Archive for the ‘Mastery’ Category

Seeds of Creation

January 1st, 2011 by Michele

When we create, watching our seeds flower in another’s backyard…when we create, knowing we may not directly reap the financial rewards and notoriety…when we continue to create with enthusiasm, moving ourselves aside…when we create with gratitude, allowing the seeds of our creations to land and grow where they may…this is true manifesting.

“You don’t have to realize your visions personally to be a manifester,” the voice came in loud and clear.

Two days ago I stood at Skylonda’s Meditation Point where I’d been many times before, looking out through the mist, listening to the water falling below, smelling the rich and soggy earth, breathing-in the lichen-clear air. A stone labyrinth nestled among giant Redwood fairy rings has now made it’s imprint where there was once only dirt and weeds. This has always been sacred ground and many seeds have been planted and sown in that very place, even in a minuscule portion of it’s history–the 20 years I’ve been visiting.

Upon exiting the sacred circle maze that day, I bowed, realizing I’d dreamed-in this labyrinth and everything that surrounded it: a non-profit educational retreat center that catered to consciousness and spirituality. It wasn’t mine, yet I’d helped bring it to fruition. For over 25 years I’d been quietly creating this retreat center and holding space for it’s ever-evolving expansion. It began in 1983 during one of my anxiety attacks. I first wrote my dream on tiny sheets of paper to distract myself from the painful and frightening panic in my body.

Then, the idea of a retreat soothed me and gave me something to look toward in an otherwise fearfully existential time in life.

Nine years later I read about a resident hiking center in the Redwoods just south of San Francisco in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was my dream actualized, a fruit bearing tree, my plan and personal vision in real time. Back then I called immediately and asked for a tour, telling them my story. I could see their smiles through the phone, though I wasn’t hired immediately because they’d just opened the doors officially two months before and didn’t yet have a lot of business. Forty days later I received a call to fill in for someone who would be out sick during the upcoming busy Christmas week.

Eventually I gave up my personal clients and two other part time massage jobs, and I didn’t leave that beautiful place for three years, working inside the brilliance of my vision. It was my muse and a dreamy job, that’s certain. I hiked, I talked to the guests and the trees, I taught yoga, stretching and consciousness, and I danced over people’s bodies, massaging, relaxing and escorting them on a week-long journey into their unknown inner worlds.

I was definitely in heaven.

Over the last 15 years I’ve revisited the idea of a retreat center business, motivated mostly from a frequent longing for my old job. I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time modifying and giving much consideration to my original dream and the desire to open my own place. An option I’ve held for so long it’s like a phantom limb, I recently let go of the idea altogether, knowing it would never become my life’s work. It was a really great dream though, and up until last year, one I regularly brought back when I felt lost, alone, uncertain about the future and unclear about what I might “do” in, and for, the world someday.

I’ve been back to visit Skylonda many times too, watching it move through four owners since its inception, and three very different incarnations. Skylonda is now Stillheart, and I spent three days there this last week, hiking, reminiscing, talking to my Redwood friends, looking around at my upgraded vision, dreaming-in my next incarnation.

I am blessed to have heard the voice at the labyrinth. I am even more blessed to have listened and embraced my next level of realization and actualization. Definitely uncomfortable in my dream’s absence, and feeling a bit like Humpty Dumpty, yesterday I sat atop the fence; it dug relentlessly into my bottom, urging me to jump off its post.

Today, on this first day of 2011, I struggle to embrace the recognition that not all of my dreams and visions are for me to accomplish in the real world. Today I also sit half on and half off the fencepost here, with no identity and no dreams to which I am attached. I’ve only the knowledge that whatever I dream-in will manifest itself in some form of perfection, someplace, for anyone willing to see it, to act on it, and for anyone who desires to participate.

Well, I do have one little thing in the early stages of expansion. It’s a dream I’ve had my whole life and today I’ve just put it into real time. We’ll see how it goes when real time isn’t holiday time!

The Energetic Connection offers a podcast series, Fuel for the Fire, and online courses in Self Mastery. You can take a single session or participate in a full course or program.

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Self Mastery: Insight & Reason

December 17th, 2010 by Michele

The Scripting

One individual plays the lead in each vignette to follow. Can you find common threads?

