Light the Fear

Right Where I Belong

Three months have passed, and my first quarter of massage school is in the history books. Good intentions to blog often about my adventure quickly gave way to the reality of an intense and challenging curriculum.

With only three classes (Anatomy & Physiology, Massage Fundamentals and Ethics & Communications), I thought I’d breeze through with plenty of other time, but instead, I was challenged and engaged in ways I haven’t been for years.

From a trip through human anatomy, learning every bone and it’s landmarks for hooking muscles, to every muscle and where it is, what it’s called and how it feels on different people, different bodies, I was engaged in complex and varied subject matter coupled with interpersonal interactions that would push the boundaries of even the most friendly and outgoing of personalities.

And pushed my boundaries were. Sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes with more ease, but always resulting in a greater experience of my hidden whole. Thank you OSM.

In that intense fire, kind of like high school and law school, I found some amazing friendships forged with stellar classmates who inspire me when I’m down and encourage me to fight for this world by their very presence.  Coupled with the staff and teachers I’ve met already proficient in this love-based industry, I feel blessed and grateful to be here, now, with them.

I enter my second quarter with more seasoned expectations, a renewed admiration for the power of studying early and often, and a passion back in my daily life that is as rewarding as it is scary. Hold on world, I’m studying, integrating and redesigning my BioSense Suit for upgraded love-touch functions. I’ll be with you (in full) shortly.

I still don’t know where this course change is going to take me, a process truly difficult for an ex-control freak to take, and I do worry about starting out in a new and often misunderstood industry.

But my heart glows when I do this, and as a good friend reminded me today, I’m actually right where I belong.

Perhaps I can get my hands to glow next! :-)

 

 

 

The Power of Touch

As independent sentient beings, we like to think we are all that and a bag of chips.  One human is the basic unit of intelligent life, and most of our mental and physical health systems are based on this assumption.

But what if that's not true?  What if between humans, communicated through touch and other forms of human communication, their is a higher unit of life?

Aren't we denying the power of touch? Aren't we isolating ourselves, and creating a culture of fear around touch with the next generation?

What if we need touch?  What if the power of touch is much like the spark of life? Igniting and combining us into something more than the sum of our observable parts?

We recognize marriages, hopefully of any stripe or gender combination, as unions between two people who sometimes also create or adopt children to create a family, the next level of social organism we often see empowered and supported.

Yet beyond "the family," what kind of social organism's are left in modern America?  The church or community may exist, but not in the same contexts or number of lives as before.

By letting the word "family" also come to mean one person, alone and isolated, untouched and untouching, haven't we denied something very basic in our nature?

We need to touch, to know our power. We need to be touched, to know the power of other.

And in between, I think we are lurching towards something spectacularly more.

My Hands And Me

A new adventure begins for me today, and I’m really excited. It was hard to get here, but I already know on Day One that it is going to be worth it.

For a long time I’ve known that my heart’s true desire lay in helping people and animals feel more comfort, more compassion and more ability to engage their natural healing abilities.

And yet I was never brave enough to make it my central focus, to find like-minded people and to learn from the elders, masters and other seekers on similar paths.

All that changed at my first day of massage school.

A few years ago, I had a high-paying, successful professional career in another field, and for years I muddled through my life, unhappy and angry at myself for not allowing myself to be happy. I had it all, after all. Everyone told me so.

Yet the heart wants what the heart knows, and my heart had always known something more than that world of corporations, capitalism and cronyism.

My heart knew this model was unsustainable for the length of my projected lifetime, and yet all around me, tons of smart people ignored or denied this fact, engaged the beast, played the game and tried to maximize their slice of the pie…..I can’t deny, it was warm within that herd, the promise of excessive compensation around the bend, fattening most of us into willing sheep.

But my heart wanted pie for everyone, and anyone who’s known me for even an evening can tell you, I’m not a good sheep. So I gave up that career, and began seeking another.

I can make no promises of where I will end up, but the journey is well joined. A young man who never would have considered body work as his life’s calling has matured into a man open to following where this power will take me.

