Overcoming Resistance As A Path To Healing

 

 

Many years ago I overheard my Chi Gung teacher speaking with a person in my class between sets. He explained that we can learn how to let go of all kinds of resistance in our energy field and consciousness by paying attention to the body. He said that many unconscious feelings are held in the body and that they can be held in different parts of it. He said that sometimes when we allow ourselves to become aware of this tension in the body it can tell us something about our own feelings. By going into and letting the resistance in a part of our body relax and unwind itself, we can also let go of emotions that get stored there. He said it might just be a little feeling in the back, the hips, the shoulders, or even a toe….all of this had something to tell us and teach us about letting go.

By letting things go like this, you can unwind all sorts of unconscious emotional material. It can be surprising how much that we hold onto. I have found that the more I do this work the more aware I become of still smaller elements in my body/mind landscape. It can lead to greater and greater clarity and a state of inner peace. I can also attest that if this process happens quickly, like it did with me during kundalini, the landscape is changed so quickly that it can even be bewildering sometimes. So, I suggest that you take this kind of work slowly and be easy on yourself.

When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings, then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape.

 

Everything that we feel is not the result of what others have done to us but is instead how we have reacted to events in our lives. Buddha had something to say about this, and it is sage advice. No one makes you feel a certain way. No one. When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape. This is not always easy to do, especially in a time when people are increasingly wanting to have the world to conform to their own feelings instead of just being an adult and understanding how we each make choices ever day about how we feel and respond to the world. Being able to develop this honesty about how we feel (and that we feel) what is happening is the second big leap in work of this kind. Be easy on yourself, but be honest and be responsible.

When you feel resistance in your body, the first step is to observe it. It can sometimes manifest as physical pain. Instead of resisting it, try going into it. It wont hurt you. Explore it with your intuitive faculties. How does it feel? Why is it that you are holding tension there? Try breathing deeply and slowly and then imagining that your own breath is filling that tense hard space in you. Depending on how tense or how resistant the area is, you might need to do this a number of times. As you breath, imagine warmth going into that location. Imagine that your breath is being sent there, that it is opening up that area. Relax. Give yourself this moment to simply explore. What things that you do help to limit or soften the tension in your body, this pain or feeling of resistance? Often you will reach a place where you realize that the tension was in fact in your mind, being fed into a part of your body in a way that sent a message to tighten. Over time, this location can begin to hurt because of how recursive this feedback loop can become. A back can develop significant pain, hips might hurt, leg muscles might remain chronically painful or fatigued. In some cases, stretching gently can help, but in others, merely recognizing the feeling that is feeding the resistance is enough to short-circuit the feedback to that location in the body. Always, bringing awareness helps to limit the problems, but this is just a first step. If you can stop your mind after you reach the problem area and let your mind go blank, you will actually be in a much better position to intuit the problem.

Albert Einstein, who learned how to cultivate this form of intuition in his life described it precisely this way. He said that as long as his mind was busy with the problem, he would not find an answer, but once he let his mind go blank, the answer would just come to him. It turns out that this is what yogi’s and yogini’s do also. It is a cornerstone state for resolving all sorts of challenges in life.

By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here.

There is a hazard in going about this in too much of a rational way because if you do, you will tend to draw on previous experience, whereas this approach I am describing to you now is the opposite. It requires your mind to go blank. Imagine that you mind needs this silence in order to pick up the deeper messages which will arise through your consciousness, for surely this is how they do. By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here. As a Westerner, you probably have been taught to always have a busy mind. This is one big problem many of us have, which is that we tend not to cultivate more nuanced forms of awareness as our busy monkey-minds steal the show. There is a great benefit in allowing your mind to go quiet and to slowly learn how to cultivate this state of mind. In fact, all meditation practices have this as one of their chief goals. By quieting the mind you can more readily get to the substratum of awareness, to the Essential Self which tends to lie just below the surface. When you do this, it is much easier to delve into these problem areas and see them for what they are. It always requires some degree of discipline, courage, and self honesty.

Are your shoulders tight? Is your solar plexus hard as a rock? Do your knees hurt? In some cases, you might have some issues with your physiology because of an injury or something that comes to your through your genetic line. That can sometimes be separate from what you hold in a center, like say, your knees. And yet, the knees can go on to hold tension that is more than merely how you have been gifted in your physiology. There is a lot that we do with feelings of vulnerability to further impact a part of the body. It is worth noting what part is purely physiological and what part might be exacerbated effects of emotion or tension in that area. I once had a shoulder in jury that I made worse because of my protecting it too much. The shoulder joint literally froze in place, hard as a rock from inactivity. I had to learn to open up the injured shoulder and not be afraid to move it and allow it to work as it had before the injury. In time, I found that I was able to bring more flexibility to it than it had prior to the injury itself, which was an unexpected bonus.

