Specialness

Most of my life I craved specialness. I was not always aware of the desire explicitly, but I often fantasized about my true superhero nature and existence outside of the painful confines of my physical reality and its systems of control. I was desperate for escape, desperate to seize my true talents and abilities and soar above the authorities keeping me stuck, controlled, and often in trouble. I certainly wanted to be validated for my uniqueness, but I also wanted freedom - freedom from school, freedom from parents, and freedom from my own painful thoughts and feelings. It appeared that specialness was my only ticket to freedom and unless I was able to impress my gifts on the world, I would never be free. However, my personality dynamics and behaviors often elicited a different kind of specialness, leaving me feeling singled out, isolated, and unworthy. I was deeply sensitive and often misunderstood for my reactions, which could be quite threatening, aggressive, and generally disrespectful when challenged. I could not pay attention for the life of me, often caught daydreaming of my superhero life - my real life - and my traumatized nervous system often betrayed me with compulsive ticks, vocal outbursts, body tremors, and hyper-excitable energy. My desire for specialness appeared destined for failure. I was special alright, special in the worst way. I was held back a year in pre-school because they did not think I was ready for the trials and tribulations of kindergarten ( I do not remember the exact reasoning, though I know I annoyed the teachers by never sleeping during nap time and counting the ceiling tiles out loud instead). I managed to develop hateful relationships with some teachers, choosing to react spitefully when I sensed any form of ill-will directed my way. I was, for better or worse, hyper-attuned and hyper-sensitive. I knew what people were feeling and I could feel it in my own body with little separation or boundary. For these reasons, I despised school but I could not articulate why, the energy just made me feel terrible, insecure, and worn down. I did not belong there, I belonged in the skies where I was free to fly across the world, being of service to those in need, and returning to my cottage in the clouds with all the video games I desired, and of course my superhero girlfriend, “Jessica.” I am not exaggerating when I say I quietly held onto this fantasy of my true life until it was steadily and heartbreakingly stripped from my soul somewhere in my teenage years.

Not until years later did I discover that my fantasy was not so much a fantasy after all, but a calling to what I would one day birth into the world. I may not have been destined to fly as a superhero, but I was destined to get free and to invite others to see the possibilities for freedom. My path led me to choose freedom from limited conditions, from pain, and from all systems that did not align with my highest truth and power. I came here, to this life, to own my power and release all guilt and shame around who I am and what I have to give. The fantasy played out with some twists and turns as I entering the all the places that elicited my wounds, my trauma, and my feelings of disempowerment. Just as the hero must be tested to show their courage, we are all invited into relationships with the very people, places, and things that trigger us the most so we may transmute the fear and break free from the constraints, both inside and out. For a while, I sought all sorts of distractions for the mind and body while stuck in these conditions before I was able to confront the stories of my life playing out just as they had in those early classrooms - in trouble, breaking rules, feeling outcast, never feeling good enough or smart enough or lovable enough, and eventually becoming deeply sick.

The deep desire for specialness from a place of lack and unworthiness was simply re-enacting old patterns of rejection and the very unworthy energy it was coming from. Rather than align with my own truth, I was unconsciously choosing to remain stuck in these powerless positions while letting the negative thoughts and emotions boil over. I was not actually taking steps to honor my specialness, my power, and my health by going toward my own Light. I kept trying to fight for specialness in the very places it would never be found, in comparison to others’ stories that were never my own. The thought of my own path was rife with fear and trepidation, hence why I kept attempting to fit into others’ boxes, others’ careers, others’ vision of happiness and fulfillment. In my fantasy, the escape hatch from this misery would simply appear as would the opportunities, but on this planet we call “Earth,” the Vision requires aligned action to become a reality. Rather than stew in the negativity, resentment, and judgment of myself and others, I had to let go of the constant uphill battle to somehow get free in the eyes of others - my supervisors, my teachers, my peers, my family, and all other human beings I had given authority over me. I had to truly become my own authority and look to Spirit for guidance. Once I discovered a way to discern my own truth and my own path by continuously checking in with Source and my own Heart Space, it became clear I could finally begin letting go of this push for specialness within systems that only mirrored back feelings of aloneness and smallness. Only when I chose to step outside the boundaries and conditions I had been fearfully and resentfully living within and create my life on my terms, did the specialness begin to feel more like wholeness and unconditional love in my uniqueness under the eyes and care of Great Spirit. In my own time and space, I could finally see the physical sickness begin to lift alongside the sickness in belief and thinking that had been playing out a false idea of specialness based in fear, ego, and comparison rather than simply because it is my nature to be happy and free. The truth is I needed no validation to honor who I was, who I am. This is the true freedom, the true path to specialness.

We are all here to expand and to see the possibilities. There is no other goal, directive, or orientation. Expansion is the galactic mission and when in a channeled state, a higher vibrational state, the mission is clear. I invite you to release all wounds around specialness, around what you feel you need to give to or get from others, it is of no consequence to your higher order. You have orders straight from the highest authority - Spirit - and from this authority there is only guidance based in love and support for your uniqueness and highest vision for life. Your call to expand is your only priority. Specialness has nothing to do with it. Yes, you are special in the universal alignment of things, you are here for a reason, on this planet for a reason, incarnated into this life for a reason, and a part of all things, equipped with the gifts and capacities uniquely tailored for the manifestation of your vision. But this has nothing to do with other people or how you “measure up.”

All measuring systems are used to determine a kind of “specialness” based in ego, in scarcity and competition, which is a grand illusion. There is no specialness based in comparison to others or to anything else on this planet, let alone the universe. This is simply the ego’s attempt at survival based on the belief that you are not already worthy, already whole and already loved. In direct connection to Spirit, you may live with the deep knowing that your path is aligned just for you and in perfect resonance with the order of all things. You are part of the wholeness and are entirely whole within your Self. No other kind of knowing is needed, no other kind of “achievement” or accolade, no other kind of specialness. Relax. Your ascension is underway and all beings, all entities, all dimensions are supporting you now. Keep listening and tuning in for further orders, while also listening to the needs of the body. Your connection to Spirit is special and tailored just for you. The needs of your body are special and tailored just for you. You are the giver of specially attuned, hand-made care, compassion, and consideration for your body. You have within you the capacity to nourish, relax, and support your body and mind as it grows into your highest expression, expansion, and mission here on Earth. This is all very special, indeed.

Knowing Your Nature Pt. II

When you begin to peel away the layers of your experience, you start to get clear on what is not you. Surprise, most of what you experience and identify with is not you. Only your awareness of being can be directly experienced. All else is perception, positionality, belief, sensation, emotion, thought, or memory, all of which is interpreted or filtered by the conditioned mind. But still, you must play the game of human relationships and circumstances so you can understand your “personality” a bit better. As you detach from the expression of your personality, it becomes easier to see in broad daylight with less reactivity and impulse to hide. Often we showcase the personality we believe is expected of us and rarely showcase the raw underbelly of who we are, the vulnerabilities we carry around in fear of being exposed, holding up this conditioned personality like a house of cards. The personality is conditioned based on several factors, including what I would call your “nature.” By this I mean your natural tendencies, gifts, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and desires. You have a nature as well as an aligned purpose to play out in this life if you wish. Through the wringer of childhood, your nature gets poked and prodded and your brain attempts to protect you based on survival wiring. You people-please, hide, or lash out, all to protect this nature from rejection, for if you were to reveal your nature and be rejected, the beliefs of separateness, abandonment, and unworthiness would appear true. The acts of protection that guard against your deepest vulnerabilities are nothing more than attempts at survival and love, but they play an important role as you peel back layers of what you are not to discover more of who you are and desire to be. Through this peeling process, you learn relative truths about your personality in the relational game of life that you play while you are here. Often we need to experience the feelings of separateness so we may grow through them and understand our deep, abiding connectedness to source and all things. The game of Earth is rife with separateness, confusion, shame, and apparent rejection until we see that no amount of poking or prodding could untether us from our nature and from the ultimate Nature of all things.

The true nature of this life is not relational, as many therapists might claim. No, this life is about you and only you. All of this is a reflection of you - your family, your peers, your circumstances. It is, in fact, all about you! The common misconception is that this statement is somehow “selfish” or grandiose. Contrary to this belief, the fact that life is all about you amplifies the realization that everyone else is playing the same game. Some misinterpret this game as meaning we must compete since everyone must be chasing the same limited prize. The real spiritual truth is that there is no real competition and there is more than enough of every experience to go around. Since all of life is based solely on your own willingness and readiness to be free of limitation, no one else can actually stand in your way other than to serve you as an invitation to expand. You are here to play out various experiences that you desire and which help you learn and grow. There is no shortage of educational resources. All of life is your medicine and your teacher. The idea of selfishness is based on scarcity, lack, and need, but from this perspective, life is abundant and so are you. All you need is here for you and all is provided. You choose to have relationships that you can enjoy and learn from, but the lessons come from within. The love you feel from romance, family, or life partners is a form of self-pleasure. It is the pleasure of recognizing your love for self through the eyes of another. All love is self-love. Again, this is not some form of narcissism, which is based in lack and perceived scarcity of love. True self-love is based on the recognition that all relationships are mirrors - windows - into your capacity for love of self. If your capacity is constricted, your relationships will mirror this, though if you say “Yes” to the healing path and begin to expand and remember this capacity for love of self, you will call in the necessary role players in your life to mirror this vibrational frequency and reward your growth.

With a clearer understanding of your nature, you also get clearer on the nature of others, which allows for greater compassion and less judgment. Some look to astrology, psychology, or other frameworks to go deeper into the realm of who they are on the level of personality. This can be very effective, though can also lead to the same identity boxes and traps that limit true freedom and expansion in every moment. Knowing yourself is not about directing the personality, but being willing to not know what comes next. Similarly, you may try just as hard to understand others and the world to make sense of things, keep you in control, and safe, but others and the world are merely reflections of you, and since you cannot figure yourself out in this way, you will not be able to “figure out” the world either. The best you can do is remain curious about who you can be and how you can show up in the world in every moment, while welcoming in whatever decides to show up with open arms. Question everything that does not feel good or represent the highest version of yourself and continue to be curious about what is blocking your Light in every moment. To know your nature is to be in alignment with your bliss, so simply notice when it is not present and what stands in your way.

As you begin to peel away the layers of approval, validation, and success as defined by others, you will naturally reveal a more naked truth about yourself and what you have come here to do in this life. As it turns out, your nature does not need to be chased, hunted, or achieved, it is simply there waiting for you upon settling down and getting quiet. From this space of presence and quietude, the energetic body will awaken and lead you closer to a more aligned vision. As the Light of your awareness expands, so does your capacity to dance and play with the personality. You can watch it change, blossom, and shed its skin. You may come closer to your childlike nature, the simple joyfulness of being that you once had before it was layered over with fears and expectations. Your personality can evolve out of this conditioning to become a purer manifestation of your natural desires, and through this expression your experiences will begin to reflect back who you truly are and desire to be in this human form. All will simply fold into or scaffold what already lives within and what is waiting to be discovered. So relax, your truth is not going anywhere nor does it live somewhere out “there.” It can be accessed at any time by coming home into yourself, into your Light, into your awareness of Being. All that needs to be triggered will be triggered. All that needs to be let go will be let go. All that needs to be known, expressed, and danced with can be surrendered into the flames of existence, trusting they will be returned to you as the bright embers of a magical life.

Knowing Your Nature

We so badly want to know who we are, to know our human design. We pursue various means to learn who we are, such as western psychology, astrological birth charts, various relationships, journaling, numerology, trendy new frameworks (like “human design”), and much more. This appears to be a natural consequence of our self-awareness, our awareness that we are aware and, therefore, the impulse to discover what this human experience is all about. The ancient Greeks said, “know thyself.” Through our journey inward, all outer circumstances become invitations to deepen the wisdom we are here to gain about ourselves, and other people become the characters in our story serving this growth and learning potential.

The journey to knowing our nature comes with the tantalizing trap of “figuring it out.” We naturally assume that if this human experience is about knowing thyself, we must come to a conclusion at some point. Consider the cliche, like most things in life, that knowing your nature is about the journey and not the destination. The moment we believe we have fully realized our nature, an insidious limitation emerges which prevents us from remaining fully open to the range of possibilities for how we may show up in the very next moment and the moment after that. If we begin to act as though we “know” ourselves, we close off to the wisdom from beyond the thinking mind, which reveals itself only when living on the edge of uncertainty, riding the wave of mystery in Presence. The ultimate dance we do as human beings is to journey inward into our nature while letting go of expectations of what we will find. The journey itself is the understanding and to remain open to all that may reveal itself is the everlasting practice. Be watchful of closing down further opportunities by jumping to conclusions about who or what you are and how your are meant to show up in this world.

I am a self-described seeker and love to meet with people who have various gifts and ways of accessing spiritual knowledge beyond the veil, shining a light on the dark corners of our psyche, soul, and life path. But the most tantalizing trap is then proclaiming, “I have finally figured it out! At last, I know myself!” In fact, I just recently met with an intuitive medium who spoke with a great great grandmother of mine, an angel watching over me and guiding my path, who bluntly proclaimed, “He always wants to know everything!” I fall into the trap just as much as anyone else! My thinking mind would love to see it playing out in front of me, alas, that is not what is meant for the human experience. You and I are invited deeper into the heart space, the feelings consciousness, to dance and play with our feelings, our intuitive wisdom, our desires, and our creation energy. We are invited to call in visions of the future loosely, with no attachment to how it all unfolds, only with unbridled excitement for the ride. We discover who we are through experience and experience comes through action, through making perceived mistakes, through trial and tribulation, and through receiving all that this mysterious world has to offer us. Like receiving a wrapped gift, you are not meant to ruin the surprise. Revel in the delight of not knowing and see the unfolding of your life as a continuous unwrapping of a gift so special it does not matter how it happens. If you surrender to the process, the delight may come not from knowing the final answer but from the mystery itself where all is possible at once.

Let us deconstruct the famous line, “know thyself.” The word “know” may not refer to knowledge as we have come to expect it in the thinking mind, but rather to a deeper layer of understanding emerging from wisdom beyond the mind. This kind of wisdom does not necessarily show up conceptually or with a map of precisely deconstructed contents of your personality, but instead may contain a simpler and more profound knowing of ultimate Truth, Reality, and Self that can only be known through deep, present-focused, loving awareness. Only when the ego and its pursuits are quieted can we gain direct access to the grander Nature of things, including our role in it all. The second word “thyself” does not necessarily refer to the personality you are familiar with, love or loathe, and continuously attempt to improve upon little by little, but rather to a deeper truth of who you are, a child of the Great Family, the ultimate Source of all things, of which Jesus himself proclaimed to be the son of. We are all the sons, or children, of this source. To know thyself is to proclaim as Jesus did that your ultimate Self is a branch of the Great Spirit Tree. From this wisdom, you do not necessarily get to figure it all out or know each step of the way, but you are invited into a much deeper peace by welcoming in whatever comes as an invitation from the roots of this tree to be the most expansive branch you can be. If you allow yourself to be completely free, free from all constraints of who you must be, you open to possibilities beyond what the limited ego mind could ever know, and you discover the even greater gift of not knowing.

