by user_dd | Jun 3, 2019 | Transitory Thoughts
One of my favorite parts of a journey is realizing I just got off the train. Let me explain…
Often I find myself wishing for the greener side of life (literally: more greenbacks, more green protein shakes, and more time in my favorite place: a lush and verdant forest).
Manifestation 101
Formulating a desire, which Law of Attraction lovers will recognize, is what jumpstarts the creative potential of the universe—the start of our journey. It’s the first step in creating what we want.
Then life happens. Stuff starts to breakdown. Sometimes it’s a crappy experience, sometimes it’s exhilarating. Destruction is the first step of creation—you have to make room for what you’re bringing in!
During this process, the strength and consistency of our desire, despite what life throws our way, is another way we communicate with the universe. The more we hold our desire steadfast in our mind’s eye, and in our heart’s intention, the more solid a foothold it gains in our manifest reality. At this point, we’re on the train, traversing a myriad landscapes on the way to our goal.
Just as we’re not in control while on the train—the tracks will take us wherever the universe has saw fit to lay them—our creative process can feel both completely intention and out of control, like going through a dark period where it seems like no matter what we do, the universe is ignoring our desire. The train keeps following those tracks that we laid down with our initial desire.
Life is happening, but that outcome we are focused on is just not appearing. We’re not in control, and what we do doesn’t matter. Now here’s the secret of creating exactly what you want. Most people don’t even see it when it happens right before their eyes, but that’s why it’s a secret.
Secret: Get off the train
After you’ve gone through that dark period where it feels like you had no control, what happens next is—you get off the train. You stop trying. Poof. Bam. Done. JUST LET GO.
Before we even know it, that journey we thought we were on is over. And we didn’t get what we want! Or so it seems…
At this point, take an honest look back at your original desire. The universe always delivers what’s true for you in your heart. Did that scary accident or unbelievable serendipity create something in your life that has yet to be recognized? Was it more real and true than what you thought you were creating? Was it exactly what you wanted, even if your mind doesn’t recognize it as so?
Chat with a friend about this. Get some objective feedback. Let us know what you discover.
Over the years, I’ve found I created exactly what I wanted, even if it took me awhile to recognize it after I got off the train.
by user_dd | Mar 22, 2019 | Transitory Thoughts
I got home late on the Spring Equinox from a seminar I didn’t really want to go to that evening. I knew it before I even left, and I’m kicking myself for the wasted time in traffic getting there. But listening and responding to my body/energy level needs is still an aspect of myself that I’m mastering.
Anyway, I finally got home. As I jumped out of my Lyft and skipped up to the door, excited to be back at my peaceful repose, I glanced at my front door. Earlier I had planned to sacrifice the now, very dead wreath hanging on my otherwise cheerful red door.
I took it down remembering my intention to do a Spring Equinox ritual that evening, and realized it was going to take a little longer than expected. Each branch of my wreath was meticulously wire-wrapped to a metal frame. I had no intention of burning the metal, so I found my wire cutters and set out to separating the prickly bits from the smooth wire frame holding it all together, while sitting on my front porch listening to music and enjoying the night air.
Preparation
I realized that deconstructing my wreath was a little like constructing a magickal tool. Doing the work to create your own tools for ritual connects you to the energy better, even if it means separating wires from each other so you can burn your wreath without leftover waste.
Once separated into its constituent parts, I found a box to sweep the mess I had made on my front porch into, and set out for my backyard with this makeshift cauldron full of dead wreath. The symbology was emerging.
I don’t have a fire pit, and everything back there looked very flammable. So I set down my box and returned to my kitchen to find a bucket and fill it with water. Every ritual that contains more than a candle’s flame of fire could benefit from a little ‘water insurance.’ I took the bucket back outside and set it near my proposed fire pit.
This was a proposed ‘fire pit’ however because all I had was empty space where it would have been very convenient to have a firepit. I couldn’t just burn my wreath and cardboard box on the pavement behind my house. I needed something to burn on. So, I looked around and found some old cinder blocks to put together that I could set my box, I mean, cauldron onto.
Now I was all set! I had a central altar in the form of a fire offering with enough room to walk around when I called in the directions.