It sounds cointer-intuitive, but many reflexologists and energy healers have found that certain parts of the body tend to be areas where quite specific feelings can get trapped. Have had self-esteem? Your root and your sacral region might need some attention. Is your willpower off or is it too strong? That could very well be an issue in the solar plexus. Feelings of being a victim? Goodness, your heart might need some work. If you take on too much of others’ stuff, you might find your shoulders literally tightening up with shoulder and upper back issues plaguing you.

The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems.

It is helpful to have a good body worker who can help to loosen those areas up, the open the energy channels so the old stuff can go and new growth and healing can take its place. The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems. If you find yourself going back to an issue in your past over and over, this itself is a stuck emotion and it will almost always have its compliment in the body somewhere. It is actually pretty amazing how much we can become aware of this stuck material if you take the time to slow down, get quiet, and then begin to listen and pay attention in a meditative way to what your body is telling you. In some cases, you might not be able to get to the source of the problem yourself. You might know that there is something likely stuck in a certain spot, but you have no idea how to let it go. Despite everything that you try, it just hangs on. This is where an energy worker can often help. Whether that person does acupuncture, acupressure, reiki, cranio-sacral, or similar types of energy work, someone who is practiced in energy work often will have the intuitive abilities to get to the problem in order to provide you with relief. It is my experience that truly great energy workers are rare, so you will want to look around and ask people about their experience.

It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too. 

With practice, you can use meditation as a way to take a quick inventory of your body state and see what is coming up for you. We are human, so we are prone to holding onto things, obsessing about something that upset us or not being able to let go of something as far back as childhood. We have lost the ability that most other mammals have for “shaking off” the tension or past emotion or trauma. This is why I recommend for really sticky issues a healing modality called TRE. If you use this term to search my blog you will find a number of posts on this method. It is actually quite simple to do on your own and has been shown to relieve symptoms of PTSD, and if done more intensively, it can eliminate the trauma stored in the body for good! It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too.

As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change.

While mulling this post, a quote came up on my social media feed in a group that I am part of. It was a person describing how one day they realized that they were free to feel anyway that they wanted about themselves. They described this feeling as being able to become like a butterfly, free from being tied down to old thoughts and feelings. One day this person suddenly felt free to feel fantastic about themselves, and so his life changed after that, forever. He now lives his life considering that he is this marvelous creature with so much good in himself that this now fills him with joy and wonder instead of being hemmed in and feeling bad about himself. This is a really great way to treat yourself, which is a form of self love. If you don’t love yourself, how can anyone hope to do similarly? Plus, you will feel really great as a result of shifting this way. For some of you, you might need some practice, but go easy on yourself. As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change. Aren’t you worth it? My best of luck to you…

Working Through The Centers

Imagine that overlaid on your body is an extremely fine webwork of energy lines, fine as spiders thread which create a vast jungle of pathways that align to organs and centers in your body that are physical that these lines help to feed the necessary nutrient of life force or prana to. You can't see or touch these lines, but you can feel them.  In fact, there are people, like myself, who can see the energy radiating off of them which can tell you all about where that person is physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It sounds a little wild to some people, but really, its only because you have never heard of it or experienced it directly for yourself.  But when you do, it is a game changer.  But you don't have to see this energy in order to work with it.  There is a lot that you can do with it that is healthy and beneficial.  
 
These lines that make up the energy body begin so small that they are difficult to see.  They go down in scale to subatomic since the energy force literally does feed right into and out of the subatomic.  Its a very very detailed system for carrying energy.  Most systems for understanding this only show the seven chakras that go up the core of the body.  In the same way that your vascular system goes from extremely small structures that feed into organs and cells, they get bigger and bigger like the branches of a tree.  Finally they go up a central main trunk, which is where the most obvious centers of vortex energy reside.  We call these "chakras" which mean "wheel" or "disc" in the Sanskrit.
You don't need to know anything about esoteric traditions to know and understand what a chakra is or what your energy is.  I can tell you that by becoming sensitive to energy fields that are in others around you and by feeling your own energy, you can learn right away FROM the energy itself to know how it behaves and how incredibly complex but beautiful it is. By learning directly with the energy, you can allow your own natural intuitiveness to bloom.  Most people feel they have to learn this from another person, but I say that you literally have the capacity within you to decode the information for yourself because it is what you are.  But absent that, a few very basic guidelines about how to reach a place where the energy of the infinite can move through you with calm and peace.

Blocks As Solid (Ideas and Emotions)
 
We like to think of energy as something that is not solid, but I want to propose to you that at the level of energy itself, the energy body has amazing structure and a kind of "solidity" to it that makes the lines that run through it that the Chinese have charted as "meridians" as incredibly consistent from one person to the next.  Far from being just a current or amorphous flow of energy, the energy that makes up our consciousness is amazingly structured.  It is out of this "solidity" that energetic objects can get stuck in the system that is our light body.  In the same way that food can get stuck in your throat, energy can be stuck, sometimes for years, lifetimes even, in your energy body.  The result of removing the block is that perception and awareness changes and the person feels much more peaceful and happy. 