You certainly have a “nature” that is unique to you and your unfolding in this life, but it is a fool’s errand to chase the complete picture until the final bell has rung. Better to trust your nature will be revealed in time, through the journey itself, rather than in one complete flash of insight. Our time here on Earth is about change and growth. If we knew the complete picture, our time would be over. Mystery is always part of the earthly equation. Dance loosely with what you have come to “know” about your mind body experience and stay open to the possibility that your inner most identities and core traits may be more flexible than you thought or may flip themselves over from time to time to reveal the underbelly of a more dynamic essence. Remembering your wholeness is not about forcefully bringing every part of yourself under the microscope for examination. Trust the parts you are meant to see to reveal themselves when you are ready to see them, and for the shadows to be experienced as readily as the Light, without attachment or judgment. To be seen, to be known, and to be understood reflect the underlying desire for validation of who we are and to know we are doing it “right,”that it’s okay to shed the conditioned shame and blame around who we are. But we do not actually need to be understood, by ourselves or others, to trust that if we only surrender to the path ahead of us, we will be guided true. It is when we force certain constructs or ideas about ourselves into play that we complicate things and resist the natural flow. Once you see through the need for your emotional protections and defenses, you realize it is less important to know and to be fully known than to embrace the mystery of all that can be. The bodymind you are occupying for this trip around the sun is not your truth anyway, let it play the role it believes itself to be while knowing there is always more to the equation, always space for greater awareness, and always another layer of existence deeper than the one you currently inhabit. Remain a mystery to yourself until your last breath. No need to rush, all will be delivered when you return home.

Raising Your Frequency

What does it actually mean to raise your frequency? You may be reading this and feeling deeply skeptical of such “woo” sounding terminology, joining words like “energy” and “consciousness” amongst the growing dumpster pile of words in your mind that no one has bothered to define in a concrete way for you. When left to abstraction, you no doubt exile these concepts from your own growth and healing practice because they have no resonance or root within your being and cannot be integrated. The difficulty with such concepts is that they are experience-based, meaning they are not meant to be words at all but subjective experiences you know from within. However, words are the best form of communication we have until we may evolve into telepathic beings or some deeper form of transmission. Until then, I will use my words to create an invitation for your experience of “frequency.”

Eckhart Tolle speaks to the “inner body,” the energy field within that acts as a portal to your Beingness. This is what I mean by frequency. Your energy field, or the vibrational source that gives life to the smallest biological substrates of your being - from your atoms to the complexity of your nervous system - is the source of your presence and dictates what you give energy to. Ask a physicist and they will tell you that all things vibrate, including you. Your vibration and the vibration of all things carries different frequencies, which allows it to manifest in different forms, such as an apple or a chair. On the spectrum of human beings, your frequency is determined by the energy of your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, which all carry incredible power and dictate your personal reality, as well as the attraction of certain people, places, and things into your life. Your thoughts, also known as your thinking mind, are like a signal constantly being projected out in the world. If you are giving all of your energy to your thinking mind, your frequency is inevitably lower because your thinking is largely fear-based unless you already have a strong commitment to the light of presence and are very watchful of your thoughts. When left to its own devices, your thinking naturally reacts based on your core beliefs and evolutionary conditioning. Your core beliefs, until heavily examined and dismantled, contain all of the traumas and limitations that you inherited and absorbed based on life experience and ancestry, and your evolutionary conditioning is rooted in a survival mechanism always scanning for danger and threat. Your emotions are then created in the body based on the frequency of these beliefs and thinking. The whole package is what makes up your ego or personal identity. Are you starting to see how your frequency or energy field is quite important? It is the essence of all that you know yourself to be and acts as a powerful magnet of attraction for all of the things you are constantly holding onto, feeling burdened by, and projecting out into the world.

Your thinking mind does not have the capacity for true presence, therefore, it does not have the capacity for true love. Thinking will always be wrapped in up past or future dilemmas, dramas, and stories to be solved. As Tolle also says, it is possible to reclaim thinking and to use it as a creative force; however, this can only be done from a place of presence within the inner body. To raise your frequency, you must first become familiar with how it feels. You must glimpse the presence of your energy outside the confines of your mind in order to have an experience-based framework to draw from. One way of doing so is by simply placing a hand over your heart and bringing your awareness to this energetic space of feelings. Within the heart space lives all of your present feelings and deeper emotional truths about your state of being. Your emotions are not your ultimate truth either and can lead you astray if you give too much power to them, but they will inevitably bring you into the present to access a higher frequency and awareness of being. Beyond the thoughts and emotions lives an even deeper awareness of your energetic presence. In this place of awareness, beyond thoughts and emotions, you can amplify your frequency rapidly to states of pure bliss. In meditation, you can practice coming into this space as often as possible and feeling the body fill up with light. You can practice seeing light or the color of your choice fill up the body and amplify it by imaging you have a volume dial to turn up. Feel the visual, energetic, and vibrational sensation of light filling up your body. The practice of this exercise will tune your awareness to the energetic field within and support you in seeing the illusory limitations of your mind and the confines of your physical body, allowing you to see beyond them or, more accurately, recognizing you already exist beyond them.

You must commit to bliss. The words “commit” and “surrender” are the same here. It is not about doing, it is a commitment to non-doing, to being with yourself devoid of distraction. Only in this musical space of stillness, between the notes of life unfolding in the outer world, can you tune in to the frequency of inner being. What may first appear to be tension, boredom, or even panic, can and will reveal itself as bliss. When you commit to non-doing and surrender to the practice, you find yourself freer than you have ever been in an instant. Each time you stave off the pains of impulse and desire to distract yourself or fill your time or your belly, you are rewarded with the bliss of not wanting or needing anything outside the bliss of being. The more time you spend in this space, the more timeless life becomes as you emit a higher frequency and vibration of presence to all who come into contact with you. Have you ever noticed the strong frequency of presence in trees as you go hiking through the woods? You can feel their stillness. You are not crazy, you are actually experiencing the high frequency of all plant life, which remains eternally present and rooted in the Now. I am not naive. I understand bliss may not seem readily available to you, you may not recognize its frequency yet and have too many blockages pervading your view. It is okay. I say it here merely to bring your awareness to the possibility of bliss. See if you can get your mind to open to the possibility of such a state of presence, which is one step closer to the experience.

Your frequency is sacred and subtle and it must be protected from distraction and distortion to access its true potential. The more sensitized you become to the state of Presence, the more you become aware when you are out of Presence, out of body, and steeped in the suffering illusions and dramas of your mind. With this sensitization comes the increased awareness of what people, places, things, and habits are no longer serving you. It is okay if you do not feel motivated to act on this awareness now, but with increased sensitization you will soon be guided to make more aligned choices for you life. Some may consider it selfish to always be so focused on your own energy, your own light, and your own presence, while putting up energetic boundaries to keep negativity out. However, committing entirely to the energy source within you and not letting anything stand in your way to divine presence is actually the highest service you can give to the world. In holding this highest vibration, you become a beacon of Light for others and you commit to holding this Light amidst uncanny darkness in the dramas playing out around you. You refuse to get sucked in to others’ stories of the world, which is merely a reflection of their own ego and thinking mind. I am not saying you dig your head in the sand. Read the news if you like, stay abreast of worldly events. Just consider that the energy of information you allow into your being influences your personal reality. Consider there is no objective truth and you simply are what you create and you create from the source of energy you allow in.

In order to maintain this commitment, you may be guided to let some people, places, and things go in order to create the optimal environment for Light within and without. You may appear to others to be withdrawing into seclusion or isolation at times. Do not despair. Aloneness may be temporarily necessary to harness the power of your own light, free from intrusion, so you may eventually re-engage with the world with a high enough frequency that cannot be toyed with or disrupted no matter the circumstance. It takes deep practice and commitment to re-sensitize yourself to your true nature and glimpse what is timeless in order to hold such a frequency in the face on constant worldly distraction, pleasure-seeking, and destruction. If you never remove yourself from the circumstances, you will never give yourself the opportunity to see what is attainable and, therefore, what is worth committing to. As you glimpse the eternal bliss available to you and others, you become the seer beyond fear - the visionary - for all that is possible in this world, and you become the beacon of Light that others attract to, as well as the lens from which others who are ready to commit to their own healing paths can see through.

I am a beacon of Light - this is my service to the world and my highest commitment. I invite you to share in this light and become your own beacon if you so choose. Our missions will naturally play out differently, with different rhythms and harmonies, serving different aspects of the world and composing a grand orchestra of service. Eventually, our unique vibrations and tunings flow back into the music of Great Spirit where there is only one note - the note of All, the note of Love - and we dance together again as innocent children, cleansed of our individual duties and differences, and the song never ends.

True Knowing

True knowing does not from the thinking mind nor can it be understood in this way, which only addresses conceptual information. True knowing arises from a place deep within your Being and comes only from your own witnessing experience. This experience exists only in Presence, only in the Now, where all experience and all reality unfolds. Once the moment has passed, so does the knowing, and it is just as important to let it go as to let it in. In moments of true knowing, the experience is happening within. You do not actually experience anything outside yourself. Though you move through life in a variety of circumstances, stories, and dramas, you are only ever directly witnessing an experience within. Therefore, true knowing may also only happen within. You may take in information from wise teachers or books, but these things only act as vessels or invitations for you to experience the frequency of their wisdom within. If a student only learns to repeat the information they have learned from teachers or textbooks without ever discovering the resonant source within them, it cannot be said that they truly know anything. Of course, many individuals can repeat information they discover from others or find on the internet, and they can hypothesize and argue theories of philosophy, but true knowing is beyond the intellectual mind and cannot be argued. In fact, it need not be discussed at all.

Since true knowing is only experienced in the present, it must continue to emerge in every moment for one to continue knowing. Once the moment of truth has passed, there is no more knowing to be found and in its place faith remains. True knowing and faith are two sides of the same coin. Once you experience the knowing, your faith is complete, and once the knowing becomes ever-present - in other words, once you become ever-present - faith is no longer required. Similar to how scientists must continue to examine a hypothesis, resulting in proof after proof of its validity, the spiritual inquirer must continue to investigate their experience in the Now. Relying on past hypotheses or past witnessing experiences may breed strong conviction, but it still only amounts to faith based on experience that is not occurring now. Knowing in the way I refer to it now contains a different level of truth - A truth witnessed, known, and spoken to only in the present.

Knowing IS experience, the two are inseparable. Most confuse knowing with cognitive or perceptual information you take in through the mind, but this information is not experienced as much as it is conceptualized in the abstract. A thought can never be experienced in the Now because to have a thought means you are one step removed from Presence. Even experience through the physical senses and emotions are one layer removed from true knowing. Physical symptoms and emotions rarely convey the whole truth and are often products of a survival-based nervous system wired for danger and threat. These signals can be useful for survival and to clue you in to the state of your body and mind, but they do not contain answers to your spiritual reality. Yes, the physical body is beyond the intellectual mind and may provide a more accurate reading of your present state, but knowing is a reference to the “inner body” as Eckhart tolle calls it, or the energetic body beneath the physical realm.

If a spiritual teacher is speaking to an experience they had 20 years ago, they are not teaching about Truth, they are teaching about past experience. There is nothing wrong with teaching from past experience and the students may still learn something about the nature of reality or themselves in the present, but the teacher cannot be said to be speaking from true knowing unless they are tuning into Presence and speaking from this place. To speak about true knowing, one must allow wisdom to arise from the energetic body, the present state of being and the same place intuitive wisdom arises from. The reason for this is simply because the present state of being is all that truly exists in the realm of Spirit. All else is a game derived from the mind, which may still present “facts” in the way we speak to information through language and understand logically true principles, but spiritual truth is of a different nature and can only be known through subjective inquiry within the self in the Now. All other attempts at knowing are games of the mind based in concept. Eckhart Tolle spoke to the self-concept or identity of “spiritual teacher,” of which he was playing the role as he spoke presently. However, he acknowledged if he were to hold onto this identity as he left the stage, it would quickly become a fiction of the mind and an ego-based identity. True identity, as in true knowing, is based in a present unfolding of function. If you are playing the role of teacher, it is fair to consider yourself a teacher, but outside of this function you are invited to let the identity fall away just as you may let the knowledge fall away that emerged in that prior presence. Be weary of grasping too tightly to what you know as well as who you are.

Conviction happens in percentages and the more witnessing experiences you have, the stronger your faith and belief in the truth. So there is no need to be in a state of true knowing all the time. Faith is a necessary part of the process, otherwise one would rarely have the courage to commit to such a process of knowing without stepping stones guiding you forth. I have strong enough faith in my own spiritual path to continue embodying such truths as I see them, though there are still plenty of doubts, fears, and hesitations that arise in the mind. When I experience a moment of true knowing, I rejoice, and when the moment passes, I do my best to return to faith. Easier said than done of course! Yet, as the witnessing moments of knowing grow larger and more frequent, faith and conviction increases until there is no further need for faith at all and the moment of knowing is eternal. This is what some may refer to as the enlightened state.

Watercolor Canvas

I have recently been playing with watercolor paint. One early realization is how to be patient with the paint as it bleeds and dances with water on the canvas, filling up space on its own accord and in its own rhythm. When my impulsivity gets the best of me I muddy things up and clutter what was a beautiful balance of color and space. If I let the paint and water take its natural course, it goes where it is meant to go with its own form of intelligence and intention. The same applies for life. I have spent the better part of the last two years clearing out the muddied waters of my canvas, the overlapping colors and frequencies that no longer serve me, that I was too impatient to sit with and see they were no longer dancing according to my natural rhythms, if they ever did. Creating space is a beautiful gift of quiet and peace, but you may first notice the engines of the ego revving up, desiring up the newfound emptiness as quickly as possible. Just as my hand gets antsy to fill the page with new splashes of color, so does my thinking mind attempt to fill what was once occupied by racing thoughts, regrets of the past, and projections of the future. To dance with this in-between space, the space we call the “Now” and the only space that truly exists, is to see a natural rhythm to your life hidden beneath the mind’s attempts at escaping it. Though it can be challenging to sit in this empty space, it is a vital part of the creative process as well as the healing path. This is where true inspiration hits, in the present. This is also where confusion and doubt surface when you do not allow the thinking mind to make sense of your life in every moment. The irony is that the mind cannot are sense of your life because life can only be experienced directly in the now. What you and I come to see and believe is the concept and structure for our lives is merely muddied water covering up the delicate colors of who we are in this moment.

