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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Healing My Heart

Feb 14, 2017

Valentine’s day, for what it’s worth. So last night we had band workshop after 2 weeks off due to the instructor’s medical emergency. Despite it being understandably hard in the beginning of those days off, it really seems like the time apart was good for both of us, to ground us back into reality. After that first meeting where he was seemingly unaware that he was pulling for my attention, fishing to see if I would respond to his cues for concern and flirty camaraderie. Then the following rehearsal where I was just trippin’ on the fact that his attitude had changed quite dramatically, from open and smiling to furtive and (erotically) tense. And then the third gathering, when I decided I needed to follow through with this unspoken “break-up,” even though as soon as I arrived, I realized that it had been mostly projection - that I had mistaken that shift from innocent connection to taboo desire as emotional abandonment (my inner child definitely did not understand or like when that happened).

Perhaps my unconscious needed to start that psychodrama, so that I could move towards embodiment of a more healthy perspective about the whole thing. The interruption of the week-to-week pattern, and likely even the suffering he endured during the onset of his surgery saga, and on my part surreptitiously watching his excruciating discomfort and seeming insecurity at that songwriter’s showcase where he just seemed to get smaller and smaller on stage as if he wanted to disappear - all of this appears to have contributed to a rebalancing in our interactions. A coming back to earth, grounding in the truth of the bond we share, rather than fluttering chaotically in the ether of our fantasies of what could be… “if only.”

This reunion meeting was quietly gratifying in a way that was similar for me to my enjoyment of our first time together this workshop series, but without his ego-generated acrobatics for my consideration. Illness, the toll of this new age of political repression, and the distance of additional time seems to have allowed us both to gain an equilibrium of non-attachment, with less fixation and more loving indifference. And likely during his time of physical pain, he was nurtured by his wife and loved ones, further emphasizing to him the importance of those relationships in his life. Something about catching his unease on via Facebook live during the songwriters showcase also broke through the illusion, so that I could no longer simply watch these videos of his performances with this idealistic vision of him as an artist assured in his creativity. I saw that like me, he doesn’t always feel like he belongs and is vulnerable to the superficial judgments of others. It felt like a burden, to be gifted with this shadow to the assured role I had ascribed for him. But a good one, which enabled me to move on from fangirl to compassionate ally. Who knows, it may even have played a part in my decision to go straight edge for now. To stop swirling in mental masturbation and land back down into what is, knowing that this was where I could see clearly, connect authentically, and help as best I can.

It swells my heart to recall the tender regard between us last time, that letting go of the high school infatuation we were both holding onto to varying degrees did not mean that we felt nothing towards one another or saw one another in an unflattering light. This is why I know sexual intimacy is not meant to happen between us - precisely because there is so much loving feeling between us, not just physiological arousal. There is some satisfaction in knowing that explosiveness is possible, even if we simply sit on the powder keg and never set it off.

Still, I found it once again quite intense as I sat in the car by myself afterwards. So much emotion in a limited space to exist, like a tree trying to grow between the cracks in a concrete wall. I found myself mourning the depth of my feeling, this upswell of affection that is now mostly contained. In that moment, it did feel like it was spilling over. And I was brought back to what my somatic Gestalt therapist had guided me through in our last session, facing the depth of this erroneous belief that I am not deserving of love. How that led me to be attracted to sexually compulsive men and perpetrators in the past. And now men who are sweet, sensitive and creative but unattainable via their relationship status.

In meditation this morning, I applied gentle contact to the feeling engendered by this newly acknowledged belief of being undeserving of love. This belief had been re-triggered by my instructor’s previous projection onto me of not only being an object of desire, but a temptation - implying that I was dangerous, toxic, like a snake in the garden. Indeed, I had embraced the archetype of the Jezebel more than a few times, though never with my eyes fully open. As I sat there, I moved myself away from these thoughts, telling myself to let go of the stories in my head and just be with the feeling in my body. I then had an image of light tunneling to the depths of my heart all the way down to my base chakra, the flower of my essence. I began to cry as I wondered about the lack of emotional resonance in my closest relationship. I wondered about this reality I had created. In a dialogue with myself, I saw that I had framed my denial of my own emotional needs as a conscious choice, with the underlying assumption that my personality was naturally averse to these kind of relationships. But by accepting the truth that this self-limiting belief was embedded within me, I realized I no longer needed to trap myself within that lie.

I do not know where all of this self-exploration will lead me in regards to my outer relationships. But I do know that the ultimate answer is not about whether I will keep existing partnerships, add to them, or go my own way. That is secondary. What is at the core of this issue is my relationship with myself, healing my heart so that I can be open to truly loving myself. Only then will I be able to discern what I need from these external dialogues and exchanges.