Invocation
Right…calling in the directions. It’s about now that I started to think about the exact intention of my ritual. What is it that I’m performing this ritual for anyway? I decided to align my space setting with the Hindu pantheon, for which I have a special relationship, so I went back inside to my magickal library to find the book with the random table I needed: deities from all the different traditions mapped to different elemental and solar symbols. Once my symbols are mapped to the elements, I can map each to one of the four directions.
Ok, I had my fire sacrifice. I had the deities I was invoking. My intention was emerging if not quite solidified. Having done space setting basically daily for the last 6 years, I had my preparatory rituals memorized. I was set!
I performed the magickal operations for clearing and setting space that I have learned in my magickal tradition—the Lineage of King Salomon. Since I was outside, under the full moon light, nature provided a lot of the sacredness of the space too!
Then I lit my fire and started calling in the directions. Afterward, I went around my circle again calling on the Hindu deities that I chose to work with in this ritual. I invoked them as poetically as possible, trying to draw a link between their unique personality or power, and the intention on my ritual.
Once the invocation was complete, I just stared at the fire. Learning to pause, and allow the energy to sink in, is wisdom that has come with experience. Try not to rush through your invocations, allow the energies time to get into the space and get comfortable with what you’ve created, especially if it doesn’t look all that grand (aka a cardboard box on cinder blocks). It is the intention that counts for everything!
Prayer
I stared into the fire, it was now time to say my prayer. I had created this sacred space on a beautiful, full moon evening, with a blazing fire for a reason. What was it? I searched my heart and my prayer emerged:
Great Spirit! With this fire, burn away all that does not serve my fullest expression. Allow the light of this fire to illuminate inside me all that yearns to be revealed and celebrating. Allow the warmth of this fire to tease open my heart to allow others in. Let my worries and concerns be carried away by the smoke, and let the coals that sprinkle the Earth become seeds for the new, flourishing me in service to my community.
So this is my prayer for you. I hope you enjoyed your Spring Equinox and felt some of this intention fill your life as well!
by user_dd | Feb 26, 2019 | Alchemy, Transitory Thoughts
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In the last post of this series, we covered the second stage of alchemy: dissolution. We also reminded ourselves that it’s important to remain non-attached. At the same time, you will not complete the alchemy process powerfully without uncovering your ‘burning desire’ that drives you towards your goal. Without the attractive force of this desire pulling you, you are in danger of getting lost in the journey of this alchemical transformation. Finding your way out is impossible until a concrete goal emerges.
Into a million pieces
As life continues to throw curve balls, we get thrown out of our normal routine, and start to see what the essence of our life is. Normally, this essence gets drowned in the day-to-day dross of our waking life, and sometimes we access it through the subconscious when we sleep. But overall, we are usually unaware of the influence this essence has on our thoughts, behaviors, habits, and outcomes in life.
When we get out of our normal routine, or try to alter our life in some way (like learning a new habit), it’s not uncommon for anger, resentment, frustration, and depression to emerge. We can often have trouble with emotional boundaries as well, not being sure exactly what we want, which has the unfortunate bonus feature of making us more prone to conflict in our relationships.
Have you ever felt so emotionally fragile like you could burst into a million shards of glass on the ground at any moment? That’s separation.
There is perspective to be gained by separating and distinguishing the parts of our life that often go unnoticed. Human beings are meaning making machines, and we go around constantly making up stories about what others think of us, how otherwise meaningless actions have ruined our day, and what we’re going to do about the past when we act in the future. Most times we are not actually present to (and appreciating) what is!
Taking a moment to see each of those stories for what they are, mental objects that take up time and energy, that drive our thoughts, opinions, and actions. They enable us to move those otherwise subconscious drives to the conscious mind where we can evaluate and choose our relationship with them, rather than be driven by them. Freud was a big proponent of this theory of unconscious drives, and ended up taking it further, forming the concept of the id (or instincts/drives) as opposed to the superego (or conscience), which, from a metaphysical perspective, is necessarily aligned with our Higher Self.