I have been practicing presence in my life more than ever before, aided by all that I have stripped away recently, and in doing so I have spent a lot of time alone. I have danced in the fire of my aloneness and my comparisons to the busy lives of others, while also noticing what begins to happen when I settle down into a more natural rhythm. An aliveness grows in moment-to-moment experience that was previously dulled or deadened by all attempts to fill the space. The space of life. The thinking mind has a strong pull, just like the desire to paint the canvas. For me, the journey continues to be one of faith that the canvas will be filled in no time, in fact it is quiet easy to fill your canvas, or your life, in an instant. To do so with truly aligned colors, people, and opportunities is a different practice altogether. Lay down the brush. Leave the painting. Walk around. Breathe. Get quiet. Wait for the next stroke to feel inspired, then act without hesitation. This is the way.

I always struggled to truly play as a child and this connects to a trauma lineage on my mother’s side. Her and I both experienced growing weary with the idea of play, as if it were an exhausting thought to feel impassioned about something. My child brain could not seem to allow for the freedom of inspiration to emerge and instead had to always be controlling the show with its doubts, fears, and compulsions. What looked like play was in reality an imprisoned compulsion playing out with my toys, attempting to resolve some inner conflict that could only be done so with exacting measures. Finishing play with my toys was more like relief after a hard day’s work rather than a spiritually uplifting endeavor. I seemed to be wired for either work or fatigue, not knowing how to engage my energy creatively. After school days, I would often come home and fall asleep, and when playing sports I never seemed to have as much stamina as others and always suffered from anxiety. I struggled to come alive. I did discover music as an access point to spiritual connection, but quickly found drugs to be a shortcut and spent much of my young adulthood abusing this shortcut to appear like play but ultimately leave me worse for the wear. It was also telling that while playing therapeutically with the young children I worked with at the clinic, my fatigue symptoms would activate and nearly debilitate me in sessions. My body was telling a story of my trauma that I had not been listening to, one of conditioned fear around true freedom of expression. For those who struggle with fatigue, recognize that if you do not truly know how to play, you do not truly know how to rest either. So the body is always “on,” always activated, always scanning for danger and threat. We are all invited to awaken the freedom of being within, a natural life source of energy more powerful than all external stimulants.

As I step into true play for the first time, I can feel the deep impatience that arises in my bodymind, the projections of how “effortful” or “wasteful” it will be, when really these are all illusions created by the ego. The mind is threatened by stepping into such a free-flowing and creative space, possibly thinking it has nothing to offer or it will not be good enough or simply nothing will arise. And yet, other parts of me are deeply creative, loving and yearning for music and writing and dance. I previously took mind altering substances to allow this space inside me to open, though I have now been graced with the experience of what is possible to heal and open within the self, to connect to the natural rhythm within. At times, my mind may say “nothing is happening,” and yet in this practice I am discovering how to live a truly inspired life. If I can learn, or re-learn, to play, I can inject this ecstatic joy into all areas of my life - relationships, service, writing, creating etc. Much has been written about the typical response to trauma being one in which individuals are unable to play, particularly traumatized children. It is a classic example of the nervous system’s attempts to keep you safe and out of perceived dangerous waters. Creativity is the opposite of control, it is letting the water run and trusting it wherever it goes. So we learn to be like water, as Bruce Lee famously said. I invite you to join me in this practice. See your life like a watercolor painting. Add some splashes here and there and then let it run, let it take its natural course and guide your way. You do not have it alone, in fact you cannot. Your life is a co-creation with all that is, with Nature, with Spirit. Practice surrendering to this dance and teach your mind and body that all is well in the flow.

The World of Systems

In the game of life, everything adheres to a system, an interconnected network, organization, or framework based on a core set of beliefs. The systems you participate in may appear obvious or hidden but they are there and you willingly give your power to them. Systems function based on belief, coordinated ideology, rules and regulations, collaboration and shared mission, inclusion and exclusion, expectation and demand, power dynamics, sacrifice, and other forms of control. Without awareness, your conditioned mind naturally participates in a system of some kind. Systems form from the moment you enter the world, typically via the family of origin - the original system - which then leads to systems of schooling and education, career, sports, friend groups, hobbies, internet cultures, politics, and any other identity you can imagine. As long as you see yourself as a relational being, you will participate in a relational system of sorts. Even in aloneness or perceived isolation, you may fall prey to thinking you are “outside the system,” though this still gives power to the system you are “outside of.” Within the self, there is also system - a universe - all its own, often filled with the internalized notions, conditions, and beliefs of who you are and the external systems you have identified with. Some may refer to this internal system as an internal family containing “parts of self,” such as the child self and various other emotion and belief based parts. The internal system may be comprised of “parts” from all along the lifespan, as well as parts from ancestry and karmic inheritance.

The game is best played when you expand awareness of all the parts you are carrying and all the systems you are subscribed to. Consider being subscribed to several newsletters and receiving several emails a week that you never intentionally signed up for, and rather than take the time to unsubscribe, you choose to ignore them but are still heavily influenced by their materials. Your subconscious mind is filled with these subscriptions to systems you are aware of or not. A subscription to a system is neither bad nor good, it is simply how the mind and its conditioned beliefs work. In the beginning, you are signed up for systems largely not of your conscious choosing, though over time you discover more agency in your ability to choose and how to engage in the world. You may engage with certain systems, like a romantic partnership or a company, for a period of time until your mind expands and it no longer fits. You may ebb and flow with your family of origin, at times enjoying the role you play and at other times needing to make space for your own independent growth. This is natural. However, many choose to stay in systems too long out of fear of lack, of being without, or of being alone. Systems can provide feelings of safety, comfort, and of being known, while also leading to the ultimate illusion in thinking Love lives within a system rather than within the essence and awareness of being the Self.

The Self is without a system, it is One and Oneness is the true nature of reality. At this level, there are no more systems because there is no more need for connection. Think of an external hard drive that has no internal moving parts. It is simply one entity and needs no wiring. But on the level of human experience, you appear to be a separate being and your ego is convinced of this separateness. The separateness is ultimately an illusion, though it is certainly quite convincing to the human mind. Therefore, the human experience is filled with an interconnected web of layers you choose to participate in. Now, I am not advocating to be system-less, unless this feels divinely guided and aligned for you, all I am pointing to is the home within you that already has the highest authority and system within it. The goal, from my perspective, is to engage consciously with systems out of your own love, integrity, and choosing, rather than out of unconscious force, lack, and perceived need. As much as the systems you participate in appear mandatory, they are not. You do not “need” to give away your power or to compromise your Light and your Truth. You are invited only to surrender to what is within you.

As you practice coming home to the Self, the ultimate source of knowing within you and one part of the “system” of God or Spirit, the more you can transparently see systems you and others are constantly creating, participating in, and attempting to receive love and worthiness from. From this Self-knowing, you will find less need to be a part of any other system and more freedom to play the game freely. The ego mind does not understand this and it craves validation from any and all external systems. Yet, no system will ever be enough for the ego because the ego has no true home. No system will heal the ego because its foundational belief is one of separation. No partner, no family, no sports team, no artist, no company, no political identity, no nation, and no world will ever close this illusory gap. The truth you may discover is that there is already a universe within you. On the surface, your mind may carry around a landfill of internalized identities, continuing to add to the pile in hopes of one day being filled up. But what are you filled up with? With all of this filling of illusion and junk, you have only blocked off access to the true universal source of Oneness. It is perfectly fine to enjoy your connections to these external things, though you must know that these attachments cannot ultimately heal the illusion of separateness. Only you can heal you once you begin to awaken to the truth: there is nothing to heal, there is no separation. The truth lies in knowing that beneath the level of systems, there is no need for interconnection. There is only Oneness. The Source within you is the same Source that flows through all. Therefore, the striving for connection outside the self, and to play the game according to others’ rules, is based on an illusion that cannot be fixed unless you can glimpse what is already here. You are never alone.

In my own journey, I wrestled with aloneness and isolation for many years, consumed by the illusion of separateness. I am still overcome by this conditioned belief at times, though I have more Faith than ever before. At the root of this condition is fear. This should come as no surprise since fear lies at the root of all conditions, and the only way to heal the fear is to recognize it for what it is - a conditioned belief predicated on an illusion, a powerful one at that but still only an illusion. I am now entering a phase of the journey which involves community building and opening to receiving Love from others. My heart has begun to open drastically to allow the Light source in others to see me, receive from me, and pour into me. Only through the recognition of the Light source in me have I been able to open to the source in others. Only through the recognition of my own service have I been able to open to the service of others. You may think these last few lines contradict what has been written thus far. Did I not just say there is no need for connection and relationship? That we are all one? Let me be clear, I am grateful for the opportunity to build community, and yet, community does not make me whole. Relationships are a part of my journey into the Heart but they do not make me whole. I am already whole, as are you. Relationships are tools to heal what needs healing within. They are a medicine and you cannot avoid them. Avoiding relationship, as I have done at times, brings its own slew of issues. Relationship is not to be chased nor to be avoided, it is simply a part of the human experience to be learned from. And the ultimate lesson is that you are already whole. It is only from this place of wholeness that wyoue can build a community of wholeness. Community does not fill any holes nor does it patch together parts of people. Partly-filled people create partly-filled communities. Only in the knowing of your true source can you cultivate the knowing of a communal source.

If you want to recognize which systems you give power to, simply ask yourself what is important to you and why. Even the spiritual path is a system and a game. Why are you pursuing it? I am in pursuit of ultimate joy, freedom, and alignment with the highest vision for this life. These are goals that may appear to require certain action steps in relationship to various systems, though as I pursue such goals, I can recognize that the pursuit itself is where the awakening happens. There is no real destination outside the Self. All relationships I build, abundance I create, services I offer, and recognition I receive are only tools to remember the worthiness I have within me all along. If this is not recognized, no amount of accolades or external conditions will provide it for you. Of course, I still fall prey to the ego at times and desire the goals in material form. But I am reminded, time and time again, these goals can only ever be experienced within and are, therefore, independent of what is ultimately brought to form. If you want a big house, a nice car, and a big family, great. You can have those things and so can I. Just continue to ask yourself why you want those things and if you are giving power to these things to fill you up. What can be taken away, lost, or destroyed, including the physical body itself, will never be your truth. Your true source of Joy can never be stripped from you. I still pursue the world of form in my vision because that is the canvas on which I can paint, but the true goal of painting is only ever to bring me closer to my truth as a painter, as a creator. I manifest only to see that I am a manifestor. I love only to see that I am love. I seek no other reward other than this knowing and conviction because there is no other real reward to be gained. The knowing itself is the only prize. From this place of knowing, all is well and all is provided. People come and go, planets come and go, even universes come and go… but you remain. Your awareness. Your consciousness. Your Oneness. Practice recognizing this truth so you may move through the game of systems with ease. You may choose to be of service to various systems without needing them or depending on them for what already lives within. To know your system-less source is to discover boundless love and to be free of conditions. Choose wisely.

A Journey of Faith

“Journey” is an interesting word to use on the spiritual path because, in the moment, you cannot see where “it” leads. In the moment, the doubts and fears may say there is no journey here, only dense woods. In the moment, the mind cannot perceive a path unfolding, or a higher vision taking root, or a master plan at work. In the moment, there is only presence and all stories fall away. Even the spiritual path itself is a story and can at times become a blockage to faith in presence. It is up to you as witnessing awareness to direct your mind to the presence of being, which comes complete with a deeper knowing and faith of a higher vision. Each moment presents the opportunity to see beyond your circumstances and know that you are guided by an untouchable Source within. Inevitably, the immediate circumstances will look to the ego mind like dead-ends, U-turns, and “Do not pass” signs. You are invited to surrender to what is here now and to the deepest intuitive knowing that pulses you forward. Simply ask, “What is meant for me in this moment?” That is all that is required. And when all logical calculations fail to provide any evidence to continue onward in this way, practice letting go even further. See how far your mind will allow you to fall and what happens when you truly begin to let go of the controls.

In the present, you may begin to discover what is meant by the phrase, “the journey is not linear.” What does it really mean to hear this? Well, if you were to jump to a specific page and paragraph of a chapter book, you likely would not know where you are, right? Assuming you were unfamiliar with this particular story if at least had not read it in a while, you might be perplexed by what is taking place in that scene. Even if you knew quite well how the story began and were assured of the ending, you would not necessarily recognize what is taking place in that individual moment and how it serves the whole. Your life is quite similar. While you may understand how you have gotten to this point and may even feel confident as to how it all unfolds in the end, in the present moment all story falls away. Just as you might do in the random chapter of the book, your thinking mind will attempt to hypothesize as to where you are on the journey. Are you in a current ebb or a flow? Are things about to get darker or lighter? How long will this current experience last? Maybe some days you are motivated by an energetic source to accomplish many tasks and see concrete evidence of your journey taking shape, while other days you cannot see even one step into the future and you are laid up in bed while your body rests. In both experiences, surrender is the only way.

The freedom of will exists only in the freedom to surrender and to forgive. Some days it appears you will get everything you want, and yet, you are not really the one making such decisions. Your ego will be humbled as many times as needed before you are ready to receive the rewards coming to you. Even as your life begins to change on the surface, you will be continuously invited to let go of attachment to anything you appear to “earn” since all is really provided by Spirit. Remember you are not the “doer,” you are the “surrenderer.” Therefore, you are not the one “making” things happen, which includes getting more of the things you like as well as less of the things you do not like. Your one true miraculous capacity is to marvel at the experience as it unfolds and practice clearing all blockages - all resistance - in its way.

Marvel at the body when it wakes at 4AM ready to face the day, and marvel at it just the same when it requires ample rest to ready itself for further transformation. The thinking mind will always be attempting to make sense of where you are this point in the story and what will come next. However, you cannot skip to the end of this book for it is not yet written, and pausing at any point to try and make sense of things will only cause you to suffer. Like pausing a roller coaster amidst several twists and turns, you will be disoriented and unable to discern right side up from upside down. You are only ever meant to see the fullness of the presence itself and to practice faith that all you need is available to you in the present. Thinking will only cloud your view and fill your mind with hypotheses and theories from an outdated framework, never fully caught up to where you are now. Even if your mind is like the analytical audience member who correctly predicts how the mystery movie ends, it will not bring you relief because you will never know until it happens. The satisfaction of the prediction will only serve to distract you from the real gift of faith. Let go of attempts to locate yourself at sea. You can only see where your are being led in hindsight because in the present, as in ultimate reality, you are timeless, at once both part of and separate from all stories. At times, you may feel the momentum building and trending upward, while at other times, you may feel yourself barreling down into the abyss. Embrace both with your one true capacity - surrender and forgiveness. This is the practice of Faith and the one true mission on your journey to the Light.