But we are a cluster of thousands of these blocks.  These blocks are always emotions that were not fully felt in one way or another. Do you fear your rage? Do you find yourself putting it away or stuffing it down?  That breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend where you pulled yourself together and stopped crying because you were afraid you were going to just fall apart? Its possible that you were stuffing something down. Or how about that moment when you feared something that you did not understand...a feeling that just hung there like dirty laundry on the clothesline?  Afraid, we leave it alone.....and we shove it down.  By not fully processing any form of emotion, we literally create a kind of bottled knot of whatever that emotion is that gets stored in the energy body.  

The Body Thinks
 
There is a lot of evidence that I am finding that shows HOW the energy body and the physical body work together to either store or to release these blocks.  It has to do with the nervous system, the brain, as well as the current of prana and how it is polarized in the life force field itself. 
The light body is made up of two fields of energy that are joined and that replenish each other. They aren't really even "two" but two ends of a spectrum of energy that represents a kind of cosmic totality that makes it possible for you to then connect into the totality that exists beyond you.  This is the way this energy works, and is why you can feel the rush of the universe move through you in moments of nondual awareness (or as a continual awareness depending on the extent of your experience).  Two-in-one (energies) who then birth a transcendent third energy.  You see? All of this activity is felt as taking place not in the head but all through the body.  
 
What I am getting at is that there is already evidence to support that the body "thinks" and stores memory.  Now this stands in direct opposition to what we all have been taught, but what we have learned about our capacity to store memory is simply lacking.  Consider that the tissues in your body contain neurons, enough neurons in your gut for the brain of the average cat.  THAT is a lot of processing power.  What do you think our gut is doing with all of that?  What does your gut tell you? :-) So you see, the body has this capacity for dealing with memory, yes, and there is also a way to use somatics (body knowledge) to aid in releasing these memories.  Unlike the brain, the body seems to be more selective in the memories it stores.  It seems at this point in time, to be storing memories that it has had trouble with.  These can now be released once the individual is ready to release them.  And doing so is a saving grace because whatever the short coming was, or the fault or hurt or fear or rage, it all evaporates after releasing these blocks. 
 
In the work I was doing with my friend Alison who is herself awakened and a gifted intuitive, we found that even matter itself has a propensity to hold blocked energy.  I one experience that unfolded that I write about in my book, I describe how we unlocked an energy that had been blocked at a physical site that involved the murder of a man who had been drowned in a lake.  At the time, we did not know that a body had been found in the lake that we saw in our inner vision, but it had been discovered as the waters receded in what was then a dry lake bed (and his body was discovered along with some of his belongings enough to identify him).  We were able to describe a scenario that had a group of friends going out on the lake in the middle of the night with one of their friends not returning.  By simply recognizing the truth of this event, we were able to release it.  Six months after our encounter our local newspaper printed a story about the man who had died in the lake!  It was pretty amazing that events in the physical world would be so closely tied to our own encounter.  The newspaper story told the story of the four friends who took this man out onto the lake.  What we saw was that he was murdered for an elicit love affair with the wife or girlfriend of his friend. It was perhaps the reason why the blocked energy could be released....because someone was able to see what really happened on that night.  No one else would have been able to really see the events as they took place.  While we had testimony from his friends as part of the historical record, it is interesting how no one seemed to even entertain the idea of foul play at all.  Basically, it came down to four people all saying that their friend drowned. As long as everyone sticks to their story, then no one is the wiser.  
 
And of course, this lead the skeptical to suggest that I saw something that was not there, or that I was making it up or seeing a real event bu interpreting it to fit my own life where I felt as though I had been drowned. And I will concede that this is certainly a real possibility.  What suggests to me that we were seeing real events was because both Alison and I were picking up on all the same information, information that was in line with the story when it came out in the newspapers.
And this is where the second lesson in doing this kind of work comes in.  When we went up to this lake, we were simply going to see the sun setting.  But what unfolded was an event not unlike one that had taken place in my own life. There was something eerily similar to what had happened to me and to our friend who drowned in the lake.  While my life was not taken from me, my experience in my marriage was that I was being held underwater to be drowned before my own children.  It was itself a really painful experience that happened to me, something that people in the psychiatric community call 'Parental Alienation Syndrome."  One parent tries to destroy the other parent in the eyes of the children.  When it happens to you, it feels like the life is being sucked out of your body.  it feels like you are drowning.  It was appropriate that I would pick up on this eerie energy that was skulking about in those hills.  It was scary at first....sinister....but as we worked through the memory, I found that I was touching on a whole host of feelings that were in me as well.  By working with one block we were able to clear the other block. 
 