In this stage of alchemy called separation, we separate out the parts of the whole that we were not noticing before, and we look at them. We start to see all kinds of relationships we never saw before. We compare and contrast the different parts of ourselves that make being a human so rewarding, giving color to our experience and rhythm to our steps. We have to have the honesty and integrity required within ourselves to acknowledge those parts of us that we don’t necessarily like before we can move towards wholeness.
Seeing the unseeable
After a particularly nasty breakup with his ex, Riley basically repressed her feelings for a year and it took her awhile to feel open to dating again. Understandably, when she put herself out there to date again, she had all kinds of caveats. “I’m never dating that kind of person again,” she decided. So she evaluated every prospective partner that came into her life from the lens of that list of traits she’d rather like to avoid, lest she find herself in the same position as last year, emotionally bruised and battered, closing herself off again to the happiness she was sure she could find if she just had another (not so crazy) partner.
She had one particularly memorable dating experience where, after dinner, she was feeling particularly attracted to her date, and decided to invite him over to her house for an after dinner aperitif. No sooner had they entered then the comments began. “Oh, what a nice space. I really like your sofa. How long have you lived in this house? Where did you get those curtains?” Riley was beside herself, one of the things on her list was no critical comments, because she felt emotionally shunned by her ex, who was always evaluating and criticizing her. Riley felt like she could never live up to his standard, so she ended the relationship.
Now it was happening all over again, except that it was happening with each person she became close with. Once the intimacy started to increase, she would start to get these comments. First they were relatively innocuous, but then later, there was some tension or even outright conflict. Riley didn’t know how to resolve this recurring issue.
One day, while at coffee with a friend, Riley was detailing how her most recent date wasn’t going to cut it again, when her friend stopped her and leaned over to say, “Riley, don’t you see a pattern here. Whenever you want to get intimate with someone, you immediately close yourself off, which defeats the whole purpose!”
Riley started to look at her most recent dates, and she was flabbergasted. Her friend was right, she always reacted with resistance whenever anyone got close enough to ask her a question that really mattered. She withdrew as soon as people were just getting to know her. This was no way to create a relationship.
Once Riley saw this in her behavior, she was able to catch herself going down that trail, and decided to she her experience differently. “No, he’s not trying to criticize me, he’s just curious because he doesn’t know! I haven’t shared that part of myself with him yet.”
After this, Riley was able to have a relatively long-term relationship again. Though still looking for that life partner, she is enjoying emotionally-fulfilling relationships both with her intimate partners and her friends.
Reflective Quote:
“He [William S Burroughs] has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know… But since then I’ve been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
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by user_dd | Feb 15, 2019 | Transitory Thoughts
I was recently at dinner with some friends and our conversation turned metaphysical. You know, as you do on cold, wintery Pacific NW evenings. Warmed by the glow of the fire, we immersed ourselves in the topic of growth and consciousness expansion. Particularly, we were interested in the nature of learning and how people integrate their consciousness-expanding experiences into their life from meditation, tantra, plant medicine and other entheogens, etc.
This topic is near and dear to my heart, having studied it tirelessly for the last decade. I think Brandon stated the point most succinctly: “You know it’s a wisdom teaching when you can’t unlearn it.”
And I thought, this is why Hermetics is an oral tradition! We tend to not write things down, because anything you write down will just be your mind trying to make sense of what your heart already knows. And when your heart knows something, there’s no forgetting it. That wisdom is with you always.
You’ll never forget a wisdom teaching
So when you hear a wisdom teaching, you’ll know it’s legitimate when you can’t forget it. Although your mind might forget it, your heart will always operate with that wisdom from that point on. It’s also another reason why wisdom traditions cannot be taught over the internet. At some point, there has to be a physical meeting of the teacher/student to get the energetic download of the information. It’s the living presence that is an integral part of the experience of the wisdom teachings.
Science Behind the Heart
Those of you who follow the Heart Math Institute already know that the heart’s primarily “language” is electromagnetic in nature. The electromagnetic field of the heart is exponentially bigger than that of the mind. This means that forces that are electromagnetic in nature can affect your heart. This has two practical applications: 1) your heart force is more powerful than your mind force—remember that next time you’re analyzing your partner, and 2) you are a generator of electromagnetic force! So pay attention to your impact on others’ hearts. This is also why presence is required to convey information to the heart. As an aside, please don’t try to convey messages that are emotional in nature over text message, it NEVER works.