A Guide to Manifestation

How do you really get what you want? When does the universe join in to support your vision? How much can you really “do” for yourself and when can you simply surrender to the larger forces at play?

These questions have accompanied me, painstakingly, on my journey to unfolding the highest vision for my life. Many times I have wondered what I could be doing to further these goals. However, whenever I found myself wrestling with how to make things happen faster, there was always fear present. The conditions of fear are the antithesis of manifestation. Fear closes down vision, projects destruction and failure, and paints the world as seen by the lowest vibration states and trauma conditioning within you. It is a good general practice to only envision your life when you can do so from a place of playfulness and amusement. It is wholly unhelpful to attempt to see beyond your circumstances when you are mired in fear and doubt, though often these are precisely the times when you will make the effort to do so. In these moments, your highest priority is to see through the illusion of the fears, to care for the body, and to assure the child self that all will be well. You do not need to force a powerful vision to appear when your foundation is rooted in darkness. First you must ride the wave of darkness and practice tools that help soothe the mind and guide you gently back toward the Light. The universe is bringing you these emotion states to clear out and create space as this is the only way for true clarity in your vision to come through. You may feel like you are spinning in circles, visiting brief windows of clarity and excitement only to feel the windows close and the fears creep back in. Remember that you are never moving back to the starting point; in fact, you are spiraling forward and each time you revisit old patterns of fear you are unearthing another layer that is ready to be released. This is the way. Through these cycles of ebb and flow, a growing faith and conviction is taking shape below the surface of the journey. Similar to how you may look at a years-long tracker of investments and see your portfolio rise and fall in day-to-day analysis, but overall you may draw a trend upward. The upward trend is your faith and ultimate conviction that you are on the right path.

Your mind will so easily forget the miraculous things that have taken place and gotten you to where you are now. In times of despair, confusion, and disarray, come back to these moments of revelation where Spirit poked through the veil and revealed itself to you. Challenge the ego mind’s attempts to chalk all of your successes up to coincidence and remember your Truth - you are always supported and all is provided. Remember that all aspects of the journey are celebrated by the Spirit realm, both the light and the dark, the challenge and the celebration. Both are required and equally valuable to help clear out what is no longer coming with you and make space for all that is. Contrary to the ego’s preference for control, you often do not receive your gifts on a timeline of your choosing, but when you have arrived at a place of readiness in accordance with the larger forces of the universe. I continue to be challenged in this area! Once you see the signs that something you have worked for is arriving, it can be challenging to stay in the natural flow and rhythm. Similar to receiving presents as a child on the holiday of your choosing, your ego mind, childlike in nature, does not want to wait! But when the moment does arrive, you will see with crystal clarity the blessings of the journey, for it is true that the journey is where the growth took place. The gift itself is simply the stamp of approval. Over time, you will require less stamps of approval and the conviction will have grown strong enough to replace all lingering fears and doubts in the true creation power within you.

Ease & Grace

How easy can it really be? How graceful can you float through this life? Your thinking mind would certainly have you believe otherwise as the virus of the ego digs its heels in. But as you walk this path, you will naturally move through different levels of awareness and relationship to the concept of ease and grace. Initially, you may be in a place of desperation when the initiation for spiritual pursuit dawns on you. I would love to say the desperation and despair is not necessary, and for some it may not be, but without some humbling inner experience, you would rarely choose to sacrifice the addictive delights of the ego despite their unfulfilling nature. One you are able to move past the point of initiation and access glimpses into the possibilities for health and healing, the ego may sneak back in to trick you that you “achieved” something and, therefore, must “work hard” to retain it and continue improving. It may take credit for crawling out of the darkness when really it was your intention and your awareness of a deeper source of wisdom guiding you forth, like a wave you suddenly found yourself on carrying you to shore. Eventually, if your intention is pure and commitment true, you will be met with a greater awareness of the rhythm of the universe as it shines a spotlight on the illusion of the ego’s perceived controls.

Personally, my journey has looked quite like this example thus far. Out of desperation, I began opening to healing opportunities my mind could literally not see prior and was not willing to see for fear of vulnerable exposure. The ego was holding on so tight to the need for protection that I was convinced I must do things alone, in hiding, and my suffering was locked in place as a result. Through the rhythm and timing of the universe, my awareness expanded enough to see a new array of choices in front of me accompanied by a renewed sense of readiness. As the cycles of pain and hopelessness ran their course, a deeper awareness eventually grew fed up and was open to change. The voices of my loved ones started to make their way in and I began to listen and heed their calls. From this intention, support arrived in the form of healing opportunities that I was now ready for. In a place of desperation, hope itself can feel scary after the roller coaster of so many prior failed attempts at lasting change. However, once the walls begin to crack and the light pours in, a powerful source of motivation arises deep from within and the wave of life source energy itself is revealed.

As you first begin to see glimmers of light, hopefulness dances and sparkles before you and there is immense gratitude and awe for what your life can actually be, as well as relief for what proves to be temporary. However, what may happen, as it did for me, is that the ego will subtly slip back in and say, “Now that you have seen the light, you must work for it.” It is true that much of your life may need to change as the habits, behaviors, substances, thoughts, emotions, people, places, and things keeping you stuck will no longer be welcome on the journey you are embarking on, but the idea of “work” is very misunderstood, especially by the ego. You may be guided to take action for yourself in many ways, though this does not require the stress that the thinking mind is wired to believe. You are less in control of such happenings than you think. All you have really done thus far is say “Yes” with intention and the universe has taken care of the rest. You may be convinced you are the “doer” because you changed your diet and your habits and made other visible changes, but what led you to those changes? What gave you the courage to do so now? What allowed you to see what has always been right in front of you? You are the witness to your life and with awareness you can direct your intention. From there, Spirit takes over and you ride the wave. If you resist, you will suffer. If you attempt to control the path, where it goes and how long it takes, you will suffer. I do believe in free will, but the freedom lies firmly in the choice to resist or surrender. The more you let go, the more you will begin to see how magical life can be and how all is provided. The more you choose to “work” and stress, the more you will reinforce the limiting beliefs that it is required.

You are not the cause of your healing just like you were not the cause of your suffering. The language gets messy at this point so if you feel confused by the words, just let them wash over you like waves. No need to decipher the exact meanings, it will become clear in time. At the level of awareness, you have the capacity to witness and direct your mind. When you notice the mind getting caught up in old tricks of stress, limitation, fear, and judgment, you can choose to surrender. You can choose to listen to what the heart is carrying instead, thereby discovering newfound opportunities arising first within and then without. Remember the inner creates the outer, so when you are ready to see, or rather feel, the vision for your life unfold, it will happen. You do not need to know exactly what will happen, you only need to consider the possibilities. Manifestation is not making something to look exactly like the picture in your mind, but using such pictures to allow for what is meant to show up.

On the surface, you may perceive various new opportunities arising for healing, such as a different type of practitioner or modality or medicine, while on an energetic level you have simply expanded your awareness enough to see it, welcome it in, and integrate it into your being. While you were suffering, those opportunities were still present but hiding out in the light while you were trapped in the dark. As you are gently guided to the light, you slowly release attachment to the ego’s demands and allow space for your true essence to shine forth. Suddenly, the sky brightens and there are books and podcasts and people that show up in your life to educate the mind, heal the body, and take aligned action. Two years ago, the possibility that I would be pain-free, often eating one meal a day, plant-based, and living on the West Coast would not have been visible to me. As you take steps toward a brave, new vision, each obstacle represents a limiting belief ready to be released.

The challenge for most of us is to see that you are not the “doer” in this. The trap is laid well for the ego since as you begin to heal you may feel validated and want to take credit for all of your hard work. Others may not understand at first but they may come to applaud you for pulling yourself out of the dark. You deserve the applause because you are worthy and you have said “Yes” with intention to the healing path. However, the specifics of what needed to be called in or which opportunities arose was never truly in your hands. Therefore, when the ego mind inevitably attempts to take over and convince you that further “hard work” is needed, I invite you to practice once again releasing attachment to this illusion. Just like you were able to let go in your lowest moments and surrender your journey to Spirit, you may now continue to let go and surrender, only this time out of love.

Success in various forms may unknowingly invite the ego back in to play pretend controller for your life. Abundance may flow and the ego will gleefully step in and say, “I did that!” Practice coming back to the heart space where you will find ease, grace, and gratitude for all that is provided for you. All that is asked of you is the intention, the “Yes,” and the courage to see beyond current circumstances. From there, allow your guides, your burgeoning intuition, your expanded awareness, and Spirit itself to lead the way. The old way of doing things, of wrestling with your thinking mind and all its doubts to come to the “right” decision is no longer valid for you nor is it welcome at expanded levels of consciousness.

With dedication and practice, you will grow clear and confident in the natural flow of any situation that arises, never again giving your power away to the stress and doubt of needing to “figure things out.” Until then, enter each situation as it unfolds with as much grace as you can muster and remind yourself that this, too, is an offering and a medicine from Spirit in disguise. Even the disappointments, the perceived failures, and the things that did not work out as they had in your head are all opportunities and lessons for you to heal and ready yourself for what comes next. The uncertainties, twists, and turns are actually celebrated in the spiritual realm. Though they appear to last forever in linear time, they are but a blip on the scale of your awakening. In fact, your circumstances are not really changing, it is you that is expanding to see your true nature. While I was on the road with no destination in sight, I often felt deeply lost, vulnerable, and frightened at what I was really allowing to to guide me forth. But I knew in my heart of hearts there was no other option. I chose to surrender and continue on despite the clouded vision and limiting beliefs mirroring my current circumstances. Only later could I realize that such deep levels of surrender alongside the fear was necessary for the conviction to emerge. If I could have faith that I would be guided to find a place to sleep that night or that my car would not run out of gas or that all my belongings would be safe and that I would eventually be provided a home, I could have faith that all other perceived issues would resolve as well. When I could see that my body really could heal, I had faith that my mind could as well. One experience of conviction leads to another until you do not require any further miracles to convince you of the truth, all is provided.

Though the current circumstances of your life may look troubling, have faith that just below the surface your awareness is expanding and the spiritual realm is celebrating you. External rewards are nice as they support your conviction, but the true reward emerges when you discover it can all unfold with ease and grace beyond your wildest dreams.

Sacred Heart

While I was traversing the California coast without a place to live, throwing caution to the wind, and allowing Great Spirit to guide me, I found myself in the most beautiful place I had ever been - Big Sur. I discovered a hermitage that essentially functioned as a silent retreat with Christian monks holding daily prayers on the side of a cliff that felt like the edge of the universe. On the cliffside, each guest received a small personal cottage with a view that transplanted you firmly into the rhythm of Nature, birds flying in and out of your personal outdoor space filling the stillness with song. Each cottage had a name, mine was “Sacred Heart.” The name resonated with me immediately as I had known for some time that my ultimate mission was to come into the heart space. I had lived for so long in the thinking mind, the egoic mind, and it caused immense suffering. I knew that my thinking plagued me but had very few tools to combat it. As I trained clinically, I was confronted with information that acknowledged emotions but it was all still talked about, interpreted, and spoken to from the intellect. Not until I found modalities that pulled me kicking and screaming out of the thinking could I fully appreciate what it meant to live from the Sacred Heart.

When you begin to move into the heart space, you find yourself closer to true feelings and the truer essence of what your mind body experience is navigating in the moment. The thinking mind cannot tell truth from falsehood so it is often stuck regretting the past or attempting to predict the future, often fueled by fear and the gnawing attempt to survive as a separate being. However, what is not false can never truly survive, so the ego mind goes on and on with no resolution in sight, clawing at attempts to prove its worth when there is none to be found. As long as identity with the ego and your thinking is caught in its web, you too will be clawing for worthiness in all the wrong places. You must choose consciously to bring your awareness down to the heart space as you slowly begin to recognize you are not the damaged thinking.

You are not your feelings either but they represent a more accurate portrayal of what is meant to be experienced in the present. The heart space is always present focused and always guides you true. If you need to be with grief, loss, or other challenging emotions, the heart space will lead you to them. You can attempt to escape into thinking but this will only perpetuate the stuckness. Other forms of toxic emotions like fear and anger do not arise from the heart space. No fear exists in the heart because fear is not really an emotion, it is a survival protection against emotion. Fear is a function of the nervous system which is wired from birth to scan for danger and threat, training the brain to avoid such possibilities. Since the ego is based in the illusion of separateness, it is threatened by anything that makes it feel unworthy or unaccepted by others. Recognizing the falsity of such threat and danger allows you to move through such blockages and into the heart space.

When I refer to the heart space, I do not mean the physical organ but the energetic chakra. The feelings in this space are not the same as temporary waves of emotion that may need to pass through. Feelings of love, gratitude, and peace are timeless, just like the heart space itself. If you find yourself confused and overwhelmed, you are coming from thinking and from fear. Forgive yourself for this and remember that the heart does not promote tension or stress and always welcomes you home. All feelings in the heart space are beautiful, even the ones that bring tears, for allowing the vulnerability to emerge leads to growth and healing. As you move through the sticky feelings, you gain access to the true power of the heart, the grace, love, courage, and power. As you open, you allow yourself to tune in to a more natural rhythm and pace, a flow more aligned with universal intelligence. From this energetic heart space, you allow intuitive wisdom to guide you and to lead the way. Thinking supports heart as opposed to the other way around.

To lead by a sacred heart means to eschew the ego mind and let go of chasing, wanting, or striving. The heart knows all is provided and abundance stems from within. From this place, you find the courage to lean into perceived challenges with ultimate faith as Spirit flows through you. With faith, all experience becomes a medicine for highest growth and understanding. As the heart space expands, the light of your consciousness expands with it and your true voice emerges, a voice unencumbered by the complaints, judgments, and fears of ego. Practice coming into the sacred heart, learning the lessons meant for you, and the guidance leading you home.