But what took place in the wake of this experience is also very telling.  In the same way that clearing a block in your body leads to a world of new possibilities, the area where this drowning took place also underwent a lot of changes in the years following our event.  Renovations were called for in the main buildings, a new arts initiative was called for with new people with progressive ideas coming onto the scene.  It was as though a new window opened for the people who lived and worked around this location.  To date, a slew of new initiatives have been undertaken on the part of the owners of the property where this lake is.  Its interesting to see how a location can be stuck for years only to see how it becomes unstuck, with a flow of new people, new ideas, and new possibilities entering the scene.  The same happens to you when you release these blocks, too!
 
Complimentary Blocks And The Law Of Attraction
 
Until a block is cleared, the block can be the basis of an attraction by others who are either similarly blocked or complimentary blocked.  What this means is that you either have someone who has had the same KIND of experience or someone who compliments the experience as in the case of someone who has a fear of being pushed, say, and you attract a person who seems to like to push you a lot!  THAT would be an example of a complimentary attraction.  A positive complimentary attraction would be somethign similar but in the positive, not negative.  In either case, however, the two people feel the similarities even if they are opposites, and these dynamics open up the flow of energy within us. They fill a role be it positive or negative.  These aspects of the other person can lay dormant for decades before expressing themselves, or they can be playing in the background all the time.  However, when you release this material, you release any possibility for this same kind of blocked material to ever be of any consequence to you in the future.  it is gone like a poof of smoke.  And this is why this kind of work is so important and life changing; you can change your whole life based on one big critical pivotal move in clearing your blocks in your body.  The result is that you NEVER feel energized by behaviors that would have effected you before.  It's as though your mind has been completely rewired when it comes to whatever hot button issue this block represented to you in the past.  There is a lot to suggest that this event does literally have the power to rewire the brain in seconds flat!  How's that for a speedy transformation?
 
It really is that fast and that easy.  When you have enough of these you realize that you can actually become a free person in ways you have never experienced before.

Ways Of Clearing Blocks
 
The best way to work through blocks is to pay attention to the ones that come up the most for you.  This is one most obvious way.  But these blocks may also be the hardest to clear away.  I am of the observed opinion that clearing smaller blocks is the way to go since it can loosen up material surrounding one block only to result in a kind of energetic avalanche with other blocks going at about the same time. 

You can identify blocks in your body by simply observing when you feel a sense of resistance or even pain in your body when you move a certain way.  Your energy body changes frequency from one end of the field to the other.  As a result, different emotions are stored at different places along this "column" in the body.  This is why some issues are stored in the root chakra than in the crown. The root chakra deals with nurture, abundance, and safety of self, for example.  When you feel a sense of resistance or even pain from tightness in a given area, you can gain a good bit of understanding about the block in general by thinking about where that block is located.  If its between two chakras, then it will contain aspects of BOTH chakras in some way.  
 
If you can identify the spot where the hurt or twinge keeps happening, you can point it out to a therapists who can work on that spot for you.  The types of therapists who can do this work will be people who do both energy work and body manipulations such as deep tissue massage.  Acupressure, acupuncture, reiki, and deep tissue are all methods that can help.  In pranayama yoga there is a lot of attention given to moving certain parts of the body, something called "locks" that help to move blocked material.  All of these involve vigorous movement of the part of the body where the chakra is located and, presumably, the blocked material.  Even placing your attention on the spot and holding it there through the day is one way that you can help loosen up a block in your body.  If it gets enough aware energy, it can trigger the release of the block sometimes. 
 
Chakra Clearing VS. Meridian Clearing
 
This is especially true for the chakras.  When a block is in a meridian line and not in a chakra, it seems to be harder to release it unless you are using acupressure or reiki, systems that actively move energy through the meridians of the energy body.  The chakras, conversely,  have a churning effect on blocks so that if you can use the chakras in meditation to swirl and move around a block, this can be very helpful because unlike clearig one small block in a meridian, a whole cluster of blocks can often be released all at once when its associated to chakra movement.  This is achieved by simply visualizing it and allowing the chakras to open fully and begin their movements, which often feel like you are moving or floating or even flying sometimes.  By placing your intent to clear the blocked material in a given chakra, the energy can begin to melt away the block.  
 
Clearing along a meridian line is more exact and may only clear one block.  It can also lead to other blocks letting go, though, and these blocks can be worked through by acupuncture, acupressure, and deep tissue most often.  The larger blocks can be "swirled" away through vigorous chakra movement and can sweep away lots of blocks at once, leaving a person feeling as though they are a changed person.  Many people who have these types of clearings describe feeling as though their body was being purged by a wave or by a force that sent a whole series of bubbles or shots of energy up along their spine and out their body.  Fundamental to all of this work is intent (willingness) and willingness to surrender at a deep level even into the body.  By reaching this deep state of vulnerability, you will also be reaching a deep state of awareness somatically about your body and your own body of feeling, too. Trust me, when the moment comes, it will be like suddenly seeing things in a very different way, the way perhaps that things really are instead of the way you have chosen to see them through the colorings of the particular block that you have.  Be ready to see things in a very different way, or to feel them very differently.  And remember; this is nothing at all to do with reason.  This is NOT about working through your emotional backlog rationally.  To try to do so is a trap.  Yes, reason can keep you OUT of the thick hot stew of your feelings and can help you to calmly identify what needs to be released.  However, you need to actually jump in the water with no fear or resistance to what you will find since this is a necessary state of mind and heart that you will need in order to clear the block. If you turn away, you are effectively saying to your body that its okay to keep the block in place.  
 
