The Shaman’s Fire & The Alchemist’s Flame ~

During this New Moon Solar Eclipse window, the possibilities are so ripe and juicy. Ripe to sow your seeds, riding the wave of this auspicious moment to create anew - your intentions and best well wishes, your Heart's desires to come alive for you. As a global, therefore planetary and therefore cosmic or Universal man, I’ve learned to tap and ride the larger streams of life. As in the very Lifeforce that keeps all these myriad worlds a’ spinning away. To read the signs unfolding around and in us is the norm for a shaman or shawoman in this world.

Now is also the perfect time to pluck the fruit from the juice you’re already creating in your life - oops, co-creating. Spirit always likes to be acknowledged. You have to be the main one to tell yourself how terrific you really are, how far you have come in your life. Yes even though, here in 2014, we’re all flying blind by the seat of our pants, you’ve made it this far, haven’t you? That’s gotta count for a lot, wouldn’t you say? I know it does for me, having steadily built up momentum after a gnarily, rough 2 yrs away.

When the shaman’s fire got a hold of me and all I could do was burn in the alchemical flame, I prayed there’d be something good left in the ashes. Anything, actually. Anyone who’s passed through the gauntlet of their world imploding and collapsing and made it safely out the other side, there’s less of you than before. There has to be. The fuel incinerated was your suffering going up in flames. Like the hard core t-shirt says: The pain is fear leaving your body. Ouch!

I’ve recently begun working with a woman, doing long-distance, absentee healing sessions. She answered my ad in Sedona Journal and as with many who call, was in a pretty tight place. A very narrow passage, as in: Life-as-birth-canal-in-her-face. Talk about ouch. As I listened to her mostly sob and cry, I remembered that place of deep despair that wouldn’t ever let me go. For too long really. I touched on what I’d wished I’d heard then and said this to her.

Breakthrough comes after breakdown. At least in this world it does. Being hardheaded I can certainly say, the ways I’ve most opened up was when I was forced to. Awakening comes with an annoyingly steep price. I had to give up the places in me that preferred being unconscious and enjoyed acting that way. That was my downfall, my behavior. But hey, learning to evolve usually takes fucking up to learn and in this I’ve been well blessed. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to practice.

Just take a deep breath, over and over again. It’s impossible to get clear of your suffering by continuing to dive back into it. Yes, you have to acknowledge and feel your feelings, just not endlessly indulge in how bad you feel feeling them. Thoughts are like this too. They’ll always lead back into the maze of more questions asked which - what a surprise! - never give answers in return. Your mind can’t figure out a solution to a problem it created. No can do.

Take a nice long walk and see the world outside of your suffering. Like peaking your head out of your self-created hole, life looks different when you’re not staring into your shit. I told this woman to find a place in nature she could sit for a bit and just feel life living around her. I invited her to ‘expand her temple’ an old Buddhist saying, meaning: Whenever you’re confused, angry or afraid, enlarge your mental, emotional and energetic containers. Get larger than your suffering which allows perspective and space to creep in.

Keep prayer alive, with each breath you breathe. We all need help, now and again.  Sometimes often. In this I’ve found, we can’t do our Awakening alone and guess what? We’re not supposed to either. We all have tremendous unseen Spiritual support waiting for us to simply ask. Our next necessary dance step is to actually open up to receive. As impossible as it is to shake a clinched fist, Spirit can’t enter us if we’re all closed up in our misery. A closed container is likely to remain so …

I reminded her to see how far she’s already come in her journey. To have faith in life, if not in herself. Of course, in the state she’d currently in, this is near impossible. The passage that’s consuming her (actually, her pain body) is all about a fundamental loss of trust in her self – in her ego personality that’s doing (and causing) all the suffering in the first place. 

The irony is, like a caterpillar enclosed in its own cocoon, there is no guaranty it will ever emerge intact, let alone fly away as a butterfly. This is why trust is the only thing that carries you through.

Finally I said, bottom line: She would have to find something in herself worth living for, for her to pull out of this spiral dive to her death.

… to be continued …

Thank You &

Love To Us All ~

PS I invite you to share these posts with anyone you feel would benefit and if you feel inspired, to write your feedback insights through the ‘Comment’ key on this blog. Also, please check out my work, Heart Tantra - The Attunement Session - on my web site heartantra.com. I offer in-person sessions here in the NYC area and absentee or long-distance work if you don't ~ Always Blessings On Your Way!