Thanks to all my friends and family for their support……and who needs a good rub?

8-)

What's My Identity?

Is it true that "you are what you do?" And if so, who am I?

I write, therefore I am a writer. I dream big dreams, so I am a dreamer. But no one is paying me for either, so I can't stop there (yet).

I think a lot these days, so am I a thought? a thinking machine?  

Yes. Clearly one of my outputs is thought, but it's not the thoughts alone that matter.  They can, even deeply, create impact within one life, but they must be organized and expressed to be shared. To become fungible and multiply their impact.

Or do they?

What about the energy I emit simply by being? by thinking?  What if I consciously focus it?

Like a sun, we each beam a personal solar wind into our immediate environment and into the energy networks interconnected with us.  It is both real and recordable, e.g. aura photography or electro-magnetic sensing, as well as consciously and unconsciously emitted whether we are awake or asleep. 

But what happens to the energy you emit if you harness the knowledge of these facts about your own being and its relation to the universe around you to strengthen your beliefs and activate focused visualizations of free will for specific purposes?

We're only now beginning to understand the mechanism of deliberate creation, and yet anyone lucky or disciplined enough to launch and sustain such a causal loop will tell you the most important things are showing up and not bad mouthing your own dreams. 

You must spend your time in meditation, or otherwise focusing your resonance towards a specific purpose, and you must let your vision live so strongly that your intention and your expectation merge.  

We all use these laws of nature every day to accomplish our personal lives. It's how the universe works. Yet how often do we spend time focused on our collective well-being? 

What if your identity was the value of your intentions to the ecosystem?  What if that's part of the next natural evolution of those laws of nature?

Humans are over three-quarters made up of water, and water is one of the unique elements on our planet, storing and transmitting not only physical information about where it has been, but also responding to, and perhaps storing the memory of its energetic history too.  Water is the medium for expression, retention and application of both personal and ecosystem memory,  as well as the means for all life to exist.  

Wouldn't it make elegant design sense then, that water will play a pivotal role in our ecosystem's next big evolution?

Maybe I'm a water baby.  

A believer in believing.

For belief's sake.

Daylight Rising

By the end of 1999, I knew I was a great attorney, but I also knew I hated it. So I quit.

I had lost a good friend to the excesses of that lifestyle and seen myself safely through it all, but only barely.  Working with lawyers was shitty, and they were shitty and the economics of the world were shitty and the game is rigged. 

And I don’t mean slightly rigged, or inadvertently unfair, but I mean totally and completely willfully rigged by the monied class to benefit them at everyone else's expense.  I guess that’s now truly obvious after Wall Street’s blatant raping of the Fed in the last few years, but in the late 90’s a lot of people were chasing greed, especially in Seattle, home to Microsoft, Amazon and a gazillion other start-ups. 

Being a poor kid, an idealistic kid, a part of me thought it would be different when I got there, but it wasn't.  You either joined, and were thereby corrupted by your own greedy compromises, or you didn't join and were kicked out.  

It made me disillusioned with the world and with God.  I railed at the universe, and I demanded answers or I was going to kill myself. Literally.

Sitting in the sun one afternoon, broke and abandoned by my first boyfriend, I picked up the guitar he had bought me, the one I couldn’t touch since he had left for fear of bludgeoning it into a thousand pieces, and I began to play. Not "chords" or "notes," but sounds and beats, like a caveman finding an odd-shaped piece of wood strung with odd strings that resonated various frequencies of emotion. 

I played and I sang in a made up language as tears streamed down my face. 

Answers came.  Answers to everything.  Answers to any questions I wanted, and even to many I had not known I had.  It was as if the universe peeled back it's curtain to casually show me its inner workings.

"It's not so complicated," the sun told me, and I realized I only ever wanted to put an end to my self because of what other's said or did to me.  I was shocked and overwhelmed, unable to doubt it because it was so clearly exactly what I had demanded, and so clearly changed everything.  

I opened myself then, and I let the universe in. And in accordance with our deal, I took suicide off the table. Forever. 