Be The Unreliable Narrator

For those who have always felt deeply misunderstood and used every last breath to convey your Truth, this piece is for you. For those who have systems, friends, partners, and family members always asking you to explain yourself, to convince them of who you are and why you behave the way you, this piece is for you. You will never fully understand the truth of who you are because the truth is beyond “personality.” In fact, the truth is revealed only once the personality has been stripped away long enough for you to glimpse it. However, you will always wrestle with this personal self - the ego self - with its attractions and desires and validations and failures, its rights and wrongs, preferences and distastes. To know the Truth, you must be willing to accept that none of these things really define “you,” and in order to know thyself you must actually surrender to not knowing this personality. An easy example of this is comparing the 8 year old personality, whose likes included Pokemon, Harry Potter, and Cap’n Crunch, to the 33 year old personality, who does not eat cereal, reads different books, and has no more Pokemon cards (though would still enjoy the cereal, still thinks Pokemon is kind of cool, and definitely still loves Harry Potter… the books not the movies). Was I more myself at 8 years old or now? As you grow closer to the Truth of who you are and strip more of these layers away, your personality will change, your body will change, your mind will change, and others will not understand if they ever pretended to in the first place. Maybe you were more easily explainable as a child, though this is doubtful, but at least you were more easily observed. As an adult, you are expected to explain yourself, including all of your actions and intentions. But if you are honest, you cannot. Not really. You cannot even explain yourself to yourself. You have always been a mystery and a mystery you shall remain. This is the glorious truth of existence and the opportunity it presents - to embrace the mystery of who you are once you understand what you are. The “who” is an illusion while the “what” is an essence. Animals in the wild do not go about explaining themselves, trees do not list off their accomplishments and hobbies for validation (Ex. “anything but woodworking”). They simply are. What happens remains a surprise in a world full of surprises, while the essence of what they are is always known.

So much of the desire to understand is the human ego’s striving for control. If you feel you understand your self, your partner, and your family, your ego feels safe in the notion that its projections of these people align with its expectations. You may rely on all sorts of labels and conceptualizations - psychological, medical, and otherwise - to paint a vivid picture of who you and others are, but if someone deviates from these descriptions, as they are wont to do, the ego freak out! “How could you?! It is like I do not know you at all?!! WHO are you?!” There is no answer for such a question. As “The Who” sings, “Whooooo are you? Who, who, who, who? I really want to know….”

As long as you hold onto this question, your thinking mind will grip tightly to the answer until it is forcefully stripped away from you. Or if you do not know, you will struggle in your not knowing for as long as it takes to let go. I invite you to release this question and to let go of this construct altogether.

Be an unreliable narrator in the story of your life.

Be as curious and awe-struck as the reader, for you are both the writer and the reader. The miracle of existence is that you get to read the story as it is written and can be just as surprised as the audience! What a gift. You can apologize for your offenses and mistakes, celebrate your accomplishments and victories, lament your losses, and love and cherish your connections, just as everyone else does… all without attachment to a full understanding of who or why. The true complexity of who you are encompasses all of the interconnected universe of which you are a part. The context for your being is significantly more important than the content. You exist within concepts of time and space, which, in Ultimate Reality, fall away just as easily as your personal self. So let go of this need to explain yourself. There are an infinite amount of reasons and possibilities for the way that you are. Allow others’ avalanche of judgments to slide off of you like the rock fragments that they are and forgive them for only seeing pieces on the mountain. The recent motion picture Everything Everywhere All At Once attempts to capture the true context of ultimate reality with the framework of a metaverse. Attempting to track the happenings of this will scramble your brain in the most absurdist fashion. In this experience, all meaning falls away because the human brain is not equipped to make meaning out of everything all at once. Rather, the brain can only focus on a few things at once; like a movie frame, it brings certain things into focus and allows others to slip into the background. Over time, as you embrace more of your essence, your true nature may begin to shine through the transparency of your personality and others many see this more clearly as well. It can be felt from behind the eyes and within the energetic state of the body, even without such typical displays of character. The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking still managed to convey his sense of humor through a text-to-speech device. With his mind very much intact, he learned the lesson that he was not merely a body; however, despite Hawking’s own atheistic perspective, even the mind could not fully capture the essence behind the personality of “Stephen.” Stephen was simply the vessel for the essence to shine through. Over time, others may accept you for the mystery - the vessel - that you are if you show them the way.

You may think you need to understand in order to love, but quite the contrary. To love only when you understand the self, the other, or the world, is to love only according to certain conditions. The minute or second you do not understand, you fall out of love. In practicing love without understanding is where find love without borders and without limits. None of this comes naturally since we all come into this world equipped with brain wiring for survival, but the closer we come to our essence, typically through difficult circumstance that challenges this wiring, the easier we see the fragility, the performance, of it all. This writing is not to shame your personality, after all, we all have one and we can play with it. On the contrary, I invite you to love your personality at a distance, the same way you might love a brilliant or tragic theatrical performance, both beautiful and flawed. Play with your personality like the actors at Chicago’s famous improv club, “Second City,” play with a character pulled from the audience at random. If you have been playing with your personality like a rigidly rehearsed Shakespearean actor until now, allow yourself to be surprised - to be the unreliable narrator for your character arc. From this place of un-knowing, there are no more mistakes and no more disappointments. Only the magic remains.

To Heal The World, Journey Inward

If you catch yourself wondering how to be productive in a world with so many problems, strife, and complexity, remind yourself that the highest service you provide - in fact, the only service you provide - is the service of your own healing journey. The only medicine you are here to truly give is the medicine you are willing to take. Any wisdom that emerges from your mouth is not true wisdom unless it stems from your own radically subjective witnessing experience. There is no other way wisdom is attained. You may read all the books, receive all the highest academic marks, and collect all the degrees and acronyms that can fit at the end of an email signature, but your true offering comes from the lessons you are willing to learn from within. There are no short cuts or free passes through the path of life experience. Everyone is blessed with the rumblings of a troubled mind, a pleasure-seeking ego, a fragile body, and a soul essence attempting to make itself known. Though the conditions may vary when you zoom in at a certain point in time and space, when you zoom out you find that all come to this human existence for the same reason - to learn the lessons, attain the wisdom, remember your Spirit nature, and transcend to the higher planes of existence. You can be of service to many, and it is a blessing and a miracle to do so, but remember this service stems ultimately from your own journey and will continue to. If you are weighed down by the weight of the world, you must only look within to find the hidden weights - the resistance - you are carrying and gently lay them down.

If there is confusion, frustration, doubt, or any other form of insecurity present, this becomes your homework and your contribution to the world for the moment. As you heal the fears within you, you create space for your own Light to shine through and you simultaneously create space for others to do the same. Your Light is a true energetic frequency and a beacon that attracts others to the flame. Your Light compounds exponentially as it connects with the light source in all things, therefore, lighting up the world. There is no need to create more Light, only to activate and awaken the light hidden in plain sight. When you change the state of your own mind, you change the environment that others experience. That is how powerful you are! You may certainly feel proud of your accomplishments in areas of charity, and deservingly so, but cultivating your highest state of consciousness is a gift that you carry onward in everything you do and in every moment. The cultivation of your highest vibrational state actually creates the opportunities for you to serve in the most aligned fashion. Service happens first from within and then spirals out as your reflection grows bright and mirrors the possibilities of the world around you.

Conviction does not arise simply from getting everything you want from your environment. On the contrary, your conviction comes from witnessing, and then from knowing, that your world is created from the inside out. The ideas that you must achieve a certain thing or receive a certain outcome before you can feel good enough or of value are illusions of fear. As you practice letting go of these fears, the Light within you will cultivate the knowing of your true value all on its own. The worthiness you carry within needs no source of outside validation or accolades, it burns bright simply from your deepest knowing. The answer is in the knowing itself and the knowing comes only from your witnessing experience of the Divine presence.

The writing may sound abstract at this point, but through your own practice of connecting to the sacredness of life, whether through meditation or breath or healers or other medicine modalities, you will begin to gently touch the sacred Nature. When you begin to touch this nature, you glimpse access to something that needs no award, no social media likes, and no amount of money to confirm its realness. Inner knowing is a precursor to all external happenings and no external events happen without a certain level of knowing or readiness. If you receive a promotion or enter a relationship before you are ready, you will lose it as quickly as you appeared to gained it. This is not personal, it is simply out of karmic alignment for the time being. So the only true way to cultivate the things you desire is to go toward the inner state of worthiness and knowing. Practice seeing beyond the current circumstances, into the magic of the unknown, and watch your life begin to take the path it was meant fo.

No action must ever be forced. All right action stems from right knowing, and all right knowing stems from inner practice and vision. Go toward the state of being you want to live in and watch the state of your circumstances change to meet you. Start where you are. You do need a “plan” for what to do or give to the world. Planning is the ego’s attempts at control and is not true knowing at all, in fact, such plans may actually hinder you from surrendering to the possibilities for your life. When you surrender to the inner journey, you choose faith over your conditioned belief. People question why their dreams have not come true, and if the belief is not aligned with the frequency of readiness - your knowing - it will not emerge. In order to know your destiny, start with the material that is presented - your doubts and fears. Notice them and choose the light instead. Move toward the higher state of being in all moments. When you get triggered, remember this is an opportunity to expand. In fact, getting triggered or bumping up against the ego’s resistance is a sign that you are on the right path! All journeys toward awakening and manifestation involve bumping up against such resistances. In the highest state of frequency, there is no resistance and all creation flows like water. Practice entering this state as much as possible and the pieces will fall into place when you are ready to receive them.

First, you may have to get triggered in response to your current circumstances. You may feel drawn further inward from your life as you know it and loneliness or shame may emerge. You may beat yourself up for not being able to see your path or your value. You may look upon the world and see others in relationships that you do not have. Surrender to these feelings of loneliness and comparison when they arise, there is no need to resist them because they are illusions of a distorted mind. Keep practicing your faith in the Light and your willingness to be guided, and soon these waves of emotion energy will start to peel off, leaving your true essence still intact and burning brighter than ever. As you amplify your Light frequency, certain settings and relationships will no longer resonate with you. It is not a comparison game of better or worse, it is simply your Truth you are pursuing. Do everything in your power to create space for presence so the Divine may enter. If all of your life is filled up with scheduling in service of others, it will be quite difficult to here the calling for your highest vision. If you are complaining that you simply do not know what life wants from you or you from it, it is time to start cultivating this present-focused awareness and to slow down to the rhythms of your heart. Only at this rhythm and pace can you begin to hear, see, and notice what life is offering you now. Without force, you will come up against your own brain-based anxieties attempting to distract you at every turn. Remove, one by one, all the things distracting you from being still. With practice, your path will become clear and you will end up exactly where you are meant to be. It may not look exactly like it does in your vision or your expectations of success, but you must trust that Spirit works on a different “time.” Spirit time is no time since all is contained within Presence. Spend as many moments as you can in “no time” and your awareness will guide you true. Whatever daily resistance you notice to being in Presence is your work for that day. All resistances offer you the medicine you seek to transform your inner life and your outer one. Go gently, more effort will not get you there faster. No time is wasted. You are of greater service than you could possibly know.

Waking Up

What does it mean to “wake up?” To emerge from a subconscious or unconscious state? On one level, you do it every day emerging out of a dream state into relative consciousness. Yet, on another level, even in waking consciousness you remain mired in the illusion of your conditioned mind-based stories and fear. To wake up on the “spiritual” path, in other words, to the true Reality of your being, is not as it appears. At least, it is not as it appeared to me. After learning of such powerful states of awakening in spiritual teachers and their authored books, I envisioned something different than what has begun to take form (or lose form) in my own life. However, it makes most sense that everyone’s path looks a little different and there are multiple paths to access Truth. To be clear, I do not claim to be enlightened or awakened, I only claim a series of events that has shaped my own life and direction to practice the art of healing, happiness, and service. Furthermore, the words that I write have begun to emerge from a different source. Not my thinking mind per se, though the language may be filtered through these mechanisms, but a more intuitive source connected to the wisdom of Spirit. Whether you choose to believe that or not is up to you, but that is the best way I can explain the writing that emerges currently. Previously, my mind would have feared producing this kind of content, feeling like an imposter or some kind of preachy guru. However, the other source flowing within me naturally produces this language without fear or care for how it is interpreted. The process appears to take on its own rhythm and represent a clearer state of communication, one not so concerned with the illusions of perception and judgment. It is a simpler practice of simply conveying the experience as it unfolds.

The process of writing is a good example of the larger journey - one of ebb and flow, surrender and will, and moment-by-moment awareness. While writing, the ego mind may creep in and try to edit the writing to death, so concerned with how it may appear to others and, of course, how grammatically correct and intelligible it is. On a practical level, it is important to make the writing accessible; however, the true reasons of the ego mind are more based in perception and fear than reality and service. Will readers think I am smart enough? Too full of myself? Too “woo?” These thoughts are effectively impractical, concerned only with perception of Daniel’s identity, and only serve to interrupt the flow of truth meant to be shared. The practice of surrendering to what emerges while quieting the thinking mind has been challenging to say the least. Upon reflection, I recognize that I never really used my thinking to write. The writing always seemed to flow in some kind of Kerouac-style “stream of consciousness.” I recognize now that my writing always emerged from another source, though I frequently allowed the fear-based and stressful thinking to take over and make the writing presentable for evaluation in the given academic or professional system. Over time, I have simply practiced letting go of that thinking and seeing what happens. This is the result of that process.

My journey in writing parallels the description of “waking up.” As you relinquish the fears and perceptions of who you thought you were, including the source of information previously guiding your way, a new way of showing up in the world, or on the page, emerges with less resistance. To revisit the analogy of waking up from sleep, some wake up in an instant, like shot out of cannon ready to seize the day ahead, while others require a bit more time and patience to experience the gradations of consciousness expanding. Some may feel the light through the blinds tickling their eyelids while their inner world recalibrates to the current waking frequency. Others may feel they require external substances before they feel fully conscious. The process of waking up to the ultimate reality - the spiritual reality that flows through us all whether we openly embrace it or vehemently reject it, and the reality to which we all shall return - may similarly happen differently for each person. However, if the true influence of karmic inheritance over lifetimes is accounted for, the perceived variations in this lifetime would disappear because, though the paths look different in the human form, we are all going to the same place. The “waking up” may appear to happen in a few minutes, a few years, or a few lifetimes as your eyes begin to open and adjust to the truth of your nature. Unlike a strong cup of coffee after sleep, you cannot wake up through force, only with gentle movement and surrender to the powerful source pulling you along, though there are certainly external sources and substances that appear to support this process and heal trauma in the mind and body.

