just thinking about it and then someone comes around the corner, smiles, and hands me a book saying, “I was wanting to give you this because it has something pretty cool that I thought you might like.”  And there it is, a cosmic friend who has arrived in perfect timing to answer a feeling or question in a way that feels like a gift from that universe which winks back at me, urging me on to open even more so it can reveal more of itself.  And of course, I am giving something to the universe that is highly personified.  But there is an intelligence there that is beyond anything I could even grasp in ordinary consciousness.

This that I am explaining is itself the means by which you can know instead of using belief to prop up for what is a shortcoming now in awareness for you.  You do not need belief though, since all of the things that were expressed in the past and written down will come into view to be seen for what they are. And just like I am doing, using words to describe the ineffable, we achieve varying degrees of lucidity of this “formless” presence that gives form to all things.  Emptying your mind of what you think you know, you can be open to what is.  Like a data stream of bliss, it will move through you.  Its grandness is enough to reveal just how wonderful the universe is.  It can fill you with grace, awe and wonder, softening you and shifting your awareness.

When we talk about our advancements in technology, this consciousness is light years ahead of using THOUGHT and the force behind all things (its love people!) in its ability to animate, create, play, and discover. We could learn a lot from something like this. “It” is ever present, yet what “it” is will escape you because, I think, it is just so vast.  And yet, if you allow yourself to be true inside, you can glimpse the whole in every single of its parts.  Like a cell inside a vast body, this is akin to glimpsing the dna or some universal holographic form that has all of itself in everything else.  Yep, it will boggle the mind and of course, discussing this in mixed company would get you some funny looks, but the world needs it.

No belief is required.  I know that the hymns and the rituals all help make us feel warm and safe, but there is a greater safety inside every moment that will also strip you down of all your faults, errors, and blindness.  Seems you have to just let it work as it burrows down into your core.  And it can be hard letting go of something you reflexively have held onto but don’t even know what it is.  This feeling inside, a broken feeling that you have taken as being who you are when in truth it was simply a story inside of you that you grafted onto your personality.  Its brokenness just feels……familiar…..and when this force digs deep it is like a death….but when you open to this cosmic invader, the light illuminates the roots of this and will show you what is true and what is error.  And really, this is what sin is about, which is doing that which damages us. Doing this work often means slipping past the subconscious self in order to dig out the roots that you thought were you.  It was the devil that you knew.  And its simple.  Jesus said you needed to be like a child.  True.  And trusting of “it” in the same way that a child might trust a parent.  You put yourself in the hands of this thing….and it can be hard for the most ardent believer…..especially for the believer….because they already have their own ideas preformed about what they think this will be like.  And it is different from what most people have thought, so it unsettles them.  It is so deep a place of communion, of union with the universal force of all life….and of course many of us shrink back because we feel like we have a reason to feel shame for our sin, for all the roots we let grow inside of us.  But this light….it does not care….it does not CARE what you have done.  It knows that in this moment, you could unwind centuries of wrong as it dips down into you and pulls out those roots wrapped aroud your energy body that form your negative karma.  This is the error of all of us.  The reward is simply so grand, why would you want to live another day in prison? Well, that is the illness of humans.  We just don’t know how bad we have got it.  If you open to this light, it will show you.  But to do this means that you get really honest and really open to it.  You do not need a priest or priestess.  You do not need to believe in a matrix or a 5d world or commandments or any of that.  The light will naturally guide you.

Will you fall?  Oh, probably. At least a couple thousand times.  Get used to it.   Just accept this as the price of admission to the next level of existence.  If you think that you awaken and suddenly are completely enlightened, you miss the human part, and this is the part missing when we think of those who are “enlightened” because I can tell you from experience that there is no great completely free person full of enlightenment sitting on a louts.  It does not exist.  And why should it?  It just isn’t what is real. Our humanness is.  We do not leave our humanness.  We renovate and perfect it by clearing it of the junk we put there so we can honor the Presence who made all of this for us here. It is then that you can glimpse how amazing this world is by how your own vessel, your soul made flesh is. But fall, yes.  Learn from it….not just how what you did made you fall….but about how compassion can make you better.  Awakening give you this rocket boost way ahead of anything you might have known, and yet, you still are little you.  It takes a while to catch up.  It may be true that it takes lifetimes before you can refine what you capture in awakening. But we have all the time in the world. We do.  Existing as soul independent of time, you can glimpse how time is not some kind of race.  The grace and compassion built into the creative force that is prana is that we have all of it and more than we need.