Have you ever had that experience of wanting to fall asleep when in a retreat or teaching or some kind, even though you’ve had plenty of sleep? Forces that affect the heart can completely overwhelm the mind, rendering it kind of useless. This is why sometimes people want to go to sleep when exposed to a wisdom teaching, their mind becomes overwhelmed trying to process information that’s actually meant for the heart.
If you want to communicate to someone’s heart, you must speak the language of emotion or the heart will barely ‘hear’ it. I encourage you to put this concept to good use this week, and Happy Valentine’s Day!
Thoughts or comments on this? Please use the comments section below.
by user_dd | Jan 18, 2019 | Transitory Thoughts
When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to be Merlin, the magician. Our weekly trips into town to visit the library from our rural Ohio farm allowed me to fill my imagination with epic fantasy stories and romantic Arthurian legends. 
I could almost see the mists of Avalon opening before me when the fog settled on the fields, making the grasses glisten in the early morning sun, as it often did in early Summer. I had the benefit of lots of free time, and 80 acres of wild forest to explore. My favorite moment was falling asleep in the branches of my favorite tree, confident it would hold me safe, until I awoke again.
Now, I wonder if I ever woke up from that tree. The world continues to surprise and delight me, being full of fantastic people and things and experiences. Miracles happen all around me everyday. They get so little fanfare however you’d barely notice they happened, but they’re there. It’s amazing how little we see of what we don’t expect to see.
A crevasse of my own making
I didn’t always see life from rose-colored glasses though. There were years where I was hiding so no one would see me. I developed elaborate ruses and games to elude anyone really trying to know me at all. I was a master obscurer, but what I didn’t realize was that I was only tricking myself. While I left others confused, I was in an even deeper crevasse of my own making. I couldn’t access my strengths and gifts, because I separated myself from their power. I didn’t want anyone to know my true powers, my true gifts. I didn’t want anyone to SEE ME!
I hated expectations, I feared assumptions, I definitely did not want to be put in a box. I was allowing others to imprison me in my own mind. They were just trying to ‘get’ me, I was too busy running away to see that.
It wasn’t until I leaned into my discomfort, and got really uncomfortable, that I started to see what was going on. My third grade teacher taught me the benefits of discomfort when I cried my way through a book report presentation in front of the whole class. Surprisingly, I’m not afraid of public speaking today. Another time I felt a lot of discomfort was pretty ironic when you think about it: I was admitting the truth of my sexual desires to my partner. He’s still around, haha!
It’s amazing how the most true things about us, deep down inside, can be the source of so much fear.
What happens when you encounter fear is that geometries of thought and emotion get thrown into your aura as you try to make sense of the new information. But they don’t stay there forever. They do muck you up for a time, but depending on the strength of your energetic systems they either get pulled back into your system and re-assimilated, providing a new puzzle for you to solve, or they get pushed out of your system and recycled back into the universal symphony, interminably singing it’s glory all around us. Remember, everything is energy and energy is vibration. Who doesn’t like to listen to music?
I like to listen
Eventually I had help. I found a path, the initiatory path, the path of of my soul’s progression, and I began walking down it to see what I would find. I didn’t just happen on the information in the above paragraph. I sought it out. After moments of intense desire and prayer, I started to get little hints. Later I realized I was guided, and thus I got there a lot faster than many of my peers. And now I see what’s happening and I have tools to handle it because that guidance helped me resolve and release what was holding me back in life. That way I could get back into the game, winning life one step at a time. It ain’t always easy, but it’s a helluva ride!
I think at this point, you’re probably pretty convinced there’s a higher power helping out, guiding your life, assisting you in times of need. I believe that too. And whether it’s true or not is not really what I want to get into, but even if you just pretended for a moment that it was true, how would that change your life? How would you act differently? And even if you didn’t believe in some invisible force that can’t be truly understood or measured, what if you heard some good advice from a spiritual friend? Would it change your what you do at all? Would you listen?