Waking up may be seen as molting or shedding layers of skin that no longer serve you and no longer represent who you are and who you are becoming. Waking up may come as a slow or fast realization that you have been blindly choosing and accepting certain conditioned states of being dictated by the survival mechanisms of the mind and body. As the mind and body begin to upgrade and rewire to support this awakening, you will gain access to previously walled off states and find more freedom and flexibility in the personality. You may experience tremendous states of bliss and peace, more powerful and substantial than ever considered possible. However, it is important to note that as long as you are in the embodied state, you will experience the bodily states that arise like anyone else, though the thinking may be permanently rewired and free from fear since you are not truly the body anyway. Below the surface of your conscious mind, you have been selecting and reselecting states of being that align with the frequency of your mind and body, both of which have been attached to certain levels of pain, suffering, and limitation. As you wake up, these levels begin to dissipate. Your body regains a sense of flow in the nervous system, your mind lets go of needless suffering in stories of your personal life, and your spirit expands beyond the limitations previously dictated by this mind body experience. The truth is that no fear can withstand the light within you when it begins to flow, and moment-by-moment you begin to see the possibilities in all time. Time appears linear only on one level of human reality. but is truly nonlinear in ultimate Reality. In waking up, notions of past, present, and future begin to blur into a more consistent state known simply as presence. In presence, all is possible and everything is in its rightful place. Out of presence, you suffer greatly under the weight of mental conditioning wired toward past and future. The human understanding of time is based predominantly on mechanisms of survival, including hypervigilance of what is to come and rumination over what has taken place. The mind searches frantically for answers to the problems it has created. All problems stem from fear and all solutions promise the relief from fear. However, true freedom from fear comes only from being in presence and from knowing your Light.

In the process of waking up, you may frequently fall back asleep, as if entering a dream that feels familiar yet more and more uncanny over time. The uncanniness of the dreams you slip into are signals that you no longer belong in the dream state and are being guided to a more awakened state of being. Upon each waking from the dream, your mind may punish you for “napping,” or falling back into the familiar thinking cycles. Watch these subtle forms of punishment as the ego tries to sneak back in and control the show. The more clarity you find in the waking state, the more forgiveness you will have for yourself and the more relaxed you will feel about illusions like “waste” and “time.” In Reality, nothing is wasted and time is forever. As stated in A Course in Miracles, the only true prayer is for forgiveness, and prayer is necessary only until we see we are already worthy.

As you awaken, you will experience states of bliss like never before, and upon leaving such states, you may feel a sense of loss and a longing to stay. As you slip back into old dream states, you may even question whether those blissful states were real in the first place or whether they were, in fact, a dream. The blissful states are not necessarily meant to be lived in just yet, they are more like glimpses into the realm of possibility as you navigate the ebb and flow of your personality and daily life relationships. Others may not recognize what is happening to you and you may not be able to speak to the experience very well yourself. You may find yourself confused, at a loss for words, yet driven in a direction that aligns more and more with these higher states of consciousness. Meanwhile, your personality may continue to engage with others, rely on familiar strategies of communication, and get triggered by all of the emotional conflicts and beliefs you will continue to shed as you expand. Rather than seeing these frustrations as blockages to your expansion, see them as necessary triggers for you to continue surrendering to the construction of this personality while it slowly crumbles and reorganizes itself at a higher frequency. You may have thought your personality was forged from steel but really it is paper thin. In order allow this construction to crumble, you must be effectively triggered as many times as it takes. You must fall asleep at the wheel and crash into the limitations of your previous states of mind and deeply rooted emotional traumas. With practice, the crashes will be less fear-inducing until you are so certain in your knowing that you take your hands off the wheel completely, realizing you were never the one driving in the first place.

As you surrender to the process of waking up, you recognize it was not you “doing” the waking up after all, but it was the universal intelligence that flows through you all along once the stickiness of your ego clears out and heals the thinking. The more you wake up, the more you surrender this process, allowing it to takes its natural course without the need to “do” anything. You realize that the ego’s form of “doing” never really accomplished what you truly wanted anyway. This is not to say your ego completely dissolves or dissipates, though it may for some, but you will begin to dance with your ego. Your ego will continue to exist with its challenged states of thinking while you move rapidly toward more permanent states of Light. The ego cannot hold tightly in states of pure light frequency, and rather than continue to do the ego’s bidding in finding answers to unsolvable problems, you simply move toward the light growing within you like a moth to a flame and this practice becomes the solution to all questions. All you must do is go toward the light. In meditation, in breath, in movement, and in all states, simply cultivate the highest light source frequency within you. Presence becomes more readily available and you will feel less and less need to defend or explain your arrival into it. Lower level questions will begin to bounce off of you, not requiring an explanation or defense. In fact, you may notice others begin to move toward the light along with you, and those that choose to resist your light may get triggered or fall away from you naturally, mired in their own shadows and limitation. However, you must practice releasing your own judgments of those who do not follow suit as they will remain your most important teachers - your most important medicine - until you release the remains of your own darkness clinging on for dear life, knowing its days are numbered.

Waking up is not easy nor is it hard, these judgments are illusions of the mind. Waking up simply flows to the true rhythms of the universe, not bound by the human mind’s illusory check points or time stamps. The difference in pacing may initially cause significant distress within your mind and the minds of others. Family and friends may not understand as they watch you let go of control and allow the car to drive itself, going where it needs to go, adventuring at its own speeds, sometimes racing across enormous landscapes and other times appearing to idle motionless on the freeway while other cars whiz by. Others, who will continue believing they are in control of their cars, may honk wildly at you until they realize your frequency refuses to engage with their ploys to bring you back in “control” of your car and your life - the reality being that the tighter you grasp at the wheel the further asleep you fall. Over time, your life will begin to match the rhythm of other sources of natural light, the rhythm of the trees and the flowers. As a result, life will become filled with more ease, grace, love, and gratitude than you could have ever dreamed of. While dreaming, states of grace exist only temporarily in time when circumstances align, yet in presence such states have a permanent quality or essence. Take your time, there is no need to rush. Wherever you are in the waking process, trust you are being shown all that needs to be seen in this moment. Take care of the body, be watchful of the mind, and move toward the light as you are called to. All is there for you. All is forgiven.

Belonging

So many of us do not feel we belong in this world, and what a silly human predicament this really is. We are born and immediately begin questioning our “born-ness.”

“Is this the right place?”

“Did they get the address right?”

“Why don’t I seem to fit in like everyone else?”

I call this predicament silly not from higher ground but from a place of deep knowing and resonance as I have wrestled with this core belief all my life. And honestly, I did not fit in in many ways. But I was not supposed to really because the truth is no one does. How could the complexity and uniqueness of a human being possibility “fit in” to something.

The trees say, “Belonging? Belong to what?”

There is no secret club, no elite membership status. There is just us beings. We are being, and often, we are longing, but underneath that longing is a truth we all contain. Certainly, there are hierarchies in the animal kingdom and animals can feel isolated or left out from the pack, but this is based on survival at lower levels of consciousness. Humans have evolved to create layers of meaning that do not resonate with an ultimate truth or knowing of our right to be here. You were born and you deserve to be here. It is as simple as that, though it can be a lifetime, or many, of lessons to learn this wisdom. I am still learning it myself. I deserve to be here and I have a right to walk this earth as much as any one or any thing else. So do you. The hierarchies we establish are nothing but the creative strategies we have put in place to survive in the same way other species do, but humans are unique in questioning their inherent worth. Plus, reflecting similarities of the natural world does not mean we are meant to emulate everything they do. At higher states of consciousness, we are privy to higher states of wisdom and knowing. Of course, we are also privy to more strategic forms of brutality and destruction, though these are the lessons we must learn.

I see that in my 30+ years of learning I belong and, furthermore, that there is nothing to belong to, my mission is to guide others into this deep place of knowing and truth, not from external validation of making the crowds clap but from a waking up to the truth within. Such a truth cannot be taken from you no matter who says what. You can be cast out, forgotten, and left to die by society at large, but you will never stop belonging to the larger family - the Spirit family- to which you shall return. The planets, the stars, the plants, the mountains, the oceans, the animals, and you. You cannot escape belonging. just like you could not escape birth. If you made it to this earth, this life, in this moment in time and space, you arrived with all the documentation necessary for belonging. You were made of the same stuff as the rest of us. The star dust and universal life source energy. There is nothing required to prove your belonging. Not through sex or money or size or anything else. Welcome, this is your home too, if only for a brief time in the grand scheme of things. You were chosen to become embodied for this life, not all souls are granted such a privilege. It is often painful to learn such lessons of human existence, but ultimately we all return to where we once came from and once we arrive, we are immediately reminded of all we had forgotten so briefly during our time on Earth. “Belonging” is a concept humans created to identify worthiness, but all are worthy under the eyes of Great Spirit. All are watched as carefully as the next and no one is lost. No one is cast out. No one is forgotten. May we dance in the silliness of our convictions and linger in the foolishness of things while we are here.

Merging the Path of Awakening and the Realm of Souls and Spirits

I have often had conversations about the differences between “my” path, which involves exposure to karmic inheritance, ancestral and past life trauma, psychic intuition, energy medicine, and spirit teams, and the path of awakening to true consciousness beyond the ego. I have wrestled with these ideas and have been unsure how to resolve them as my own path took shape. The following is based on recent thoughts regarding these paths. If you have ever read the likes of Eckhart Tolle, Michael Singer, Byron Katie, or the numerous other spiritual teachers who identify with a path of Oneness and awakening, you have likely recognized themes in their teachings. The teachings identify a level of consciousness that recognizes the inherent illusion of the thinking mind as well as the emotional body, and emphasize a pure state of bliss radiating out at all times regardless of external circumstance once you let go of attachment. The teachings identify the ego, or attachment to personal identity, as the biggest illusion of our perceived reality and the crux of all suffering. Upon releasing attachment to the ego, spiritual teachers describe a profound process of “waking up” to your true nature and the true nature of reality - ultimately not separate - with you as the witness, the higher Self, and pure conscious awareness. Within this realm, all paradoxes and inner and outer conflicts are resolved by a deepest knowing of Truth. The awakening experiences come in all different shapes and sizes, some in a flash with no apparent preparatory work or seeking, and some after years of meditative study or search. I know this summation is severely lacking in the nuance of these deeply personal stories, but those are some highlights as I see them. I was introduced to these ideas at a young age by my father who still abides by these teachings and has shaped a worldview around them. We have often discussed how our paths intersect and where they bump up against one another. For years as a teen and later as a young adult, I was either explicitly attempting to follow this path or align with it somewhere in the back of my mind as a guiding philosophy for happiness. However, I simply could not find my way. There are many reasons for this beyond the linear or logical reasoning I identify with, but my primary reasoning was that my body was simply too traumatized and dysregulated to address the sickness in my thinking directly. I had no tools outside of sitting quietly to truly alter and expand my conscious awareness. On an intellectual level, I understood the ideas quite well. I knew from a very young age that I was not my thinking and I could even feel my awareness behind the thinking, and yet, it still plagued me to no end. Grasping the intellectual idea of who “I” was did not seem to end the onslaught of pain brought on by my thinking and, furthermore, by my conditioned beliefs and associated bodily emotions. I was stuck in a cycle of seeking and suffering which led me down several unhealthy rabbit holes of coping and escape. In the following paragraphs, I will acknowledge some of the reasons, beyond my “too traumatized” explanation, I believe I was meant to take the path that unfolded for me and why it may not yet look like the “traditional” form of waking up. I will also acknowledge how I see these paths intersecting as one collective mission.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

When my path led me to the world of clinical psychology, I was profoundly sick in the body and guided to mind body medicine as an answer to the “chronic illness” that was both diagnosed and heavily misunderstood by traditional western medicine. Through this path, along with exposure to classic psychoanalytic ideas in my training, I resonated with the notion of physical symptoms as a manifestation of unresolved emotional traumas in the body. With this burgeoning awareness of the mind-body connection, I began to awaken to these principles and address this connection with the tools available to me. I became familiar with like-minded practitioners, read books, and cleaned up certain behaviors that were keeping my mind and body riddled with pain. I eventually revisited long-term psychotherapy with the intention to integrate my trauma and heal this condition. I practiced modalities like somatic tracking and learned about breathwork and polyvagal theory, all body-focused mechanisms of accessing trauma and bringing safety to the nervous system. Contrary to sitting quietly with the thinking mind, I discovered another entry point - the body. I learned about how profoundly fearful I had been most of my life and how my body remained a frightened child, unable to see the light. The sadness and fear that pervaded my view started to lift and for the first time in my life I started to see the benefits of therapeutic work. However, at a certain point the work became incredibly effortful and my healing was dishearteningly slow. At the tail end of my clinical training and 10+ years into navigating this condition, my experience had shifted from where it started but was still manifesting in heavy sickness weekly. I knew it my heart it was time for a change. Thus began the most transformative period of my life. I left my traditional therapy and soon after, I left my traditional job. It became increasingly clear that fear was still the driving force behind my life, fueled by conditioned beliefs and the thinking mind, which required real world action steps and exposure to a new paradigm. While I had learned many things about the mind and body, including a deeper understanding of the nervous system and how emotions are stored in the body, in addition to exploring my early attachment relationships and practicing body-based modalities, I was still profoundly fearful and dragging my scared little child self through the world unprotected without a sense of the true power and possibility waiting for me.

At this point in the journey, I began to open up to healers with other ways of knowing, including self-described intuitive, clairvoyants, shamans, ancestral and past life readers, reiki masters, and energy healers. My body had always responded to these kinds of healings but I was never quite sure what to make of them, the doubting and clinically trained part of my brain reacted in protest and attempted to keep me from fully embracing these openings. I tried for awhile to keep these experiences separate from my “real” therapeutic work as a professional, but at a certain point, there was no denying that this work was a powerful force needing to be explored in my life. A turning point came when a healer was introduced to me who opened up space for me to heal the “illness” that was still plaguing my life so many years later. From these healings, I could feel my consciousness expanding and a deeper trust and conviction in my ability to heal. With all the work and study I had done, I still had very little trust in the possibilities for my health and often considered managing this “illness” for the remainder of my life. During my early twenties, I had spent many hours in meditation, including a 5-day silent retreat of walking and sitting meditation in the Vipasana tradition during one graduate school break. Though I had found solace in some of the spiritual practices of buddhist philosophy and western spiritual teachers, I had not come close to embodying peace in the way they spoke about in the books of my adolescence, such as The Power of Now and The Four Agreements. I am not saying I explored and experienced all there is in the world of spiritual seeking through such teachings, but I am saying that I gave it an honest try, and it was not until profound experiences of intuitive and energy medicine that I could literally feel my body lightening and a deeper knowing emerging, as if the truth of who I am was being called forth.

