Archive for February, 2010

Sacred Spaces: Owning the Container

February 27th, 2010 by Michele

What is sacred space?

Let’s keep it simple today and begin by saying that all sacred energy in the human body has a matching physiological part. For example each chakra corresponds to a physical location and endocrine gland in the physical body. Chakras are also the core of our subtle bodies and emanate energy outward, creating the auric layers. The fourth chakra is the essence of the 4th layer. This energy belongs to each individual; it’s all part of our personal sacred space and contains our spiritual energies.

The lower abdomen and sacrum (sacred bone) contain the second chakra which corresponds to physical body emotions and our ability to be empathic, experiencing emotions and sensations from both inner and outer planes. We are all equally empathic, though some of us are more open, less defined, programmed to heal others, focused on outside energies or any number of similar things, making us more enmeshed in our empathy. Because of this we have trouble being in the world in many ways, for many reasons.

So what’s the remedy for what could be at the very least, distracting, and at its worst, physically debilitating or even injurious? Although it’s not that simple, the easiest answer and action is to own our containers so we know what is our own energy and what is something from the outside. Own the body, own a chakra, own your personal sacred spaces.

Breathe!

Breathing always sounds like the simple, even trite, answer to everything, because it honestly is the answer to everything. The source of breath is the element of air, and inside the body it supports all functions…it alchemizes the blood into an elixir. On an energetic level, breath is prana or chi, life force. it moves through the physcial body as a chemical compound (O2),through the subtle bodies as chi, and through the energy channels (Nadi’s) as prana. Whether physical or subtle, our bodies need breath to function, even to survive. It’s obviously all interlinked; we are in a constant state of interdependency.

Try this:
1) Breathe naturally at first, noticing where the breath goes in your body. Pay attention only to where it goes.
2) Now witness the quality of your breath, feel the physical sensations and notice any emotions arising.
3) Next, focus on breathing deeply into your lower abdomen, gently pushing the belly muscles outward to expand the container.
4) Gradually increase the size of the container allowing more breath to build inside your belly area.
5) Feel the breath brushing the insides of your container; the inner low back area (sacrum) and the inner front of the belly.
6) Notice how the breath circulates around vital organs. Feel the sensations and notice any emotions that arise.
7) Using your belly muscles, inhale and expand your container to it’s maximum; exhale contracting your container, using the muscles to pull the belly inward.
8) Can you feel the sacrum as you pull the muscles inward?
9) Press your finger into your abdomen half way between the navel and pubic bone. Focus on the rise and fall of this specific place as you breathe.
10) Continue to breathe in and out, using the muscles to expand and contract your container taking the breath deeper each time.
11) Repeat this 9 times, focusing on how you feel and any emotions that arise. Use your finger to guide you deeper into your abdominal container.

Eventually you’ll be able to perform more repetitions, and one day you’ll notice that your breath naturally expands and contracts the belly as you breath. You are occupying one of the most sacred spaces in your body and activating the subtle energies as well. With the breath you are moving out old stagnant energies, making room for the sacred energies to enter or stir within you. You have just a created space for your spiritual energies to anchor themselves. This is ownership.

After repeating this exercise 9 times with focus, what do you notice about yourself? Go out into the world, breathing deeply, owning your second chakra, anchoring yourself inside yourself. What’s different about your experience of yourself in the world?

Additional exercises in Awareness & Alchemy.

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Journey into the Shadows: Ownership

February 26th, 2010 by Michele

This is a week filled with synergy, symbiosis, dichotomy and revelation…a typical week around here.

One of my friends called me both a sloth and stubborn all in one week. At first I laughed and then when it was repeated twice, I reacted internally. If I weren’t anchored in my physical body I may not have seen this as just a projection. Even so, part of me really wanted to believe it was so, and because I am at times lazy or resistant, I could justify this as truth.
As it was, there were moments when I felt incredibly drawn, even compelled, as though these were valid reflections of who I am. Like a dog with a bone, I barred my teeth and didn’t let go of my self-imposed limitations, walking around for a few hours, rigid with protection. Why, I wonder, do I hold so tightly to my right for self-abasement?