Curse of a Shadow Magnet III ~

Getting back to your evil twin - your Shadow - this buried part of you that’s been carrying your nasty bag for so frikkin’ long, that’s been the receptor and depositee of all your unfelt ill will, that consequently HAHAHA, (so sneaky is your Sacred!) holds all your personal power too. 

This solid bedrock of ‘you’ contains all your imbedded abandoned voices that still can’t believe or trust in you, not ever - because it’s been too painful all the times it’s never worked out. From lifetime after lifetime, I’m talking about. It’s never worked out. Why believe now, what will be any different, you ask? (Because now is a brand new day on our planet!)

 

The voices of your Shadow just can’t believe you’re really an amazing person who probably hasn’t (ever) given yourself nearly enough credit in life. This isn't unusual, I have them too. I just don’t let them bogart the inner mike too long. At the round table of your various sub-selves, gathered like attendees’ at your interpersonal meet-and-greet, I ask you - who’s speaking the loudest inside your head anyway? and do you really want to keep listening to who’s been doing most the talking?

Because by golly, it is a choice. It honestly is. How badly do you want it? I would ask. How bad do you want your freedom from suffering, most of all? Enough to look as deeply as it takes, no matter what? As an old friend pledged (often wishing it hadn’t become mine) can you go to the Root of the Roots of your pain body? 

In this, how deep can you dig – and why would you want to anyway?! A part of me really wishes you wouldn’t – if only because 1) you can never disengage and ‘not wake up’ again, meaning you can’t possibly ignore your Sacred waking up in you either ... so watch out! 

And 2) once you commit, the collapsing vacuum of your dissolving ego pulls back through all the misbeliefs you’ve ever had and told yourself. Yes, the works. Hey baby, it’s all gotta go and will if you keep saying the Two Most Magic Mantras YES & THANK YOU as you do. These potent word elixirs will absolutely transmute any and all of your Maya - if only you’d really believe down into the juice of your loins and blood in your bones. 

Deep, deep to the root of your roots, you’ll have to love. In this, your Bad Boy Shadow holds all the maps and clues back to ridiculous Self-love. It really does. 

Eventually, you’ll have to pass this way Home and to enter, you’re gonna have to love your deepest hurts, if only to turn them into blessings. Because like the weight of a feather measured to the heft of your Heart, you gotta be real light to fly. It’s just how it works. 

Only through the eye of the needle or transforming in the blaze of the alchemist’s flame, being clear and transparent is necessary to embody your Sacred. I’ve found nothing less will do. When it comes to your flight time, as you know - nothing is lighter than love.

Herein lives your power or rather, the Beloved’s power living through you. As you keep shining your light into your dark underbelly, tapping into your deep belly wisdom, you’ll turn your shades to shine and your sadness to celebration. You'll come vibrantly alive because, inverse to the best bumper sticker ever: Own Your Shadow or It Will Own You. Once you do, you’ll no longer be endlessly battling your self to keep from looking.

As you embrace from your Heartspace all these funky Shadow places in your life, they have to change, they must shift. They can’t help not cuz don’t you know, Love Heals All. YOu better know, your Sacred is so totally relentless. It has all the time in forever to wear you down.

Like the camel’s nose that slips under the flap, once it has entry, it ends up filling the whole tent like a cape or a cloak. It’s your destiny actually, to be filled with your Sacred that comes to wear you as a garment. In this, it’s no longer about you ‘becoming’ any more. You’ve been becoming for such a long time now – who are you right now that you most love and where is you Sacred already filling your life?

This is the alchemical intention of Awakening your Sacred, whatever your gender or frame of reference. It’s to turn all your painful dross – all your suffering of not being good enough or being way too much to handle – into the pure gold of your Sacred living as you. In a nutshell: This is why you came to Earth in the first place.

 … to be continued …

PS I invite you to share these posts with anyone you feel would benefit and if you feel inspired, to write your feedback insights through the ‘Comment’ key on this blog. Also, please check out my work, Heart Tantra - The Attunement Session - on my web site heartantra.com. I offer in-person sessions here in the NYC area and absentee or long-distance work if you don't. Always Blessings On Your Way!