I think the answer is ‘yes,’ because the more assured you feel, the more confidence you have, the more risks you’re going to take on this crazy trip called life. And there’s nothing truly great achieved in life without taking risks. The worst that can happen here is that you don’t get the result you’ve been looking for. But if I told you people have been walking this path of thousands of years because it works for them, do you think it’d work for you too?
If you’re curious, come learn more at my upcoming lecture on “Upgrading your Energy Body with a DNA Life Activation” Jan 29th at 7pm at Incite Healing Center. I promise the information will only help you on your path. It did when I heard it six years ago, and my life continues to accelerate in the most beautiful ways.
I pray you have peace, and joy, and I pray I get to see you soon so we can drop into some conversation over tea. Life begets life, how will you live yours? Covered up like I was for many years, hiding from the Light, or will you come out and play to discover where the seat of your joy lies?
The invitation is open to you.
by user_dd | Dec 20, 2018 | Transitory Thoughts
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In one of my recent coaching sessions, the topic of power came up. With the end of the year and sales goals looming, my client was beginning to stress about upcoming deadlines and things she needed to do to succeed in her business. I took her along a journey to understand the nature of power and how it applies to her situation:
When I ask you “What is power?” what comes to mind?
In this case, my client mentioned that it was the freedom to be herself, and many people say that—Freedom. So then I asked, well, “What is freedom?”
Her answer was, essentially, ‘Power.’
So in this case she’s defining power with circular reasoning, something we all do. Power is freedom and freedom is power. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, except that running around in logical circles all day makes it difficult to reach our next level in life. If we truly want to take life by the horns and drive, we have to get out of our circular reasoning.
A liberated perspective on power
Power moves energy. But we can only move a thing with more energy than the tendency of that thing to stay in the same state (i.e. this is how we overcome inertia). We have to bring more power into our lives to make the changes we want to make. For the purposes of this conversation, I will define power as your focus on a way of being. By focusing on who you have to be to achieve the goal of making more money, or achieving ideal health, you have to focus on being. Often brute force willpower does not get you there, and it can fizzle out quickly when you are faced with obstacles.
However, a way of being—like generous, caring, flexible and so on does not fizzle out. It’s simply a choice we make. Regardless of what’s happening around us, in our empowerment tradition, we believe that we always have choice. You don’t need to be powerful to choose, choice is something you have at all times. By choosing our way of being and focusing on being that way, we have the power granted to that level of being.
How does who you want to be determine your level of power?
Perhaps you want to be a bookseller, or an insurance agent, or a ‘high-powered’ executive in some large corporation. Each of these roles necessitates a certain level of power. By focusing on being a bookseller, insurance agent, or executive, and by embodying those roles, you will obtain that power.
You’d need to have the power to buy and store and ship books if you were a bookseller. You’d need to be able to represent individuals and companies to large insurance carriers if you were an insurance agent. And you’d need to have the authority to hire, fire, and redefine roles; create strategies; and otherwise administrate your team if you were an executive.
Indeed, society agrees to give each of these roles a certain level of power so that they can perform the functions they need to perform. The key is that you and I let those people filling those roles have that power, because we’re interested in a world that works. We’re interested in roles having the power they need in order to do their job. It just makes sense.
Organizations hire people for roles, and then they have the power that comes with that role. If the legitimacy of the organizations couldn’t give the role enough power to do the job, the whole system would break down pretty quickly and the world wouldn’t make sense. Insurance agents wouldn’t be able to sell you insurance, booksellers wouldn’t be able to obtain an inventory of books, and executives wouldn’t be able to make their organization more effective by building and managing their team. Being able to perform these functions is the whole reason to have power in the first place.
As an empowered person, what function do YOU want to perform in your world? In your community? And what roles have those functions?
This is who you want to be. Once you define yourself as that role, and get society to agree that you are that role, you will start to receive the power associated with that role. In this way, who you want to be, indeed who you create yourself to be, determines your level of power.
Your ability to create ways of being in the world literally determines the type and amount of power that you have access to.
What follows is that you are only limited by your imagination of who you can be to the world! So go out there and create yourself today. The world is waiting.
Thoughts or comments on this? Please use the comments section below.
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