This work is like putting a big puzzle together….the puzzle is you…your self cleared of all the pieces that did not fit.  Errors, assumptions, beliefs that all sounded good at the time, but wound up not being quite right.  And each of these are like blocks for the true light.  So piece by piece, you feel this light shine into those cramped places inside of you…..and as each piece goes and is replaced by its more perfect piece, you can begin to feel all the other places where other puzzle pieces don’t fit.  Like tight shoes.  You wear them for a while and you one day realize, “You know, these shoes aren’t that comfortable!”  This is the beginning of the change.  Just awareness.  So simple.  Your own personal awareness has flowing through it the light of the All, and this force has the power to melt and erase and save you from all of these pieces that were installed incorrectly, or were less than joy.  You don’t even need to know HOW it works.  You just  let it in.  It is the single most intimate act you will ever do, letting that thing in.  No mantras are needed.  No prayers, no postures, no methods or techniques.  It is what U.G. described as the pathless path.  But that path, I will tell you, is simply amazing.
To awaken, you will do so when you are able to remove that which divides you.  The more of this you remove, the more this flow will move into you.  It is this simple. Some might call this removing blocks from the body, others will caution that you MUST breathe a certain way or else the kundalini will flow the wrong way….and I am here to tell you that this is all the result of the past error in perception because we really don’t have a lot of time left to get this right.  The Collective is pushing forward the energy of awakening now in what can only be described as a watershed moment in history. People who have not spent decades in a practice are waking up spontaneously.  This ought to tell you something.  This is not for the elite, the chosen.  It is WHAT everything is, and when you awaken it is just this very thing that you find stringing all of this together into something at once vast and also incredibly simple (like how a galaxy can be resolved into a speck in the night sky).
Sometimes a simple meditation is enough to bring you to enough unity within that “it” revs up and turns into full blown awakening.  Maybe being around someone who is awake will remind you of what it is “this” is.  I stirred awakening in myself, I know, by resolving a long-standing sense of guilt that I had with the universe about not doing enough in my inner life.  When I made peace with that (quite unexpectedly), the waters flowed from then on. My days as the old self were numbered….even as my essence has remained.  Two days later I turned and felt this thing…..like a far off song playing on the breeze….and I wondered….how could something be so beautiful?  “It” told me that I was part of a family of consciousness, that I belonged, that the story of this family would be what “it” would be revealing to me for the rest of my days here on the planet.  Its funny, because this “family” is actually everything that is.  That is the family.  Every leaf, every atom, every star and galaxy.  Every baby, every smile, every action, event, thought, all of it. Nothing is excluded.  And if that don’t shake your world, I don’t know what will.

You don’t NEED belief.  When you move from imagining what the Kingdom might be like to feeling it surging in your veins and traversing at light speed via prana in your energy system like so many invisible fiber optics, there will no longer BE a need for belief.  You now have EXPERIENCE.  As this experience accumulates, belief naturally can go by the wayside.  And this?  This is what Yogi Bajan (I am told—I don’t read his writings) is what makes you the most dangerous person in the world.  I am sure he used this for dramatic effect, but its good because in a way it is true.  It makes you this person who cannot be lied to. If you see the world of the 10,000 things as the Taoists describe it, but also feel the soul of the world, then you see the outer and feel the inner.  You don’t need belief to prop any of that up. You walk by someone and you feel their world of life moving all through them.  Loss, gain, love, hate, joy, frustration, and that incessant chattering thought.  We have all been this.  We are this. But we are potentially more.  So beyond belief, yes.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Sin, Karma, and the Beloved Disciple

I have been digging through some drafts of things that were half written in my blog, things that were not published.  I am working to get these out.  This entry is the easiest for a mid-week effort. 



The great wonder of our inquisitive spirit is that our need to discover overcomes our impulse to stay rooted in the past.  After fifteen hundred years of a solidified canon within the Christian church, we are getting a breathe of new air as discovered in the codices found that emerged in the 18th century and did not come into a broader light until the latter half of the 19th century.  These codices include the Gospel of Mary Magdeline, The Apocryphon of John, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ.  These, along with the Nag Hammadi codices represent a new voice that has emerged about the teachings of Christ that reveal an expanded view of the teachings of Jesus.  Perhaps because of their deeper mystical bent, they may have been dismissed out of hand due to either ignorance or a desire to keep these teachings out of the view of the masses.  And who really knows, except that many "scrolls" were ordered destroyed at the time of Constantine.  He had bishops in the newly formed church to go out and find some of these after the first big round of purges took place in the wake of the Councils that formally pronounced what the canonical books would become for the followers of Jesus. 