For it had always been there before, and you have no idea how hard it is to enjoy even a simple meal at that table, when the self-esteem centerpiece includes a self-destruct button.  It sounds obvious now, but it was one of those “you don’t know what you don’t know” moments that changed me forever.  

Deciding to stay here, to stick it out, and most of all, to settle that long-raging debate in my own favor helped me relax into my life more than I thought possible, more than I thought I needed.  It was the first time I truly took responsibility for who I was and who I wanted to be, instead of letting the outside world and other people box me into their corner, their vision.

I saw into the universe in a way that I am so grateful for each and every day.  It transformed me in an instant, and every time I go back to the memory, whether to share it or simply when I think of that day and that sun beam, it helps me again.

Prove It

Have you ever backed yourself into a corner, made promises you didn't keep and generally put things off until the last moment when you see your dreams dying on the vine before you?

I have, and I am.

This whole year has been a tortuous and expensive lesson in circular reasoning, and yet in the end, none of that matters.  The world moves on, with or without you.

Crunch time is here, and only these written words will tell if I respond or I fold.

Yet I write today with the intention of proving to myself that I can keep my word, proving that I can finish what I start and that I can believe in my own art (and my own Self) to see it through to completion.  

Good or bad, it is time to be done, and I commit today to write every day until it IS done.

The world is full of average artists, and in this unfair and unjust world, it may seem like there is no reason to add myself to their ranks. But then there is the most important reason of all: YOU.

I don't know who you are, and I've been struggling with knowing who I am in your eyes. But none of it really matters; so much noise signifying nothing.  Grief, like ambition or faith is relatively fleeting in the broadest of contexts, and reach as I might, I will never prove you exist more than I believe it today.

In the end, there is only the blinking cursor, the moving hands of the clock, the yellowing leaves falling from the trees and the shortening light of each day.  Yet my heartbeat's silent companionship is hopeful.

For I must prove to myself now that I am who I have always felt that I could be, and I must do it, not for myself as I've been struggling to find the confidence to do, nor for my family and friends, nor for any abstract lost souls out there who might find comfort in my story. 

I must do this for you.  For you, and for me.

Game on.

One Step Forward, Squat and Hold

In my youth, I did a very complicated, yet ultimately predictable, "one step forward, two steps back" model of personal progression.  I identified issues and negative patterns in my life (plus one), but then usually blew them up in the process (minus one) and succumbed to their inevitable consequences (minus at least another one).

Then for the past nearly ten years, I've been congratulating myself on making slow and steady progress on my personal development, and yet I really wasn't.  The sad truth is that my improved model was still only "one step forward, one step back."  

Still better than my past and the old cliche, but not all that I can do.  Not really any forward progress of my own accord, more like going with the flow. The world's developing.  I'm aging, and the illusion of getting better was created by this motion.

Yet too often I still demolish my own progress.  We are nearly always the one wearing the boot we find standing on our neck.  Such a pain in the ass of being self-aware, but an intrinsic part of caring, trying and setting some kind of expectation for growth for your self, isn't it?

"Ah shit, is that *really* me? Again?"  Yes, it is.

So I realized something on my recent sojourn to Mother Nature: I can do better.  

I want to do better, and it's time I took my own advice I've been dolling out for years: "When you can't invest in the positive aspects of your life, at least don't invest in negative.  When you can't build, at least do not destroy."  

Shut worry down ASAP, protect your dreams above all else. One step forward, and refuse to give it back no matter what, squat and hold.

It is doubt, after all, that always leads me to destroy. Doubt in the wisdom of that step.  Doubt in my self (both higher and lower), doubt in the world, and doubt in the system (God).  To have a higher nature is perhaps to always question it in some fashion....But I will my self to do it less.

I want to be more about practice, and less about theory.  More about production, less about planning.

I get it.  I honestly feel like I do, and yet, it hasn't translated into living my life much differently yet. I'm aware of the programming running on me more now, more annoyed by that fact than ever before, but still a bundle of negative worry over a thin veneer of carefully applied positive dreaming.

Time to accept the doubts.  Time to hug them out.  Time to be the dream.