Isn’t it just as easy to hold onto self-respect?

This week I’ve also powerfully closed some outstanding business, successfully completing each of the seven situations by being present, vulnerable, receptive and willing to communicate challenging information. How can I possibly be “what was said” with all these wonderful other things in play? There are moments when I can embrace these results, even within the paradox.

Still though, my mind holds onto the thought that I may really be a stubborn sloth. Sounds funny and also crazy, like a human mind at work! My program wants me to believe the negative report is true because it’s actually easier to distract myself with falsehood, to keep the Program in play becoming other people’s projected fears.

In some strange convoluted reality, this is way easier than being alone with the power that comes from owning a limitless capacity for transformation and spiritual freedom. Worse, it’s actually quite lonely to be self-empowered because humanity is so filled with apathy. Who would be my friends in this reality?

There, in that soup, I can hide in a second-rate place along with many others. It’s a place where I can only long for first-rate situations; hope for the future is ingrained as a good thing, yet in truth is just another distraction and sticking point. It is also the place where I can only attract third-rate experiences because in that place, I need desperately to feel better than something, anything.

Let’s count for a minute and get a linear reality check. Two negative reflections coming from the same person and seven positive results from seven different sources. How does this calculate into self-doubt? In what Universe could this possibly exist?

It’s the Program holding on for dear life. And, it’s imprinted in my brain, and its sibling may be stamped into yours!
Because it’s so tied to survival in my world, the Program must win or I will die, poof, disappearing from the face of the Earth. No growth, no completion, no legacy. Another double bind: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Why does this desire to “own” the negative construct far exceed the knowingness that I have just as much capacity for transformation in my body as I do out of the body when in a purely etheric state?

There’s at least one plausible response: it’s an imbalance in the brains; the limbic system and higher brains are not properly supporting one another. There is a disconnection in the communication link someplace in the network. To complicate things, the link between brain and lower body are blocked or impaired as well.

Walking can easily change this, re-establishing the connections and clearing up communication dysfunction. By engaging the body in a cross pattern, which involves the right and left sides of the neo-cortex as well as it’s corresponding limbs and the cerebellum (lower back brain)—home of our motor control center—we awaken nerves, circulatory routes and meridian channels between the brainy parts. It also connects upper and lower body through the pelvis; it’s the body’s fulcrum in relation to the Earth and where our energy is most efficiently anchored in the body.

Energetically, walking connects the root chakra at the pelvic floor and the 6th chakra at the mid brain and brainstem. We are also awakening the masculine and feminine principles through the same nadi’s and meridian channels. Get it? Right and left brain, feminine & masculine?

As I walk, I inhale and exhale, relaxing my body, releasing the discordant vibration of the Program. Energy and physiology begin to support their natural symbiosis, holding and balancing one another. The internal conspiracy unravels as I simultaneously focus on my sacred intention. I accept myself more and trust the potential for change taking place inside me, inside one simple breath cycle. Breath by breath, cell by cell, I release the trappings of my Program, making space to own this vessel and all its weaknesses.

Ownership to me is about accepting the weaknesses and the strengths, the formidable and the vulnerable aspects of ourselves. Its about knowing who we are as spirits in the body and moving forward as such.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? Let’s try holding that for a change.

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Self Mastery: The Program

February 24th, 2010 by Michele

The Program
An unnatural cellular construct; the deepest place from which we falsely respond to life.

Personal Discovery
Ever since I can remember I’ve searched for something that holds me so tightly deep in my bones, sometimes I can’t breathe. However unconsciously, and whatever it’s definitions over the years, I knew it both protected and exposed me–a dichotomous stronghold—a complex program embedded in my cells.

Memory told me I’d always had a reaction to outside energies, a compulsion to erect walls pushing away even the most loving gestures. I often felt as though I was being followed. No matter what the momentary emotion or thought, the common thread was always, “it’s going to hurt me.” And the voice became louder as I became more aware, simultaneously filled with fear.

