Whew! Well that was a crazy year!We are taking this opportunity to ride the wave of chaos of 2021 and make some foundational changes and shifts in our own programs at ASC. We are going deeper into the authentic teachings of the Andean Mystics and redesigning our programs a bit to fully embrace the traditional "shamanic" magic of the Andes. And at least for this year we are going online...
Do distance healing sessions work?
Yes, they most definitely do! Energetic work is not bound by space or time. I do not have to be with you physically to pull through the healing energies, track the origins of your woundings, or blocks, or to sweetly support you as you are processing your stuff. All of that CAN be done over the phone, Skype, or Zoom with deep and profound results. You just need a quiet uninterrupted space to be for 90 mins so we can dig in. With everyone home that is the real challenge of distant work these days!
Quote from a client who reluctantly accepted that her in person session must be done over the phone now: "I cannot thank you enough for yesterday's session. It was so incredibly powerful, eye opening, healing and the list goes on... My spirit feels lighter and not so heavy."
Coherence Instead of Chaos
So... as I tire of all the blaming and finger pointing, however merited it might be, I find myself, at times, watching old movies... and just as I popped into the middle of one, Sean Connery’s character in Rising Sun says the following:
“The Japanese have a saying, ‘Fix the problem, not the blame.’ Find out what's f-ed up and fix it. Nobody gets blamed. We're always after who f-ed up.”
Yes, we in the west THIVE on blame. But it is a victim perspective, and a complete waste of energy. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just creates more angst and division.
We are all in this together! Yes, mistakes have been made. Of course they have. We are all in new territory here and the learning curve is steep. We are learning from our mistakes. That is at the core of developing wisdom. No one has all the answers. We are finding them now. We must be our own authorities now instead of hoping mommy and daddy will fix it.
The way we step out of victim is by assuming our own authority. We need to be asking ourselves how can I help instead of who is to blame. We all have our spheres of influence. Ask yourself how you can help within yours. It’s the little things even... but it’s energy put in the direction of a constructive solution.
The more we unite in solving the problems, the more the angst level goes down. Angst creates chaos. When we work together for the same cause we step into unity consciousness. Unity consciousness means we step out of digging into the egoic divisions that separate us, and give us claims to being “right,” and into the collective consciousness of serving our humanity. Our humanity. Yes! OUR humanity.
This is our humanity that is at stake here. No other life form is being shaken to the core. Each of us is an aspect of that collective consciousness. Your thoughts and your actions are all part of this collective organism. We are being asked to bring our individual awareness to what we bring to the equation. And then to act consciously, responsibly, constructively...
The virus comes to us as an outside agent, as something seemingly against us, because we have not found the way to unite from the inside. We both, the virus and humanity, come from the same mind. It is trying to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, from within... until we can.
Can we not focus on peace and Unity for once? The enemy is within. The enemy is using these brilliant minds we have been given to judge and criticize, to play the eternal victim, to negate and minimize, to stratify and dominate, instead of to solve the problems at hand. It’s about frequency, vibration, and resonance. It’s about coherence!!!
Ask yourself... what can you do today to make this a better world? ❤️❤️❤️
People who are drawn to do healing work, counseling, and social work are often very empathic. They instantly feel the emotional state of another. This can be a great gift in these fields, as it helps create instant rapport, but for many this can also be a burden. We are not born knowing how to deal with the overload of all of the incoming information, nor how to sort through what is ours, and what belongs to another, we are just wired to pick it all up.
In youth an empath may not even recognize that they are different; we all assume our normal is everyone else’s. After some time, however, we find we cry easier, melt down easier, and are singled out as “overly” sensitive. Depending upon how supported we are, this “oversensitivity” can become a journey of self medicating and not fitting in. As the overload redlines our stress response capacity, our anguish often leads people uncomfortable with emotion to reject us. This, of course, affects our self esteem.
We understand, intuitively, that the soul is the deepest aspect of our being. When we have been emotionally wounded we feel it is “sick”. Sometimes this manifests as physical sickness as well. To heal our soul is not just a lighthearted jaunt though a well groomed garden, plucking dead blooms from their stocks, it is hacking through the densest, darkest, jungle to find our light again. It’s looking into the abyss of who we truly are, claiming the darkness these wounds have generated, and its reclaiming our divinity.
As our souls heal, by our transcending and integrating our dualities, they evolve. In the Andean traditions this is called increasing our state of ayni, our highest state being when we are congruent with Source. It doesn’t work to emphasize our light aspects, while burying our darkness through negation, that fuels more separation and duality. It is about taking ownership of what we externalize. Whatever we perceive happening outside is happening inside first. Perhaps we are in scarcity, for example. Were we cursed by some angry or jealous family member, or is it because we are unconsciously punishing ourselves for things we have not yet forgiven ourselves for? Perhaps we are blocking abundance because we are uncomfortable receiving, or we believe we are unworthy or undeserving. We cannot heal when we externalize these problems, putting them at the feet of others, instead of owning them.