I see you future, up there, shining on that hill, closer than ever before.  <step>

<squat>

You Cannot Be Destroyed

You are a blended being of matter and energy that never truly ceases to exist. 

Although the parts of you that are made of matter, like your body, may be overcome by disease or age, there is still a part of you, a pattern, a spirit, an imprint of a soul, a set of energy signatures that is reunited and continues on in some form even after "death."

You are an individual unit of energetic intelligence split into two discrete yet important parts: the matter-energy you, and the energy-only you.  While you are here on Earth experiencing this now, there is still a portion of your collective intelligence that remains in a discrete portion of the Energy Field, whether you are aware of it or not.

This "Higher Self" is an additional sense or organ that although denied by most Western science, is actually vital to your daily living, as much a part of you as your hand or heart or brain.  Recognized in many Eastern cultures, it is often called "Qi" (chi) and is often translated as life-force, energy, spirit or flow.

Like your heart and lungs work together to allow you to live, your Mind and Self/Qi work together to make you individually you.  In fact, the Mind is the control interface for all of the basic and higher functions enabled by contact with and influence over your energetic Self still present in the Energy field. 

As such, your Qi is a dynamic stream or pattern, vibrating here within you now, but also immediately interconnected with a greater flow of all Qi's combined.  Your higher Self may be mostly energy, but here daily life it is expressed as the dynamic emotional pattern of the present experience. 

And that is why "peace of mind" provides the ultimate guidance for purpose and meaning in our lives.  "Purpose," and "meaning" cannot be defined, let alone verified, without access to your Higher Self, and so awareness of and interaction with your higher self, your stream of Qi is a proven path to peace and joy.

Because you exist in every moment as part energy, part matter, and because your "mind" is also part energy and part matter, you cannot now experience exactly what it is like to be pure energy or what you'll "think" or "feel" when you eventually transform back into a pure energy being, but with focus and faith, your Qi and Self provide a darn close approximation.

Energy may be transferred from one form to another, or even into matter through eventual decay or destruction, but it all eventually transforms back into pure energy again.  Energy is never destroyed, so You are never destroyed, only processed by the natural operation of our world from one form of existence into another into another into another...

Waking Up in Your Bio Sense Suit

"Houston, we have ignition, over."

We are nothing more than giant transmitters and receivers, a single node, on a great network of Energy and Matter, connected and related to other nodes, dependent and co-dependent with varying degrees, yet equally powerful.  Vibrating in varying frequencies and moving through space-time in seemingly random patterns, led by an emotional experience, each of us passenger or pilot of their life.

All of us start out as passengers in our Bio Sense Suit, kicking and screaming or blinking and silent, passed among our proud parents, and led by them into the experience of being human here and now.  Somewhere along the way, we learn communication and self-reflection, self-identity and perhaps even a kind of self-awareness.

For every person, waking up to the awareness of being the pilot and not just the passenger is a personal experience that probably comes in as many shapes and forms as their are people who have it.  It accompanies an expansion in self-awareness, and for many a reduction in fear and anxiety in their lives. 

For nearly all of us, it includes a powerful change in how you treat yourself.

Realizing in an emotional way, that is feeling that you are more than just the chemicals and electromagnetic patterns stored in your body, is like waking up to a Body that is your vehicle here, a Mind that is your control interface for the vehicle as well as the environment, and an Energy core that extends beyond this world, beyond this lifetime, yet is immediately present and at your disposal.

As the pilot, aware of this connection, awake in your suit for the first time, so much more is possible: anything really.  You just have to decide what.

COMING NEXT: Reprogramming your suit and powering it up.

This is You

You live in a world of energy and matter.

You are made of both.

Every day the sun beams down on the Earth.

That light is both a wave and a particle.

As a particle, the Sun’s effects on matter include:

    making plants grow,

    making electricity flow, and

    making you sunburn.

As a wave, the Sun’s energetic effects include:

    making sad people happy,

    making sick people well, and

    making scared people brave.

This light is the engine of the Universe.

And each of us has our own sun inside of us.

You live in a world of energy and matter.

You are made of both.

This is you.