A nine-year-old girl bounces off the bus and runs for the front door to tell her Mother about the incredible day she’s had at school. She’s met with great acknowledgment, hugs and musings about how smart she is. By the time the little girl is 12, this type of support begins to fade and when she reaches her early teens the outer reflections are almost completely shut down, replaced with comments about how she is too full of herself. As her childhood relationship with her Mother fades away, the girl goes within to find both her answers and her worth, doing more observing than interacting. As her the relationship with her inner voice matures, she occasionally offers up her wisdom in the face of family issues. Occasionally her comments are tolerated, yet mostly they are disregarded, or met with lots of resistance, criticism and invalidation.

“You’re such a know it all!” her Mother says this venomously, her teeth clenched, at least once daily.

A man and a woman in a potential romantic relationship are talking about their spiritual experiences on the phone one evening. They have a lot in common; movement and body-oriented therapies are at the root of their personal spiritual practice. He speaks to his decades of Tai Chi practice, she speaks about the many different modalities she’s learned and practiced over the past 25 years, all of which play a deep role in her current self-discovery. He speaks loudly and authoritatively about his teachers and gurus, the transmission he’s received from years of focusing on one thing and how this is the only way to a deeper understanding and spiritual advancement. She “gets” what he’s saying as her cells remember many lifetimes as a yogi, a monk and other similar paths. She’s also experienced depth in the energy of his particular method when she attended a 6-week class several years ago.

“You’re really arrogant aren’t you?” he says this softly, almost off-handedly, though its point searches expertly for the target inside her.

One friend asks another friend for reflections on her increasingly intense life situation. Nothing new, it’s been going on for 15 years and input is requested several times annually on this particular topic. The responder has gone from being thrilled and enthusiastic to help her friend out of the dilemma, to being disengaged, responding from a distant place of reason. Even so, she continues to share her insights honestly.

“Why are you so distant? You seem so disinterested?” the distressed friend asks. The input goes un-received for the umpteenth time. Or, she says, “Please don’t confront me now, your certainty is really scary!”

Raising the Bar

This level of consciousness has a glass ceiling. In spite of its high level of beingness, it’s also like an unstable atom ready to either shatter the glass or to bounce off its invisible barrier, back into the chasm of anger, hopelessness and unconsciousness where it readies itself for another climb upward. Under its transparent umbrella, there’s a lot of angst and suffering, a breeding ground of inner, existential commentary coupled with fear of advancement into the unknown.

The way through this false transparency is humility, to ask and actually receive support from outside our own belief systems, beyond our rigidly held dogmas. Breakthrough happens when we are able to relinquish our controls and begin to see that other people are realizing and actualizing right alongside us.

Key in this discovery is to embrace all of humanity, to recognize our common potential, and simultaneously to sustain our individuation, our certainty and confidence, our will and courage within.

David Hawkins identifies this level of consciousness in his book, “Power vs. Force,” as ‘Reason,’ the home of great scientists, statesmen, religious leaders, lawmakers and Nobel Prize winners.

These people have reached the pinnacle in their vocations and careers, in the context of the highest, solely human, potentials. They are at the top of their financial games, they rule world governments and churches, they establish the height of the bar for global discovery and advancement.

There is one very crucial and forgotten piece here: the fact that we humans are filled with divine energy, that we are spirits embodied and we have a soul connection to a higher power, God or creator. Although many here are connected to spirituality and religion, we act like atheists in the context of our daily choices and actions, standing almost exclusively on our personal willfulness and physical energies.

Our lack of engagement with a greater spirit eventually exhausts our comparatively tiny resource bucket. Dangerous is the self-bred arrogance that comes with our intellectual knowingness, or at least the belief we have reached the top of some distant monument to ourselves, overlooking our domain.

Some of us know spirituality exists in this place, and likewise make statements to the fact that we’re following a soul path, yet we forget to include the divine in our daily lives. We forget to consult with our inner voices, our higher minds, the Gods and Goddess of our hearts, and our divine guidance.

Personally I see this as a place with immature satisfactions, a place with false floors. It’s also an important stepping-stone to achieving and sustaining a causal relationship with the eternal truths.

It’s a place we can visit occasionally while we grow into our integrity. Here we can sit in the sun and weed out attachments to dogma, gradually decrease our propensity for intellectual pontification and surrender our complacencies. A station with many benefits, we can stop here to gather Cosmic energy; we can observe where we’ve come from, and the road to where we’re going.