Some blocks go quickly.  Some take months, even years to dissolve.  A good rule of thumb is that if you have a strong investment in a given block, the harder it will be to rid yourself of it.  The more ego focuses on it, the harder it will be for the block to simply dissolve.

Part of prana is the energy body that expresses itself as a vortex, a kind of doughnut-shaped field of energy that is common to most anything that has an electromagnetic field around it.  It is this field that carries your consciousness and also the energy that feeds into your cells. When the energy is blocked, illness and neurosis can result. Life force is literally being squeezed out of you when it should be more abundant. 

When you remove these blocks you can realize stronger energy, a more peaceful state of mind and greater bliss that is not at the whim of whatever blocks are turning in you at the time. 
Until you are able to release a block, the block itself will be energized by prana in your body and it will remain active.  It can cause any number of problems, all of which will revolve around some kind of meme that is less than who you really are as a divine creature in earthly robes.  These blocks can cause no end of trouble for you.  There is little else work that is as important as this is. 
There are numerous ways to clear away blocks in the body.  One method is through energy work like White Crane Chi Gung.  This method of blending movement with energy work will aid in the removal of blocks throughout the body.  In order for it to work, it requires patience and persistence.  By working at it for weeks and months at a time, you can begin to see results.  Deep tissue massage by a practitioner who knows or understands about blocks is helpful.  Also, body movement is key.  The very act of shaking or massaging or moving the part of the body that is blocked can aid in removing material from it.  
 
Until you have cleared one chakra region, you will be dealing with what blocks remain in that region.  You will likely find that less obvious blocks come to the fore in your awareness now after having one bigger more obvious block removed.  Your attention can become much more highly tuned in this way to detect blocks in your system.  As this happens, you can also become much more sensitive to the presence in blocks in yourself and others if you are interested in learning a healing art.  I have dug so deep into myself that I have had some practitioners unable to detect the blocks.  One actually scolded me, saying I should not try to CREATE problems when there were were not problems there.  This practitioner was not able to pick up on this material, and I went on to have a number of clearings surrounding this region, so yes, there was more there, but not all of us will be as good about picking up on it.  While I have done the bulk of the clearing on my own, I have used a variety of methods to assist in clearing my system, and these have all worked well for me when they came along in my awakening journey (almost as if they were perfectly suited for the blocks kundalini was churning away on at the time!).  In many ways, I have been very gifted to have found a certain modality at a given time, as though the timing was perfect.  I was talking with my latest therapist about doing more work in the Fall recently as she expressed some surprise with the level of release I was experiencing with her work. I had to explain that while my being able to release blocks was different from her experience, it wasn't from my experience.  For many people, it seems they get a deep tissue massage and maybe loosen up some material a bit.  For me, I am headed into the final stage of releasing material, a process that has taken years of steady daily attention and work, and I am having flashes of past lives, of deeply held traumas from my ancient past. It seems the deeper I go into it, the harder it is, the deeper the shadows. New things come up, things that had not come up before.  Because I am dealing with the root chakra last, I am encountering a landscape inwardly that shows me all of the feelings that have arisen in me ever since I was a baby.  These are very old things, lifetimes in the making, and yet even so, I am here to deal them a kind of wonderful kind of death, which is in truth a redemption.  I let them free, no longer prisoner.  As this happens, I find that I experience emotions that I have long since pent up.  It isn't easy!  I am afraid I will offend someone, that I will get caught in the vortex of its energy while I am actively trying to clear it out!  But regardless, I go forward.  I go forward relatively alone because I would not want my anger and rage which was so-long suppressed in the root to be bubbling up with people near me.  How would I respond?  What would I say? In moments like these I feel like someone with terrets syndrome, afraid of walking into public places and calling the nice old lady at the counter something I shouldn't.

I know.  I hear that voice in my head, too.  "Oh really, fellah? You mean you might call an innocent old lady who did no harm to you an ugly old hag or a bitch or something?  Is that what you are saying?  Doesn't sound very spiritual to me, fellah....not very spiritual at all!"  This is of course where I give the voice in my head the virtual finger and turn back to what I am focused on.  You see, all of this is spiritual.  The sooner we get that, the better.  Some people will point out that calling someone names is not really spiritual, and I will say you missed the point.  This isn't about pretending to be something we aren't.  But the path to becoming what we know we can be is one that is involved in removing the error (shadow) that gets in the way of that perfection.  So its all about being real.  Its like being the Velveteen Rabbit. 