Last fall I was guided to fathom the exact wording of my Program—”the fear of annihilation by external energies.” I’ve pruned my tree a lot during my lifetime, trimming and shaping, sometimes even cutting a limb permanently deep in the life rings. Lately I’ve been digging. Layer after layer, I pull it out by the roots.

What exactly is the Program?
The Program is like a river running through our lives. It’s also an overlay and construct woven deeply into every cell, affecting the physiological body and natural balance of energy in our subtle bodies. The Program has been with us from the beginning.

It starts with the unique interpretation of our environment from the time we occupy our fetus-bodies in the womb up to the time our brains become wholly functional around age five. As the operating system in every layer of our cellular structure, this Program affects all aspects of our inner and outer terrain. It expands and morphs each time we have a “familiar experience,” responding from inside its framework. It becomes more wired-in each time.

Early stimuli for our Programs include even the subtlest states experienced while we are in utero. Conception to birth, through infancy up to the development of our cognitive faculties, these states of being and interpretations of our environment are primarily psychic and emotional.

Because we lack the ability to reason our way out of situations, they are exaggerated during those vulnerable ages. At that time in our personal evolution, we don’t differentiate external realities from what we experience internally. Until we individuate and deprogram or clear this original construct, we are ruled by it.

The construct is like a prison and dictates the contexts in which we choose to operate; over and over, repeating experiences, behaviors and reactions. It binds us, defining the edges of our illusion.

As comfort seekers, we rarely risk the unknown, so very little change is actualized. It takes awareness, willingness, acceptance and a circumstance that kicks us out of our cozy nests. This impetus must be an expert guide, demanding we take a risk to move toward our end point.

For newsletter subscriptions or private sessions to help you with your own Program, go to Enlightenments and Education in “Quickening the Rhythms of Change.”

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Journey into the Shadows: the Program

February 24th, 2010 by Michele

Visualize 12 people in a darkened, womb-like room, screaming, jiggling and shaking, pounding on their lower abdomens with fists. The music and screeching are excruciatingly loud; the floors vibrate to the beat of tribal drums.

Strange that the only audible sound is that of each person’s voice ringing and buzzing inside their own ears, while the ambient noise of the room opens spaces deep inside their bones.

That’s where I was in January, at a holistic healing course performing some combination of these exercises every morning for three hours, 8 days in a row. It was miraculous.

Daily I experienced a deeper relationship with myself than each previous day. Through these exercises and more, I accessed and released emotions and states of being that were linked to a fear-ridden operating program that has kept me imprisoned my whole life.

At one point near the end of the course I was transported back into my baby body, re-experiencing the emotions of my life from birth to 6 months–the neediness and fear, the jealously and greediness of infancy.

Who thinks this way?

Like the cycle of creation, the key features of deep healing are awareness, digestion, ownership and ultimately the destruction of old patterns. Sometimes it happens in a moment; sometimes it involves more details and effort.

Awareness begins as a thought or idea, digestion is about stomaching the resultant emotions, and ownership of these states is experienced in the lower, physical energy centers. With this sequence and a lot of trust, the Program moves out with activity in the densest facet of our beings—exercising the physical body.

And tapping on the delete button was precisely what we did as we pushed our voices, our strength, our emotional limits and for some, the edges of sanity and courage.

My intention was to find and destroy its roots, thereby deleting my Program. The success I created here is the result of first identifying the Program and then finding the willingness to risk living without it. Think about this for a moment…risk living without the Program…hmmm.

All this coupled with a strong commitment to take action and I’ve come away with a new sense of ownership—feeling more anchored and present in my body; a stronger sense of rootedness and worth; a taste of trust that everything I need is right here within me.

Is the Program gone? Probably not completely, yet I’ll know if I got the whole root when the next rain comes. Am I perfect…absolutely not…there’s a lot that I haven’t mentioned yet…you can follow along with all this in my newsletter, “Quickening the Rhythms of Change,” or check back here for more stories of what led up to this moment and of course what comes afterward.

I do feel much clearer about what is mine inside of me and what is not mine on the outside. I’m much more willing to be a bit empty and undefined by what’s out there. I don’t feel as though I need to pump myself up creating a false sense of value or cater to my personal illusion. More than that, I don’t need to give away my gifts and accomplishments nor deflate myself for any relationship.