From these experiences, I began to develop my own spiritual practice, different from the more traditional styles of meditation I had learned previously. These practices involved cultivating intuition and actually questioning and listening to the body, as well as energetic practices of clearing out and channeling. I was able to recognize the debilitating fear and anxiety as an energy source fueling my brain, conditioned by not only early life experience but also ancestral and karmic inheritance. While the teachers I had read growing up had not gone into the depths of such astrological and karmic worlds, most acknowledged reincarnation as part of the soul’s journey, and these openings gave me an expanded view of my suffering rather than the more simplistic entry way of “you are not your thinking.” Again, these ideas are powerful but I had not been able to truly embody this practice and come back to a style of meditation that was successful for me until I learned how to visualize and channel energy in the body. The work of healers and teachers like Joe Dispenza and Donny Epstein were hugely influential on this alternate path to meditative and body healing practices. Even breathwork masters like Wim Hof provided new access to states of being I had not grasped through simply sitting quietly with painful thoughts. I needed more direction, more guidance, and more framework for my Western mind to comprehend the nature of “trauma,” which had become too big and too buzzy a word even for someone with years of clinical training. In the traditional psychological world, trauma is studied and talked about to death, but actual healing practices are few and far between. Essentially, all paths lead to some form of exposure, but the way to that exposure requires an entry point that works for you. For me, the intuitive realms got me there and invited me to see my own intuitive gifts in the process, which allowed me to further own my power and chart my own path, healing deep wounds of insecurity and unworthiness along the way. One one level, the primary communication of my body’s disease was that I was not aligned with my highest truth and needed to break through some limitations around what I came into this world to do.

As I sit here now reflecting on these paths, I do not see the energetic, intuitive, and astrological realms as separate from the path of awakening to Truth beyond the ego. Rather, I see it as one path to higher states of consciousness that eventually meets back in a pursuit of oneness and wholeness. The realms I have explored have ultimately given me the guidance and opening to address very basic hurts and pains I have held onto for a long time. Though the other literature and teachings addressed these very same concepts, it was not until the style of energetic practice and intuitive reading came into my life that I was able to integrate such wisdom and practically apply it to my life. I could see myself - body, mind, and spirit - begin to change before I my eyes. I began to let go of control of who I thought “I” was and became more of a mystery to myself as these changes took root. At times, it has been confusing, fearful, and challenging not only for me but for my loved ones as my ideas and identity began to expand so rapidly. However, my life has transformed more than I ever thought possible as a result, with less fear and more bliss than I have ever known. Some may not need these realms to get there, but for me these frameworks supported my journey and greatly influenced the way that I am able to serve others. The truth is, many people have psychic and intuitive experiences that are dismissed or considered pathological by more traditional fields of science and healing. Therefore, it is important to welcome in these experiences as further support for awakening beyond the conditioned source of knowing - the thinking brain - and into deeper sources of knowing in alignment with Spirit and ultimate consciousness. I believe my path syncs back up nicely with the profound truths of recognizing the thoughts are not you, all paths lead to loving kindness, and and you are the witness to Spirit’s divine plan. I just needed a different form of guidance to get there and to continue going there. I do not claim to have achieved anything beyond what my current experience dictates, only to share that all paths lead to one. The frameworks, the language, the tools, and the style of exploration may all look different, but the goals are the same. I will also add that astrological, intuitive, and energetic spiritualism can also function as an escape. The work provides a whole new playground to explore and to potentially get attached to and lost in. It is magical and enticing and you can easily get caught up in the identities of “psychic” and “clairvoyant” and this or that kind of healer. It seems to convey special Harry Potter or X-men like abilities that create a romantic vision of these capacities. You may see this work plastered all over social media with quips like “you can manifest the life of your dreams.” I do not dismiss or ignore the gifts of these individuals and I engage in some of it myself; however, there is no free lunch. There is no escaping the human experience no matter how intuitive you are. The answers come through witnessing experience. And for those who have appeared to simply “wake up” in this lifetime, it is my view that they have done lifetimes of work in lives past to get to this point. As souls, we all learn the same lessons and as spirits being human, we all must navigate the pains of being embodied no matter how connected or aligned we become to Spirit.

With that said, part of my journey into more energetic realms is knowing that the possibilities for health and healing are way beyond what traditional western medicine considers possible at this time and even what other forms of traditional buddhist teachings may acknowledge or address. I have personally witnessed healing beyond the realms of medical explanation and as a result am called to share this with the world through such powerful energetic and intuitive channels. Ultimately, it is important to recognize that the body is no more your identity than the mind; however, while we have to live in it we can use it as the powerful tool that it is to expand greatly into higher realms of understanding. As David Hawkins says, the only real death is ego death. Once the body dies, as dramatic and painful as it may be, the soul returns to a higher realm of consciousness until it once again merges with its ultimate Home, the place we all come from, inherently are, and will one day return.

So, this is my attempt at integrating seemingly disparate paths of healing, one that appears to emerge from a more disciplined, unflashy lineage of stillness and self-love, albeit moments of incredible awakening and bliss described by the teachers of our time, and another that appears to live in the realm of magic and mysticism, complete with angels, spirit guides, and psychic transmissions. In the end, I believe we all desire the same things: a deeper understanding and truth of our existence, relief from suffering, and access to eternal bliss. Find the entry point that lights you up and go toward it with reckless abandon. Practice trusting that there may be more possibilities to who you are, what you are capable of, and your experience in this life than you have given credit until now. Your path does not have to look like mine or the Buddha’s or the Zen masters or the psychic witches or anyone else’s. You are here to cultivate a brave, new vision that only you can discover. Your Truth is waiting for you.

The Body Holds Your Child Self

Learning to care for your body is the process of learning to care for your child self - your bodychild. The body is a vessel for your inner child and contains the unresolved fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, and creativity that your child self contains. If you struggle to integrate these parts of self, look to connect with the body to begin this integration. Using tools like breathwork and intuitive listening, you can hear the bodychild speak to you and show you what they have been carrying. Your child self will reveal what is held in vital storage centers like your heart, gut, and root (base of the spine). If your nervous system carries primal fear, which most of ours do on some level, you can show the bodychild they are safe and can rely on you (adult you) for safety and security in moments of tension. The unresolved fears of your childhood are stored in the body and can be accessed and welcomed in. The process of listening to and caring for the child within requires patience, compassion, and courage - the courage to see the vulnerabilities that live within you and the patience to reassure your body while it reacts and gets triggered. The natural impulse when the body gets triggered is to blame the body and punish it for being so “weak” or “fragile;” this is often the case, as it was for me, in instances of chronic pain. The conscious mind feels punished, isolated from others, and unfairly treated for episodes of body pain.

I experienced this as a child with debilitating stomach issues and as an adult with the “CFS” label. However, the body is not to be blamed, it is merely a vessel for the unresolved conflicts of the child self - both the ways they have learned to cope with stress and the resulting conditioned belief system manifesting in the present. The various symptoms of the body are all manifestations of the child’s protest for unmet needs. If you have, for example, disavowed your child self, ignored their pleas for comfort, and sacrificed their needs for external acceptance, success, or validation, your body will communicate this in more ways than one. To care for the body, you must make a pact with your child self to no longer abandon them and to prioritize them first, above all else. You may feel like the necessary lifestyle changes are a “sacrifice” at first, but the true sacrifice is ignoring your inner child’s needs for all of this time. The self-abandonment is the true pain, and when you recognize how this part of you has been hurting and how you have the unique capacity to bring comfort and ease to it, you discover a world of power that has been sitting on the shelf waiting to be unleashed and integrated with your other strengths.

As you begin to show your child self compassion for their struggles, love for their gifts, and space for their creativity, you will begin to feel the integration and wholeness of who you are, no longer having to fight such conflicting identity battles within you. Your nervous system will begin to learn, upgrade, and rewire to support this wholeness, literally bringing oxygen to parts of you that have been walled off. Your brain will begin to receive different messages that support your worth, your growth, and your love rather than your lack, your longing, and perceived threat. The child self reveals emotions long overdue for release that may bring discomfort at first but also reveal the power and strength you have denied yourself all along. The power in your root and the courage in your heart may lead the way as you learn to dance with your bodychild. Breathe into these parts as often as you can and direct your awareness to these truths. When triggered, show your mind that the conditioned images of you as “weak” and “unworthy,” filled with self-punishment, is no longer welcome here in this body home. You no longer accept or tolerate this kind of self-treatment and you practice respecting the child as you would the elder. The child holds wisdom that your adult self cannot perceive due to its conditioning and societal constraints. Remember you are worthy of love not only in moments of joy but in moments of grief, of fear, and of pain. Your love is not conditional nor is it for sale. When the bodychild begins to trust you again, you will feel the freedom of being as you are, whole and accepted.

External conditions will change but inner conditions are sacred, always. From the moment you wake up, check in with your self, with your body, with your child. Notice what they are carrying over from the night and what they may fear for the day. Honor your commitment with a daily practice and cultivate the time and space to feed your bodychild all that it needs. Spend time grounding your energy in nature as well as clearing and channeling in meditation. Practice building a toolkit and use all the tools at your disposal. Notice where you are giving energy to others, to events, and to goals that are not in alignment or in respect of your child self. The child self is not the only authority in your soul team but it is a valued and respected member and must be reminded of this. You are not simply one individual mind, but an expansive awareness of mind, body, and spirit parts. You carry lineages of early life, of ancestry, and of past soul lives that influence, inform, and shape the personal reality you live in moment to moment. When the world feels as if it is closing in and your body cannot keep up, remember you are the awareness, the manager, the overseer, and the witness. You have the capacity to bring assurance and safety to the parts that are crying out. As your bodychild learns safety, trust, and integration, you create space for the excitement, joy, and creative vision that your whole self brings, to dance and love freely.

Heal Trauma Conditioning, Discover Your Mission

The Swiss psychoanalyst, Alice Miller, wrote of the “gifted child” and the conditioned roles children learn to play for their caregivers. By “gifted,” Alice truly meant highly attuned to one’s environment and able to detect and absorb emotion energy like a cat in the jungle. With such gifts, children inevitably take on a myriad of learned emotional protections against vulnerability, as well as unconscious responsibility for the caregiving of their caregivers. All caregivers are children in adult bodies carrying a lineage of unresolved emotional conflicts, and their children, in child bodies, learn to survive and adapt to these conflicts through their little nervous systems. The child brain becomes wired to support the learned survival strategies, complete with wired beliefs about themselves, others, and the world, and associated emotion states deemed acceptable or unacceptable. Children will attempt to hide or punish any surfacing of characteristics, emotions, or behaviors that do not support the reception of love and care, while spotlighting those that do. In distorted and disturbed home environments, and even in supportive ones by all accounts, children’s brains become conditioned to pursue the emotional attunement and associated behaviors that reep such loving rewards, though the “love” is conditional by nature. As a result, the child’s capacity to recognize the emotional needs of their environment takes precedence over the emotional needs within them. They sacrifice the emerging emotional, physical, and spiritual gifts within themselves to play the “gifted” role in the family.

This description is a classic understanding of early attachment dynamics and the conditioned roles children learn to play within the family unit. As you grow into adulthood, you may stumble on you conditioned life path since your strategies continue to be based on what is necessary to receive the love and admiration of those around you. Consciously or not, your true gifts may remain hidden. Sometimes this brings success in many forms, sometimes not. Regardless of the success rewarded for such a mission, it cannot truly be the mission of your soul until you recognize the conditioning that has created it. After that, if your mission remains the same, you may follow it out of your own free will and choosing with renewed awareness and intention. The process of cracking open and deconditioning is messy and may come with the disapproval of others, but consider your messiness a worthy price to discover the whole power of who you are. You may temporarily rupture the family dynamics that have become so engrained, so accepted, and so comfortable by other family members or loved ones, but consider this as a necessary invitation for all to heal the conditioned roles they have learned to play. You are giving others the same gift you give to yourself, that of the invitation to discover who you are without the expectations of others. Some may live very comfortable lives never exploring their conditioning and I wish them well, but for you, me, and others, your lives may hang in the balance and it may be as dire as a life of suffering or of freedom.

Personally, I never felt there was much of an option. I grew debilitatingly sick and dis-eased the longer I tried to pursue conditioned roles for love and approval, continuing to re-enact long held beliefs about what it means to be “good enough.” But the brain is not conditioned for joy, only for survival. And, ultimately, there is no “good enough” for others. Until I recognized the roots of my conditioning and aimed to transmute this power at all costs, my gifts remained hidden, deeply afraid of the light. As I continued to uncover the expansive nature of my service, beyond the traditional boxes I had known, some disapproved, some did not understand, and some were disappointed, and some continue to be, but to say “Yes” to the truth of your own soul is nobody else’s business at the end of the day. You are here for a reason and you can trust that the universe/Spirit/Source/Creator wants you to find out what that is! Ultimately, you are a child of Spirit and this is the only authority you need hold dear on your destined path.

Healing involves learning how to harness these gifts in a way that serves the whole of your being, not just the behaviors that get rewarded by others, and is aligned with your highest intention and service to the world. The point is not that others do not want you to succeed or be of highest service, but others may not yet be able to recognize what is emerging out of the role you have played for so long. All of our brains become conditioned to identifying people in certain ways, and when those images begin to change, it can be frightening for us to adapt and we may question those changes out of fear. Family may want the very best for you, which is why they may struggle to see you taking “risks” and exposing new parts of yourself previously ignored or walled off. Not only may others be frightened, but you will be terrified as well! All of the doubts and fears your brain has internalized about disappointing others over the years will emerge in full force. The practice of healing is the practice of quieting, exposing, and disproving those deeply rooted limiting beliefs over time. As you move through these fears, you chart a path for others to do the same - this is how true inner change is enacted and modeled. This is how leaders are born, destinies fulfilled.

The invitation in this, at times, confusing and messy process is to see through and let go, as much as you can, of the conditioned love that has come to define your most intimate relationships. Your parents are not the beholders of love nor do they get to choose how it is disseminated. Love resides within you, unending and ever-growing. As you take steps toward a truth only you can know with gifts only you possess, a love of self will flourish in the absence of the conditioned love you have relied upon up until this point. Your brain will concoct all kinds of fears around what your life may look like in the absence of such supports. Maybe you fear you will be homeless, outcast from society, and a leper to all. Notice the catastrophe that such fear-based stories present in your mind and remember that you are not the one choosing to live in fear, anger, sadness, or hate. If others choose to do so, that is their choice and freedom, but it is none of your business. Your business can and always will be to love, your self first and then the world, as disapproving and harsh as it may seem at times. As you grow toward this loving place within, you may notice others adjust course and begin to meet your frequency with their own love. You may notice others begin to see the powerful and passionate light emerge from your being and decide they want some of that to. You may notice you now have something to give others who are also attempting to learn of and break free from conditioned roles. In time, with patience and grace, you will align with those meant to support your journey and to be of greatest service to you. Those who are willing to grow with you will amplify your true mission as it comes into view.