Curse of a Shadow Magnet II ~

When it comes to creating the ‘Sacred’ anything, masculine, feminine or mix of each, being able to embrace your pain is first and foremost on the list. Unless you can hold your suffering, you’ll always run from it. Seriously. And it will always chase you as a result. Endlessly. That’s the secret to embodying your Sacred, folks: To the amount you can hold your pain is the degree you’ll heal and be free of it. It takes a very special outlook on life and especially yourself, not to mention the Divine, to want to walk this razors edge.

To be committed to facing all your perceived darkness as a necessary element of your Spiritual practice is really a very basic aspect to Awakening. You really can’t become free again unless you recognize where you’ve been holding yourself prisoner or rather, hostage to your own suffering in life. No can do.

The first act of getting out of prison is realizing you’re in one. This is the power of a Shadow Magnet. They always show you where you’re still trapped, unable to clearly see your blind-side. You can always tell you're hitting it - your outer reactions that arise in conflict inevitably reflect the hidden places in yourself that still grind. And yet it’s so easy to point fingers, isn't it? claiming and blaming another for your shit.'You made me feel like ...' Really?

Why face-to-face it head on when you can project and save your own? After all, our egos are 100% invested in not looking too closely at the nonsense it perpetrates, all in the name of feeling secure and safe from fault. Especially your own. Here the Shadow plays center stage for many of us. As long as I don’t see it, it really must not exist. Yet oddly enough, our inability to see it makes it so real in us.

A Shadow Magnet, however, forces the issues up in your life. Now again, the world is full of those who act recklessly and disagreeably without consideration of our property or feelings. Here in NYC for instance, there’s a near never-ending flood of people you’d never let into your home. You just wouldn’t, not if you had any sense anyway. Judgments aside, it’s not a smart thing to do. You better believe, discernment is mandatory here in town.

And yet, personally speaking, we let the crazies of our own making, the repressed, ignored and denied wounded parts of our self, have free rein over us without thinking twice. Isn’t it all too normal, if not comfortable (not to mention, familiar) to keep making excuses for our own indiscretions, our own misbehaviors?

Now, I’m not taking about robbing liquor stores or running old ladies over, just for fun. The misbehaviors I’m referring to are the private lies we tell ourselves - about who we are and never will be, what we can and cannot do with our lives. These are the insidious, inner voices that have run us from our Shadowland, for about as long as we can remember. It’s the nay-sayers speaking through our Inner Critic, always having our ear, continuously saying what we’ve come to believe is true.

For me, my main lie or core wound was that I was unlovable … so, my belief systems in life were formed around creating situations that proved this, over and over again. I kept fulfilling my own self-prophecy without even noticing what I was doing. Thus, the term ‘Shadow’ brought to word by CG Jung, meaning: what we can’t, don’t and won’t see about and within ourselves. And the most amazingly absurd misbehavior of all is: we’re the ones putting the blinders up in the first place, clouding and blocking our own view. All to keep the illusion alive that we can’t see. Tricky business, isn't it?

A Shadow Magnet has learned to make peace with these parts of themselves, to re-reference and reassign these old and very close companions, giving them a new job to do. By turning to face the pursuing wraith instead of always running away, it melts and turns to mist, losing its rule over us. Like in a child’s nightmare, the power of direct innocent awareness, turned to face our Shadow, evaporates and illuminates the ghost, once and for all. I believe there’s a life lesson in here somewhere...

We’ve pivoted in the corners of our Shadows, choosing to bring light and sight in again. Here it all shifts from what I don’t see to what I easily can. Opening my Heartspace to the funky places I’ve always been secretly ashamed and anxious of, changes these parts of me to something lighter and more lovable. This one shift alone rewrites my old ego script to something new and vibrant, more alive and actualized. And this I can really feel glowing inside my cells. For me, this is the purpose of all this Awakening stuff - to embody my Sacred.

… to be continued …

PS I invite you to share these posts with anyone you feel would benefit and if you feel inspired, to write your feedback insights through the ‘Comment’ key on this blog. Also, please check out my work, Heart Tantra - The Attunement Session - on my web site heartantra.com. I offer in-person sessions here in the NYC area and absentee or long-distance work if you don't. Always Blessings On Your Way!