We need critical thinking skills. We need to be able to plan, discern, and distinguish right from wrong. All these skills come from a well developed logical mind. But that mind, when traumatized, can fold in on itself and collapse. Overbearing internal voices develop, questioning everything and derailing our simple ability to choose. We loop in circles, no longer able to find our true north. We lose our footing, our personal authority, and we find ourselves spiraling forever inward, to a place some liken to “Hell.” Others call it “depression.”
Trauma doesn’t have to be a violent affair with blood, guts, and gore, it can be a simple sense of abandonment, or chronic verbal abuse by a loved one. It makes us doubt our safety. The mind then goes into overdrive trying to secure a safe passage through the world, often by developing these cautious voices inside. Unchecked, however, they can take over and override the intuition. The intuition is our personal guidance system. It guides us from our own internalized divinity, from within our personal place of deep inner “knowing.” Once lost, the fearful mind goes unchecked and folds in upon itself.
There is a romantic narrative in our culture about being swept off our feet and succumbing to some sublime pull from the Mystic, to be overcome, ever entwined, and enthralled... It is the theme of many a mad love story. We long to surrender our cautious minds and merge with the infinite world of our hearts, if only we could. It’s hard to put your finger on it but there is something sexy about seduction, about someone pulling us into compliance, oblivion, about the surrender of our will to an infinite One...
It is almost as if we come preprogramed for it, and perhaps we do. Who hasn’t felt a biological attraction to someone who really does not have long term partner potential. When we have been seduced by someone we find compelling, we feel transfixed, taken under their spell, pulled in beyond our control, charmed. Perhaps our innate biology has embedded within it this override button that says “To heck with it, YES!” Perhaps this is how we have continued to exist as a species... seduction, the ultimate mating enigma, creating endless strains of biological diversity. For many there is something magical and intoxicating about this. We will override our morals and ethics to comply. We give up our riches and our bodies, our marriages, our minds, even our hearts. It is a strange phenomena indeed.
We set out for most destinations hoping to reach them directly, without inconvenience. On our spiritual journeys, however, we climb many steep aspirational mountains, hack through tangled interpersonal jungles, and descend down into the depths of our internal fog laden valleys, before we finally find the peace we are looking for. The spiritual journey is not actually one of destination, so much as it is a painstaking iterative process of refinement, the rugged but delicate unfolding of mighty wings, the pure evolution of the soul. For those of us in a time crunch, it seems to take an eternity. But that is just it, the soul knows not the limits of space and time. In fact, many believe that is why we take form, to learn from the causality of the three dimensional world. If there are no walls to bang into, no feelings to hurt, how will we develop the strengths it takes to evolve?
This is a path where we realize the expansiveness of our divinity within the limits of our humanity. In our expansive moments we open up and all is possible. We see where we have hobbled ourselves. We see our fears for what they are, simply phantoms rattling the chains of ancient thought: the fears of our ancestors, our culture, and thoughts we have put in place as children to feel safe. As we start to see through our them, and dismantle our defensiveness, all is good, all is forgiven! We are divine light, we have finally come home. It all feels so good... until it all happens again...
We think of a spiritual path as being one of austerity and principle, of selflessness and even martyrdom. We carry rice bowls and give our gifts away for free. Many choose vows of poverty and chasteness, even. Give up your worldly pursuits and prostrate yourself in Service! If you look deeply into the spiritual path of Andean Mysticism, however, you will see that all this self denial actually takes us out of alignment with Source.
The worst thing we can do is put our needs in shadow insisting we have none. Many wives, mothers, and healers find themselves here, many overworked fathers and indulgent husbands, many social workers. In not defining strong boundaries, and a vibrant sense of self, however, our persona becomes entangled in a web of self denial. This is very different than selflessness. Self denial is just that, saying we have no needs when in fact we do. From the Andean perspective we are each souls who came in to evolve. The journey, from this perspective, is about being in integrity with ourselves so we can be congruent with what created us. This means we must be keenly aware of who we are.
Most of us were raised by being rewarded for good behavior, and punished for bad. This is how we learned right from wrong. As children there were usually adults to steer us, someone who executed a parental interest in our outcome. Through their guidance we internalized a sense of morality. And then we became adults.
In most cultures religion becomes the guiding hand once we leave the nest. We are taught early that our deeds will be judged and recorded by some unseen force. In the traditional Judaeo-Christian perspective we go to “heaven,” or “hell,” depending upon how we behaved. Are you a sheep or a goat? In more eastern traditions the law of karma keeps us in line: bad deeds in this lifetime are paid for in the next. What is interesting in both perspectives is there is a reward system for behaving properly, but it is based on the judgements of an external source, and only pays off once we die.
The Andean prophesies say there will be a day when the Upper World and the Lower World will meet, in the Middle World. This will be Heaven on Earth. While the different worlds are “places” in their system of belief, much as in ours, they also represent our personal psyches. Thus the prophesies speak of a time when the unconscious of the Lower World, and the higher conscious of the Upper World, are both collectively owned, and integrated...