So don't be afraid of the shadow, I say.  That you get down into such shadows is cause for celebration.  Who on the planet has managed to get this deeply into themselves....to overcome the world?  That is pretty special and pretty damned spiritual.  :-)

This is why clearing blocks is so important; it is all about overcoming the world.  Would you like to see with new eyes?  With clear bodies, we can build a clear world.  And that is why I am writing to you today.  Pass it along!
~P.

Dealing With Blocks

Do you know what it feels like to be blocked?  I was almost two years into my awakening before I realized just how blocked I was.  Kundalini had begun its work and was loosening the material that had crowded itself around me. I thought things were getting better.  They were.  I was a changed man.  But awareness is a very relative thing. By being aware of how blocked I was, it led to still more removal of harder to get at material.

Certainly, the easiest material fell away first.  I could feel it. The more central material in my core, that was a different story.

I began the process of still-greater blockage removal by realizing it was there.  I began to attend a class that met twice weekly just a block from my home offered by a man who was an expert in his field. the classes cost me five dollars per two hour session. The teacher did this is a community service for the most part.  Lucky me and everyone else that took part.

The process that began in earnest in those classes, which utilized what is known as White Crane Qi Gung is the same Qi work that the Shaolin monks use.  There are many versions of Qi Gung, but all of it is based in movement. It means "energy work."  I can't say that any one type is better than another. My teacher, though, knew a lot about Chinese medicine and he was able to offer many different pointers to help facilitate the flow of Qi (Chi) through the body. The effect at first was that I felt awful.  I went away feeling clammy and more aware of how blocked I was.  This made it seem as though I was more blocked than I was.  I had merely become more consciously aware of these blocks.  I think it is important not to let yourself get down on yourself during these times of awareness.  The very fact that you are now aware is an important first step in removing the blocks!  Remember; where attention goes, so does energy, and if your intent is to remove something within,  the universe will conspire with you to see that this happens. Persistence is key.  So keep at it.

I found that the blocks I was now feeling felt like very real physical things. Around my heart there was this stony mote.  I could feel my heart scrape up against this hard surface every moment of the day.  This was maddening. It hurt.  It was hard. The pain was very real and I had no idea how to get it to stop.  In about a year in a fit of sadness, it all happened without any effort.  I felt the part of us that is known as the Observer step in and the rest was history.  It gave me just enough room to feel the forgiveness that was my own enough that this age old karmic thread was able to slip quietly into the ether never to return.  For as hard as the feeling was in my heart chakra, it did drive awareness in me in a 24/7 sort of way.  It wasn't until I gave up trying ot was at the end of my rope that the answer came.  It was swift, simple, and permanent. My heart center was then magnetized towards something very different. The effect that this had on my life was substantial. Events took a sudden turn in a new direction.  It was as though I was living in a different version of a world populated by people who were no longer attracted or affected by this thing that I had only a few days before.  Instead, a new story was unfolding.  Miraculous.

Movement has long been inculcated in the removal of past traumas.  There is a biological dynamic that happens where both etheric and physical are affected so that what lies in the energy body is also removed from the physical.  They work together so that the act of merely moving can loosen age old material in the energy body.  This material can be from lifetimes ago.  It has been observed, for example that nearly every culture on earth that knows ecstatic states (all of them actually) will tend to have a corresponding movement that goes along with it.  This can be expressed as twitches, jerks or "quakes" or shakes. The movement of the Holy Ghost is the same and Kriyas and mudras are an expression of this in the Hindu tradition. Aboriginal peoples will go into shaking fits as they reach communion with the spirits of gods.  Animals will shake after they have been attacked by larger animals all in an effort to "shake it off."  For more on this, search the archives using the search term "shaking it off" and you will find an article written over a year ago that addresses this very subject.

Staying physically active is helpful in removing blocks.  The Sufi tradition recognized the role that movement had in reaching higher states of being.  Sometimes it just FEELS good. But dance is another form that can also help, especially if you can dance ecstatically and get your body moving.  Will aerobics work?  That is a good question.  I do not see why not.  I have heard that pushing ones self physically can often break through energetic barriers to feel a deeper sense of self.  Runners often speak of hitting a wall that leads to a euphoria that give them the means to go further with less struggle.   Is this the same?  I can't say. I sure would be interested to know if anyone has experienced this and whether it had a liberating effect long after the event of the running took place.

Something about movement helps us to cognitively and emotionally rid ourselves of past issues that we have been holding onto for a while.  I notice that it gets me out of my thoughts and into my body, which is a peaceful place to be.  Here, with the mind silenced, you can simply be with the body as these small miracles happen drop by drop. This is not an intellectual pursuit, so keep the mind out of it.  This is much more a fundamental exercise.  Let it do its work without needing to know or understand.  It works.  That should be enough for your mind to chew on.