This is a little taste of what the Energetic Connection’s online Self Mastery Programs offer. You can try a little taste with our Single Servings or you can commit to the full course. Check it out…you might enjoy a little company on your journey into the unknown.

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Commentary

November 28th, 2010 by Michele

Dear Friends and Fellow Journeyers

I thought it appropriate to address this particular concern today, the first day of advent, and one day following an all time high level of blog visitors.

I love to hear from you about my postings and your personal experiences related to the topic matter. And, I will post your comments, even your links, under the following conditions:

1. When there is a real, honest and connected commentary associated with the blog material
2. When there is no web address nor any promotional links associated with your comment
3. When the web address is an obvious, clear, clean and spiritually-oriented or personal growth related site
4. When you post my blog material on your blog with an author reference and link back to my blog

Thanks for understanding the nature of my writings and intentions and for perpetuating this type of transmission and education.

Happy Holidays!

The Energetic Connection offers online courses and podcasts in self-mastery, opening the body to spirit and quickening the rhythms of change.

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Self Mastery: Self Negation

November 24th, 2010 by Michele

To deny our soul is deep apathy. To deny our humanness creates enmity in our hearts. To deny our brilliant mind is disconnection. To deny our divinity is complete self-negation.

There is always a state of being that doesn’t feel quite right, a level of consciousness that doesn’t fit properly, or maybe one that we’ve worn so often before, its bare and fraying threads are long forgotten. It could also be an old trend, or something we bought years ago yet stuffed so far back in the closet, we don’t know it still hangs in there.

Self-negation is that for me.

It is, to date, the most challenging bit of subtext I’ve chosen to address, re-writing it at least four times over. And even though I’m speaking from personal experience and about a much softer version than its potential, this is the only way I could really squeeze myself into the fabric of self-negation.

Your perspective and interpretation may be very different.

At a soul level, self-negation is incredibly insidious; its apathetic relatives quietly eat away at our passions, our enthusiasm for life and our amusement. Akin to self-enmity, it freezes our self-acceptance and leaves us wandering lonely through an empty winter battlefield, cloaked in those old tatters against the winds of emotion and memory.

“There is an emotional violence in people who do not believe themselves to be as sons and daughter of a loving God who is inside them,” paraphrased from “The Mary Magdalene Within,” by Joan Norton.

This, to me, is self-negation.

Apathy: lack of interest and emotion, indifference

Negation: denial of the existence or truth of something.

Self-negation: self-negation is denial of the being, both physical and spiritual. We could say it is the state of being an enemy of one’s true self.

Enemy: One that attacks or tries to harm another, in this case, oneself.

Apathy is one expression of self-negation, denying our beingness at the deepest level. We could say it’s a state of enmity toward the self. Apathy is the antithesis of empathy, disabling our senses and the capacity to feel another person’s emotions. In apathy, there is a complete lack of emotion.

I see apathy as padding on the walls of emotional resignation and victim consciousness. A step deeper into the abyss, apathy, enmity and self-negation can further numb the already deadened limbs of our victim nature, buffering the severity of the emotional fall during states of collapse.

Numbing-out! What a great way to avoid feeling victimized and useless.

Floating on a lack of inspiration and intention, other signs of self-negation include over-thinking, especially negative monkey mind style, to the exclusion of any emotion. In this mode, people explain themselves, mentally telling, rather than simply being who they are. Delete previously existing last sentence in this paragraph.

As humans we all have free will, unlike other instinctually based species inhabiting our planet. When a person doesn’t exercise free will by creating goals, taking decisive steps, and committing to a course, they reside in a state of non-choice. This could be perceived as apathy on the surface, though I see it as non-acceptance and negation of our gifts. In these instances, there is a missing spoke in the wheel of contribution and co-creation.

Personal Story
Growing up as a 1970’s teen, apathy was a term often tied to war, politics and current events. People who weren’t up on current events; college students standing on the conscientious objector’s platform; and those who didn’t vote; were all thrown into the same basket of apathy, by very different interpretations.

Now, on a more spiritually evolutionary course in life, I see apathy and self-negation as something quite different. To rectify an apathetic state of being is still about making choices, yet it’s also about integrity and awareness of the links between our physical and spiritual energies. Advancement comes when we listen to our inner voice and follow our soul path.