Certainly, another heavy veil has been lifted.

What about you? Even if you aren’t planning to attend a confrontational workshop, how often do you take the time to play detective, going back through your patterns to find what really drives you?

My Program was sacred ground and the heaviest anchor I’ve had to this plane of existence. However dense and painful, it’s my comfort zone and therefore not so simple to locate and remove. Many friends and teachers have gently tugged on my pillows for some time now.

What is your deepest fear? What are the common threads woven tightly into your daily experiences, every day, all your life? How often do you call in a new context or an honest person to kick you in the rear so you can witness yourself from a different vantage point?

Learning to accept the fact that this tapestry exists makes it easier to see, digest and dissolve. When we consciously and purposely call up the Program, we are more able to accept our weaknesses, and all weakness revolves around the Program.

Do you accept your weaknesses? Do you take action when you get an epiphany? Wouldn’t you rather do this consciously, by choice rather than by apathy or accident?

I’ve always been more like a tree pruner than a root digger, yet the Program is definitely the root, residing at the core of who I am. It’s not something that just happens to shift when the wind blows, nor is it something that washes away with the ebbing tides. We planted it that deeply for a reason.

Imagine; private rooms with a view of the rising sun over the red rock mesas of Sedona. It was primarily a silent course, so our attention rarely ventured outside our inner terrain except to look at the vistas and dark night sky filled with stars and the gradually waning moon. When the time came to break the silence, we played as though we’d known each other forever.

Maybe we just knew ourselves that much better.

“Quickening the Rhythms of Change,”

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Journey into the Shadows: In the beginning

February 23rd, 2010 by Michele

Recently I’ve made a choice to go consciously into the depths of the unknown. Of course, it’s my unknown as self-mastery is a personal road filled with the unique experiences I create in my daily life. The same applies to you.

Instead of being knocked unconscious by the wind or swept away by my emotional sea, I’ve decided to stand at the top of the stairs, purposely walking downward and inward, much like Inanna did back when the Gods mated with humans.

Here, I write about my journey with the intention of integrating it within myself and showing you that you are not alone in your growth.

Of course we aren’t alone, as most of us have visited the unknown many times. However spontaneously we’ve been tossed into those shadows, usually we are forced rudely in, only to feel victimized by its grasp and run out more abruptly than we arrived.

That seems to stir up a lot of fear and avoidance, doesn’t it? Let’s do it differently from now on.

I’d like to share this journey of mine with you…if you are up for it. I will expose each step I take, the vulnerability, the poignancy, weakness and strength, as well as the amusement I feel along the way. You can stop in anytime; you can look back at the segments already past and you can go your own way at any time.

I’ve actually grown to like my shadow and want to know it better. So, I am walking into the dungeon to meet and fall in love with all that I am…I ask the Goddess and God for revelation every day. Luckily for me, I have a lot of enthusiasm for exploring the unknown.

And, with the Queen of Heaven and Earth as my guide, there will be no wrong turns…only new and different meetings and musings along the way.

There are many blogs about the mundane world; some are even made into movies because they are palatable by a broad audience or even because they parallel the life of some famous person. On the other hand, many people actually want to spend their time with inner growth, so I figured there was room for a blog on Self-Mastery; one that fuels the fires of transformation!

Originally an open discussion focusing on health and consciousness for women in the menopausal, middle age years, this blog is no longer gender specific. It speaks to both men and women of any age. After all, a balance of masculine and feminine is the common thread in all Universal principles, and what depicts this more effectively than the dance between shadow and light, Moon and Sun?

As a deepening expose of what is proposed in my monthly newsletter, “Quickening the Rhythms of Change,” the only real desires here are to write and contribute. I want to add something to our world through a common intention and journey into our fullest potential for consciousness.

Feel free to comment and add your personal experiences; click on the individual blog post in the upper right, scroll down to the bottom and add your piece (or peace). I am grateful for your presence in witnessing me and sharing your world…we are only holograms of the Universe, microcosms that reflect human Oneness and individuality.

The Energetic Connection

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