These "new" books help to shed important light on the depth of the teachings that this man and his followers were about.  Perhaps for their depth, they were not understood.  It is easy to see why they did not appeal to the burgeoning church of the day.  As was the tradition of the day, women were often called men, a term that is not too different from our use of "mankind" when we really mean both men and women.  In books such as the Nag Hammadi, you can actually see how those who were educated in the mysteries of his inner teachings would be called "male" even though they are female.  It was certainly something born of a sexist society, but it also suggested a certain level of worthiness to hear and discuss such lofty ideas and realities.  And so it is that Mary is referred to as "Him" in her own gospel.  She was an equal to the men. 

What I find so congruent with my own inner discovery about the nature of karma is how sin is discussed.  From chapter 8, which is the beginning of a fragmentary gospel it says:

. . . Will matter then be destroyed or not?
22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.
23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.
24) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
25) Peter said to him, Since you have explained everything to us, tell us this also: What is the sin of the world?
26) The Savior said There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.
What can often escape some of us is an important point being driven home here in this passage, which is that of the Essential Self, the "root" from which all things emerge out of.  Peter, in what is a very common line of questioning about our fallen nature in the world, he asks about the world and sin.  But.  Sin does not exist as such.  We are the ones who make this sin.  It is not on the shoulders of some craven world, but rather is the result of our adulterous nature. It is easy to think that Mary is saying that sin includes adultery (for instance), but the drift is subtle, powerful, and points to our delimna; just as in adultery we turn from another, we turn from that which can heal us which is what is IN us and is resolved back into the root of our nature not as fallen beings but as beings who, if we were able to, could heal ourselves.  In fact, the passage continues on to explain that this thing in us, our divine nature, is what can heal us and make us well.

This shifts our understanding quite radically, and is entirely in keeping with what I have learned is the nature of negative karma.  If you go through my writing back through the years, you will see as I have mused that karma is like pulling away from a magnetic compass bearing.  Doing this causes pain and trouble for us.  It is against our true nature, and yet because of where we are, we pull from that magnetic pole even as it causes us trouble.It is a fundamental turning away from our authentic nature, which we all seem to be afflicted with this turning away.

So instead of karma being some kind of punishment, or sin as being something real in the world, sin is not as we think it is.  But we have made in spiritual circles, karma into an image of ourselves.  Needing punishment for those who have harmed or hurt us, we prefer to keep the cycle of hurt going in a never-ending cycle of pain for pain.  We call this "justice" which is the old eye for an eye concept of how to handle our affairs.  We have been at this quite a while and we have prisons full of these offenders and we aren't any closer to fixing the problem.  That is because, on balance, we just aren't interested because to do so would be to crack the old paradigm wide open and reveal something entirely different underneath.  We continue to die by the sword because we live by it.  But this does not mean that karma is a punishment.  Its the idea that everyone is going to "get theirs" in good time that is what is amiss.  The world is all aflame, like a house on fire and some stay in to be consumed by the drama and thus the ongoing karma or we flee that building, never looking back.

I say it is time we begin to flee and not look back.

I will be the first to admit that I have at turns sought to flee my old life.  I say flee in the same way one withdraws their hand from a hot griddle.  Some, though, think that there is some honor in frying their hand to the marrow.  But there isn't.  The only advantage to feeling pain is that it teaches you to no longer desire it.  Yes.  Desire.  We have this lust for pain sometimes, even as we run from it.  It is this odd thing we tell ourselves.  We say we don't want it yet put ourselves right back where it can capture us.  Why?  It is a perennial question.  It just is.  And it may be that this thing will serve as our greatest teacher when the time comes to undo that next seal within us.  It might wind up being perfect.  But until that time, we keep it at arms length but without ever really letting it go.  it is the devil that we know, right?  We chose that devil.  When we can own up to it, something pretty powerful can happen.  We stop this yo-yo action with that which destroys us and we face it directly so that its appearance completely changes. 

The world is not a broken place, but perfectly made for an amazing level of realization to take place.  You will see what I mean when you can stare into the core of things and realize that the world placed within our world supercedes all of our current dreams about it.  It is this......vehicle for something remarkable.  Our bodies, made up of all the same matter, is also this. We are all of this coming to a level of awareness and realization.  The trick is to know how important it is to stop running from our demons and begin to face them.  And we can each liberate souls that are caught in these traps by no longer holding on to the old paradigm of an eye for an eye or of karma as a kind of cosmic punishment where no one is really involved except you, as though the divine has somehow checked out of the whole affair.  No, it is right there, supportive as always.  In a world as ours, there is never a moment when we have been abandoned.  Rather, we have taken leave of our inner divine.  It is there, though, marvelous and majestic.