So I did. I listened. And it took a lot of coaxing because I’d become my own worst enemy, caught up in what my mind thought should be done, negating my deepest desires. In trying to fit in, I’d repressed my most natural and creative rhythms.

Now I know why I’m stressed out, why my heart beats too fast, and why not too long ago I was at the edge of implosion. Awake in the middle of the night, it was all about deadlines, self-expectation, thinking, thinking, thinking.

I’d been here before, long ago. This was the old yet familiar beat of my monkey mind at work, one that had become a terribly comfortable dissonance. That monkey monster instructs me to sing and dance this way, rather than my way.

Screeching in the key of stress, I can barely accomplish the ominous deadlines, all created as the final hurdle before actualizing my dream of becoming a ‘real’ writer one day, down the road.

One dark morning I heard the voice clearly, “Who cares if you work at night or in the daytime? Who cares if it all comes out as planned, in a sequence?”

“When will you begin?’ the voice asked; and I immediately answered, “What about now?!”

So I grabbed my journal and wrote a few words in my black hole. They were huge scrawls and I tired quickly, wishing to see what I’d written. I lay there in angst, journal on my belly, staring up at the ceiling envisioning a way to turn on the light without moving or getting cold. I needed a little light to guide me in the darkness.

And just then I remembered, “I have a book light!” How could I have forgotten this amazing little light! What convenient memory loss kept this answer from me?

Well, like the times in between sleep and waking when we really hear our inner voices, the moments between breaths offer up the real answers. And our souls know of no one called apathy, enmity or self-negation.

The Energetic Connection offers online courses in self-mastery. You can participate in a single session or a full course.

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Self Mastery: 21 Days, Give or Take

October 21st, 2010 by Michele

As I continue to follow the currents of my 21-day boundary feast, I realize that the key to everything is self-acceptance. It’s a raft in the middle of the flood plains and the gateway to a farther shore, the other world and the higher levels of consciousness.

I’ve spent decades unravelling and embracing many things in my search for a more enlightened state of being, and even though I’ve seen glimpses of the void where self-acceptance would reside, and have certainly recognized the same issues in others, I’ve spent very little time looking at it as a key to higher vibration.

In fact, and please interpret this from your own troughs an swells, I’m just as vain and shallow as the next person, figuring that if I look healthy, I am healthy. Like for most of us, self-acceptance remains elusive as I go about my life seeking kudos in various denser and material forms.

Sure, I’ve always realized, like everyone else, that I am driven in part by a desire for validation in the world. This seems to be a common pursuit in this human form. Yes, I also do much to acquire, obtain and gather evidence that I’m okay in this form in this world. My wheels, they are spinning!

Still, I honestly have not fully explored the riverbeds where the prolific weeds of disloyalty to myself and stones of self-negation exist. I’ll say it again, the last three weeks have had a single common thread: self-acceptance or lack of the same. I know I’ve dipped my toes into this river before, its temperature and currents are very familiar. The difference now, is that I’m ready to fully immerse myself, feel the rocky bottom and swim to the other side.

Maybe too, I’ve opened my heart a little more.

Everything that has arisen, no matter on what level of consciousness it was propagated, has been tied to self-worth, self-love and the antitheses, self-hatred and self-loathing. Self-acceptance is not only at the bottom of everything I’ve experienced, its lack seems to be the foundation for all human dysfunction, personal growth, true service, and spiritual expansion.

Well, it’s been a time of constant self-observation, even more so than ever before. It’s been a month of seeing the unattended inner child, it’s immaturity, it’s innocence and it’s beauty. And, I am not finished here. This adventure will continue on for the next seven, 28 or even 87 days, just to put it into a perspective without the overwhelming, eternal burden and subtext. Even though I won’t be writing each day about what I’ve seen or experienced, I’ll be right here, changing my mind, changing my cells from lack, to an abundance of self-acceptance.

What I have experienced is, simply said, the next layer. I feel blessed to have come to such a singular focus, yet know it is incredibly insidious and that no matter what I’m doing in any given moment, no matter how I feel, chances are this other stream will still be running alongside and I will need to keep up with it, for a while anyway.

Like all waterways, self-worth issues run deeper underground than I can even fathom. Like any water droplet or river, it will create a path to the surface too, in just as mysterious ways. It bears watching, and while I’m watching I will continue to focus on it’s antithesis: self-acceptance.

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