If you have read my work, you know I consider the elements of trauma we carry to stem not only from early life roles but from ancestral lineage, and even past lives as well. Using intuitive guidance, you can uncover this “soul map” of trauma conditioning and allow it to bring a life path and soul mission into focus. As you clear the conditioning of this “soul team,” you are able to learn from the resilience and resourcefulness of your ancestors and all who came before you to support your vision. If you think you are a separate individual floating in space, recognize the long lineage of supporters you carry within you who have shaped you and watched you every step of the way. You only must clear the conditioned traumas of this supporting cast of inner children, ancestors, and past lives to receive the full weight of their gifts. From this expanded view of who you are, you will begin to see with clarity and conviction the purpose you have on this earth and the true mission laid out before you.

Love II

When I was younger, I was never sure if I knew love. It always appeared to be something outside of me that I was chasing and never truly felt filled up by. On holidays, love appeared reserved for other children and for other families while I carried a feeling of emptiness, longing for something I did not know. This is not to say my family did not carry and share love, only to say that I was unsure how to take it in. I had a thirst for adventure, and yet, when I would leave my family I would feel a deep sadness and loneliness. But when I was with them, I still carried a feeling of not belonging and feeling separate. It seemed like a lose-lose situation. When I was old enough to become interested in romance, I thought that would be my answer. A romantic interest or partner would fill the part of me that was yearning for this loving experience. Yet, it only seemed to bring more complication and hurt, specifically in the form of jealousy, anger, shame, and competition. These were the emotions I was most familiar with in area of intimacy. I was lost with love, it only seemed to exist in fantasy. Not until many years later, as I began to peel away the layers of these negative emotion states I lived in for much of my life, did I begin to see what was burgeoning bright within me all along. With practice, I could begin to experience an overwhelming sensation of gratitude for existence itself and feel genuinely motivated to share it with all. What a magnificent sensation! I began to see that gratitude was not some punishment adults gave you when you were being “selfish.” Gratitude was an opportunity to experience beauty like never before. It was a gift we all have. I still forget sometimes, but not as often as before, and I am quickly reminded by the various things in my life that have become amplifiers of that beauty and that love. With the right intention, there are no shortage of opportunities to remember gratitude and love, and to recognize when we are not in it. However, the things in my life did not always remind me of love but quite the opposite.

For example, I needed to heal the blockages in my way of relationship before I could see relationship as an amplifier of love. I am still growing in this area, still discovering how relationship can serve and amplify my purpose. However, an easy mistake is to choose relationship in order to feel like you are a part of something and worthy of the collective Spirit. For me personally, it was and continues to be important to learn my worth independent of others. Searching for love through relationship to others can breed dependency, and though we are always in relationship, knowing we are a part of all things does not require others’ participation or validation. I did not know my worthiness for many years, and so seeking love in relationship only appeared to amplify my unworthiness. As I practice worthiness in myself each day, I find that relationship can now amplify this worthiness… of love. Relationship, sex, and other forms of connection are amplifiers, they will amplify whatever you are already carrying. Love does not live inherently in these experiences of connection, it lives within your own capacity underneath the layers of scar tissue. Therefore, you do not need these emotional amplifiers to touch love, just as you do not need sound amplifiers to hear music. You only need to recognize what you have always been carrying and always been worthy of. Only then can you experience the true gift of such amplifying experiences.

I do not mean to portray the path to love as such a linear journey or that you must find love alone before you let others in. Connection and community is an invaluable part of the path and others help you heal in ways you could not do alone, but if you feel dependent on others to do this for you, you may lack a recognition of the power you have to do so for yourself. Any experience that amplifies what you are carrying is an opportunity to see precisely what is standing in your way. If something other than love is being amplified by a relationship to someone or by a membership to some community, you may glimpse the invitation to go toward that energy, to listen to it, and to find the tools to learn from it and release it. All of life is an opportunity to get closer to the frequency of love, and as you get closer to embodying that frequency, all of life becomes an amplifier for it. As you become more and more the vessel for love, your outside mirrors the inside and you never lose sight of what is flowing within you and all around you. You become an amplifier and a transmuter yourself, like the shaman tree - a vessel, support, and medicine for all things. You remember at all times that love is not to be bought or sold, earned or lost, but known and chosen in every moment.

Many who have said “Yes” to the healing path, the “spiritual” path, or whatever name you want to give to a path of growth and expansion in oneself, have come upon the notion that we are all branches of the same tree. This notion is found at the root of many, many religious traditions, shared spiritual practices, healing modalities, indigenous cultures, and philosophical writings. The notion is found so ubiquitously across cultures and societies that it is easy to shrug off as cliche or false. Anyone who you might share this with might be quick to say that this is not new and, therefore, they have already chosen a stance on it. Even those who might agree with the idea intellectually or in principle are likely limited by the fact that they have not experienced such a state of connection. It is truly only in experiencing this truth that one can come to embody the practice that we are all children of Spirit. I was open to such an idea as a young person but never truly embodied it and, therefore, was just as disadvantaged as those who outright denied it. I was open to the idea intellectually but behaved as though it were not true. There was a disconnect between my intellectually held belief and my action. I held so much judgment, blame, and shame of myself and of others, that I was blocked from truly acknowledging the connection between us all in practice. My ego, also known as my separateness, led me to competition energy rather than collaboration. Our brains are not conditioned or wired to acknowledge this connection, they fight for survival and attempt to compete and “win out” against other beings that it perceives as threatening. This is a form of instinctual tribalism that some would say is “innate.” However, just because something has taken place historically and conditioned us to act accordingly does not make it “innate” or even necessary. There is much corrective literature now about the collaborative nature of evolution and that the human species evolves significantly more through collaboration than competitive destruction or “survival of the fittest” mentality. All is to say that when you experience love as a state of being, it becomes all the more clear that this experience is readily available to all you and is not scarce, endangered, or at risk of going extinct. It is not necessary to hunt for love.

Love comes from within. It cannot be more simply put than that, can it? But what does this statement truly mean? The actions of society certainly do not reflect these words. Everything you see from media to consumerism spreads a different message. The message you often receive is that love can be bought, sold, earned, and lost. None of this really speaks to the idea that not only does love come from within but you are love. The frequency, vibration, emotion, and experience of love is the truth of what you are. You are not in relationship to love, you are a part of love. Just as you can experience the natural world and also recognize you are a part of nature, you can experience love and also recognize you are a part of this loving nature. You can be a vessel for which the frequency of love flows through. You do not often hear of advertisements for buying, selling, earning, or losing experiences likes hatred, judgment, blame, or shame. However, you can choose these experiences and become a vessel for them just as you can for love. Emotion energies span the rainbow of choices for you to embody and be a vessel for. Just as easily as you can conjure judgment, you can conjure love, yet for some reason our society makes it seem like love remains hidden behind paywalls and extravagant gestures. Furthermore, because we are such relational beings we have internalized the idea that love happens only in relationship - in romantic partnership, in family, and other relational experiences. Of course, love can happen and be readily amplified in such beautiful relationships, but love does not live in these relationships. Love lives within the human experience itself, within the capacity and reach of all beings. Therefore, you need not have a partner in the creation of love, you only need recognize your own powers of manifestation to channel this frequency, and if it feels far away or untouchable then start with where you are at. Practice going toward love even if it does not make sense to you just yet. Practice seeing the possibility that this experience exists even if it was wholly absent in your family of origin or all romantic or friendship experiences to date. Even if your only attachment to relationship has been abuse, neglect, or a host of negative and hurtful dynamics, practice trusting that the frequency of love still lives under all those layers of tarnished clothing.

Love lives and breathes within you, just hidden beyond your current circumstances. With practice, you can touch the experience of love for free and without anyone else’s permission or reciprocation. Love is here for all because love is a part of all things. Other beings and life forms do not appear to choose love, they simply know love. When a baby is born, ideally without heavy ancestral burdens of trauma, they simply know love when they see it. Babies need care to survive, but they do not need to be taught love. They know love as long as the environmental conditions are such that they can expand into this knowing. If conditions do not support a baby’s access to love, it is not because they do not know love but because their access has been distorted and layered over with emotional scar tissue. As humans grow, they become encumbered by the conditions and layers of emotional scar tissue that protected them from hurt, and they forget what was always within them. Once you remember truth of what lives within you, you can practice going toward it as often as you like, even in dire circumstances. The choice is not always an easy one and, at times, may go against every cell in your nervous system that is crying out for threat, danger, and survival, but your awareness is greater than simply your nervous system. With expanded awareness, you may recognize love even beyond the physical body you contain it within. You may feel this frequency overflow through your vessel of a body and through the vessel of all beings, of all life. Even if you forget, you can trust that other beings, other life does not forget. And for that reason, love is always available to you. Even when you yourself cannot seem to choose it, other beings choose for you and shower you with their love, knowing it is overflowing and will not run out. And when others appear to forget, you remember for them. You can be the purveyor of light and love when others see only darkness. This is your right and your capacity as a human being - to transmute all forms of energy into love. It is the innate alchemy you carry.

The Epigenetics of Trauma: Ancestral Lineages of What We Carry

As an intuitive psychologist, I have been guided to focus heavily on the area of ancestral healing and unearthing the lineages of trauma we carry. The burgeoning scientific field of epigenetics explores how environmental factors alter the expression of genes and how such alterations on a molecular level are carried forth across generations. Specifically, the area of epigenetic inheritance has wide-ranging implications for the transgenerational transmission of human experience. From my experience, ancestral, and even past life, trauma is one of the most significant sources of influence on how we navigate our experience and, therefore, how we create our personal reality. Of course, early life and acute instances of trauma are deeply impactful, though consider that these unfoldings have linkages to what has occurred prior and may in some ways be a re-enactment of the past. While we cannot yet fully validate this according to Western forms of scientific inquiry, we can see the profound strides in epigenetic research beginning to mirror what eastern philosophies and self-inquiry has illuminated for centuries. Personally, my work with traumatized clients as well as my own healing journey has validated the ways in which ancestral lineages wire and precondition the nervous system to manifest the traumatized states of brain, mind, and body.

When considering ancestral lineage or epigenetic inheritance in clinical research, researchers are understandably cautious in their interpretations. Studies are not yet able to isolate whether the source material of trauma is transmitted during prenatal and natal stages of development or even prior. Additionally, research acknowledges that it is still too difficult to differentiate the effects of parental behavior from heritable effects of biological transmission. Such is the age old question of nature or nurture. However, the resulting influence from generations of trauma in areas like the human stress response is profoundly clear. Though I acknowledge the limitations of western science in this area, I am intuitively guided to the understanding that trauma can be inherited ancestrally as a part of becoming embodied - in other words, the same genetic material that determines other aspects of your physical experience may determine the beliefs, thought patterns, and associated emotion states regarding how you see yourself, others, and the world. The implications of this understanding are profound and apply to all aspects of health and healing.

Examples of modern research findings include the epigenetic impacts of trauma on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) , the central nervous system (CNS), and the immune system. All of these systems are involved in the experience of emotional threat, resulting in effects on long term emotional and physical reactivity to stress. The commonly understood language of stress, and one’s relationship to it, is the foundational language for trauma and all modern disease. Stress is a psychophysiologic - mind and body - experience that contributes to every aspect of human survival and suffering, and our relationship to it determines how we show up in all situations. From a neurobiological perspective, stress can be understood as an experience of tension or demand on the body, which elicits the body’s survival response to threat and involves the HPA axis, CNS, and immune system, as well as the limbic system or “emotional brain.” The body’s stress response is not inherently bad, but for many people it has become maladaptive to present reality based on trauma conditioning. Specifically, these systems in the body that help you survive have become chronically reactive to perceptions of danger or threat in one’s environment and trigger “first responder” systems, such as releasing cortisol and inflammatory cells, when not necessary. In the modern era of medical science, inflammation is considered a primary source of most chronic illness and disease; however, rather than being a foundational cause, some researchers now agree it is more likely correlated with other pre-existing causes, such as the epigenetics or pre-conditioning of trauma in the body.

The manifestations of a preconditioned or traumatized stress response system include virtually all symptoms across the mental and physical landscape. The influence of these conditions spans from the classic psychiatric diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), to panic disorders, depression and anxiety, gut health, chronic pain, and even life-threatening disease or illness. All may be considered branches of a more deeply rooted trauma tree, or at least profoundly influenced by such conditions. I consider a deeper understanding of the epigenetics of trauma to be the foremost subject of all healing and wellness in the 21st century.

The hormone cortisol plays a vital role in the stress response and is expressed in almost every cell in the body to regulate genes that control development, metabolism, and immune response (Yehuda and Lehrner, p. 14, 2018). Yehuda and Lehrner found that generations of holocaust survivors had children with chronically low cortisol levels, which impacts an individual’s ability to respond to threatening situations as well as to turn off the stress response when it's over. Such examples span far and wide from more notable traumatic circumstances to the average stressors of generations past.The overall impression of this research is that most individuals are born into bodies that are already dysregulated and maladaptive to stress in some fashion. It is worth noting that resilience plays a role in these inherited conditions as well, so it is not all bad, but in a modern age rife with self-blame and individual responsibility, the world of what we carry can provide a vital entry way to deeper understanding and forgiveness for who we are and how we behave. Intuitively, I sense that the source material of what is transmitted is the energy of conditioned beliefs, though this will take longer to reveal itself in Western science.

Though debates on where trauma originates will no doubt continue for decades, I believe the gifts of intuitive wisdom and self-inquiry, in combination with a deeper understanding of genetic expression and alteration in the body’s core systems, will pave the way in healing and, therefore, allow human beings to fit their traumatic experience within a more expansive whole. With a deeper awareness of what we carry, we may be able to understand, dance with, and heal our traumatic experience more easily, allowing it to guide us to the fullest expression of ourselves.

References

Lehrner, A., & Yehuda, R. (2018). Cultural trauma and epigenetic inheritance. Development and Psychopathology, 30(5), 1763–1777.

Lehrner, A., & Yehuda, R. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243-257.

Pfeiffer, J. R., Mutesa, L., & Uddin, M. (2018). Traumatic stress epigenetics. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports, 5(1), 81-93.

Wolynn, M. (2017). It didn't start with you: how inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle. New York, New York, Penguin Books.