Part 2


There is another aspect to removing blocks that can also be very helpful.  I discovered the effectiveness of this as a result of my own work professionally in art.  I am a glassblower and my work is very physical.  It fuses grace, brawn, and skill in an act that is itself alchemical if you know how to let it work for you.  In these early sessions I found myself channeling different energetic aspects of myself.  Whenever I say "energy" I also mean consciousness. Always.  For energy is itself aware and you can feel into this when you know how to feel deeply.  A deep surrender ensues and all turns to bliss. 

But less than the movement used in my work is the power that creative energy has on us. In the same way that movement can help to remove old material, so too can the flow of creative energy.  Having said that, tantric energy also has the same effect.  All of these aspects all happen to have a lot of energy as a hallmark of their presence in your life. you can literally fuse them together in an intuitive way to make them work for you in a powerful way. 

So creative energy is very closely aligned to sexual energy.  It opens you up and allows you to feel yourself more deeply.  It leads you into that most beautiful part of you that awaits for that touch fo the divine that we are.  This can lead to a pulse of life so amazingly wonderful you will wonder how you ever lived without it. All you need to feel it is to become inspired. That is the core of all art.  But being inspired is also the same as being turned on sexually.  Both of these states have the same elements attached; we let go of the mind and begin to FEEL.  

When I teach my students in art and when I work in the studio in glass with people taking classes, I do everything I can do to keep thinking from getting in the way.  If you are of the opinion that you have to THINK in order to create; stop. Right now, put away that idea because it has no place in all of this.  Trust me.  In the same way that you let go all thoughts and just allow yourself to surrender in an act of intimate love, so too do you do the same exact thing when you are creative.  The feeling of the energy is different, yes, but not terribly.  We get excited and feel happy in both states.  We do this because it is what we are.  the act of becoming inspired is itself the shepherd to your core self.  Let it do its great work.  As you open up you can imagine or even feel those hard shells fall away from the outer parts of your being.  You become vulnerable, perhaps the most vulnerable you have ever been.  Let it be that way.  No one is here to hurt you. Be soft and feel yourself.  It is here that you are in this ancient current of the divine.  It is your soulfulness that you are bathing in.  You are infinite, and here you get to settle down into your pure essence.  Revel in that.  

Be like a child.  Stop feeling like you hve to put the brakes on everything.  All of these things are the very things that my students show me are their biggest hurdles and they have been mind, too. When I stop thinking about WHAT to do that it all just comes down like some giant download of information.  be a channel for this energy.  You will feel enraptured, enlivened, and renewed.  It will feel so good that you wont want to stop.  And why should you?  the challenge I p9ut to you is to learn how to channel this energy all the time.  This is what you are, and what you are learning to become. 

So use your imagination. What I do to get there is consider what would I make if I had all he money in the world.  No limits.  I think of how I once had a kingdom at my command and these people, whom I loved so much and who loved me, were willing to do just about anything for me.  I had such a rich supply of resources. We built temples in the forest.  We quarried stone and we decorated it with beautiful colors. I think back on those days and it helps me to realize that when i loosen up what i think is possible inside of me that the flow of inspiration just begins.  I have no thought in these moments. I have no idea what will come.  I direct it, yes, through my interest and desire, but I also am careful to allow accidents to happen.  I do this as a signal or cue to the higher self to step in.  My accidents are always full of discovery as a result.  I know this may sound haphazard to some, but because I intend it to be an entry point for the higher self, it quite naturally does.  It works because i believe that it can.  In order for it to work for you, you have to carry the same belief or else it might not work.   These events are very good for bringing in new ideas that I hadn't considered before.  There are simply no accidents in my experience.  But you have to be able to let go enough for this kind of magic to happen. 

As you do this work, you fuse your physicality with your energetic being in creating something.  In just the same way that making love can lead to creating new life, creating art leads to the creation of new forms of "life" which are embodied as ideas. We can quite literally break down old cognitive barriers that lead to new ways of seeing and feeling. When you still thought, you give this inspired moment the room to move in you.  Most great artists know this, but it is not taught as a methodology in schools. The students that have the most problem with art are those that are worrying about how it all will turn out.  You simply have to allow yourself to play and enjoy it, like a child does.  You CAN do this. Stop being so serious for a bit!  you do not create by ploughing seriously through the process but in surrender.  Your mind opens, your body and hands take a more receptive posture.  Then it slips through you like a small boat slips through the watery waves of your awareness.  First one, then another.  Here being in the moment, being present, is important. Then, still thought so you can feel your energy.  Just feel it.  You don't have to do ANYTHING with it. Just let it be for now.  It will get you excited.  This is the coming of inspiration.  It will show you that there is nothing to fear in letting go like this.  

The body gets in the act.  The two energies of the universal current begins to move.  the yin and yang merge both in your energy field and your physical body.  The brain, a mirror of the masculine and feminine aspects of the universe begin to work together.  The linear more masculine left brain takes the wildly imaginative yet almost formless right brain material and gives it a voice or a form.  The right brain sees the big picture and the left sees the details.  It sees the leaves and cell structures, but it gets lost in the forest.  the right brain sees the scales of form in great volume. Together, when they work perfectly, it is like tantric union except this is the creative act of birthing new ideas and forms in the world. Here, you are in your element.  I can hear the protestations now: "But I am not creative!"

Of course you are.  Maybe you cannot draw a perfect nude or a still life.  But you ARE creative.  In your own way, it is what you are.  It is what we all are. It is not an "art thing" that makes for creativity.  But I have a neat trick to help with that when it comes to art making.  I have glass. 

Ornaments, Parker Stafford

Glass is a material that, in its molten state, glows with a life of its own.  It is an amazing material.  it is also difficult to control, which for our use today is perfect. I use the molten plasticity of glass to keep people anchored in the moment.  This works!  Your focus with the glass is so total that your mind has the opportunity to go quiet.  People have told me that they like doing glass because it forces them to think of nothing else but the glass.  This is a lot like zazen or other meditative states. You can FEEL your energy in moments like these.  The other side to glass is that when you flow with it, it looks beautiful.  In fact, you can dribble glass onto the floor and it will look fantastic.  How can you go wrong with a material like this?  The simpler you are, the more its essence comes through.  Just let it do what it does naturally.  Colors are brilliant, and the glass sparkles and shines. Everyone who has tried glass for the first time have all been surprised with the beautiful results of the glass they have made at the studio.  This serves as a way to trim away all of those thoughts of their not being creative.  With glass anyone can make beautiful things.  It also doesn't need to be anything other than it is.  Sometimes an ornament winds up looking like a planet or world from some other realm.  It is interesting to look at.  Sometimes I just gaze at the ornaments on my own Christmas tree and see all of the wild details I had missed just a year ago.  The funkier and wilder, the better.  You see, glass can show you what is possible when creating blown forms.  

Nautilus bowl detail, Parker Stafford

In no other instance does it feel like Christmas then when we open the kilns where the glass we blew the day before we placed so they could cool slowly.  It has been over fifteen years and each time there is an excitement to see what is going to come out.  You'd think after hundreds of tons of glass made in my studio so far that I might get jaded.  But it doesn't ever seem to grow old.  Every day that has something waiting in the annealing ovens is a day where there is something new to discover. 

My work in the studio is designed now, when it comes to teaching others, to help set their wild horses free.  One moment we are doing a large sun catcher and moments later it becomes a ribbed tendril that get placed in a flower garden or hung with others as a light fixture or placed on a stake near a door to greet all who enter with its crystalline beauty. 

Nested Yin Form, Parker Stafford

My work in the studio discipline is not hard. It is deceptively easy.  It is about feeling into it.  The power of this is realized in how you feel as a result. It sounds like it is too simple, but it is in the simplicity of it that the effects are achieved.  It is in letting it happen to you that is the key.  When the mind gets out of it, something else gets into it.  Sure, you have to keep molten glass balanced on the end of a four foot metal rod, but in my work I am there telling the person what to do next. I don't map it out first in order to keep their mind out of it and simply engaged as it watches what happens as it all unfolds.  It is an approach that works very well. It is not always best for seasoned blowers who need to understand a complicated series of movements, but it is very effective for ferrying beginners through the process without building anxiety over the many steps or things they will be doing. In this way people tend to maintain a form of engagement that is very good for what I am seeking to help them achieve.  Just feeling good about making something beautiful itself has a very positive effect on a person. Fear goes away.  Creativity does not do every well in the presence of fear.  Like love, creativity and fear do not mix.  One closes you down, the other opens you up. 

Absent having glass as a moving modality for healing, you can do anything that lights your creative fire.  It can literally be anything.  Writing, drawing, dreaming, singing, dancing, writing music, or rearranging the house.  Working on the car.  Any act can be one of creation if you know where to look.  Then, cultivating a life that is passionate and engaged will keep your energy moving in you.  You can also observe those times when you feel suddenly bereft of creative fire and consider what it was that happened inside of you in those times that caused that to happen and learn to avoid that kind of thinking in the future.  I can tell you that my experience is that anything that causes me to pull back from life in anything less than a full embrace is what kills my creative fire.  Sometimes it is just a stray thought that turns in me that my ego get to work on and then after a while a very small thing turns into something big.  There I go again! I remind myself. I then just get myself worked back into a state of energetic excitation and suddenly the world glows with a new life.  This is a moment by moment cultivation of the very force of life in the day to day.  This is learning to bring heaven to earth. It is, after all, a worthy cause.