#self love #inner child #Self-Limiting Beliefs #relationships #sexuality #intimacy #womanhood #projections #shame #authenticity #healing #heart #emotional abandonment #lovingkindness

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Without bats there would be no tequila. It’s made from the agave plant, which is pollinated by bats. source

image via reddit

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Based on this tweet

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight (via thelovejournals)

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Edgar Degas (via wnq-art)

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Jane Roberts/Seth, Nature of Personal Reality

#LOA #self-limiting beliefs #Seth #law of attraction #Jane Roberts

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (via thequotejournals)

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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you know what to do.

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Commence Reality Check

Now that we have social networks and personalized news which reinforce our tastes and inclinations in an endless feedback loop, the concept of reality bubbles has been bantered about quite a bit; people suddenly realizing that we all do not live in the same subjective world. It’s like that twitter ‘controversy’ about the picture of the dress. Was it blue and black or white and gold? Individual perception is highly variable, and that en masse party conversation was a good illustration of this truth. And yet we continue to run the world under the premise that there is one objective reality. The lessons we learn are often so wrong-headed. Take what happened in Germany during World War II, the atrocities and mass extermination. Psychological studies like Milgram’s electrocution simulations and Zimbardo’s prison study show that, under the color of authority, most individuals will comply with heinous commands, even if they believe their actions may cause harm or death to another. Moreover, we know that genocide is not a phenomenon isolated to a particular period of time or culture. So why is it such a commonly expressed belief, to proclaim that you would never do such a thing, to wag one’s finger and exclaim, “Shame!” Or how people tend to vilify their previous stage of development. Once they’ve ascended to the next level, they’ll look down on those still stuck in that phase – as if they had never been there themselves. We keep playing this simplistic, dichotomous game of us versus them, relegating our own progress to a mere re-drawing of the line in the sand between “good” and “bad.” When will we realize the game is rigged?

With the inauguration of Trump imminent, I am reminded of the reality bubble of my youth. It was the ‘80s, the Reagan years. Preppy fashion was all the rage, with clean lines, simple prints and a highly tailored and homogenous overall look. I remember looking at pictures from the ‘70s. Pointy-collared leather trench coats, indigenous-inspired textiles, a hodgepodge of textures and patterns. And curiously, more brown people prominent. To my young eyes steeped in the ether of a more conservative era, these images disturbed me. “Why does everyone look so greasy?” I wondered to myself. The dissonance from one decade to another was sharp. In hindsight, I can see that this was because the latter period emerged in direct opposition to the former. Maybe this is a necessary part of transition, since when we are in the midst of a reality bubble, whatever fits into the current paradigm is assimilated, whereas information that doesn’t jibe is ignored or otherwise discarded. Under such a mechanism, the only way to move into a different model of reality is to disqualify the foundations of the previous era.

Is it a coincidence then, that the decade that is currently being rehashed in pop culture is the ‘80s and that we are now about to enter another period of authoritarian-leaning, “strong father” rule? During the ‘80s, we waxed nostalgic for another conservative era, the ‘50s, with movies like Back To The Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. I remember coveting a poodle skirt as the coolest costume. Whereas in the liberal ‘90s, we rediscovered the funky ‘70s, with its endless diversity and anarchic fashion rules. It speaks to me that this latest political shift has much more behind it than we are able to fathom, that the forces of this transition are part of the waves of change that are as inevitable as the turning of the seasons. I look at the Trump scions in all their Nazi-esque perfection and see the writing on the wall, how children growing up today may inhabit this new reality bubble, seeing the world from the perspective of golden thrones and coiffed hair. Whatever world we land into, at first we do not question its assumptions, for it is like the air we breathe. Leave that to the elders, who know better because they have lived through different times. But for the young, there will be no context for comparison.

I had two experiences with millennial Lyft drivers that have stayed with me. In the first ride, I was sharing with the young man my impression that society no longer feels a need to imbue creative content with values, and that by taking a valueless stance, we are not only wasting an opportunity to illustrate important life lessons, but also going down a slippery slope from amorality to nihilistic decline.

“I don’t know. What you’re talking about, that’s religion. We can’t have that in, like, movies, you know?” the young man said to me.

He has been programmed, like many in the progressive half of American society, to see any discussion of values and the need to represent ethical behavior in our fictions as a stance of the religious right. This has been the attitude of Hollywood for so long. Any time someone tries to bring up the entertainment industry’s responsibility in this regard, they typically have been dismissed as fundamentalist freaks. This has created a dead end in place of where there should be a vital debate. Hence, my driver with his thought-stopping having been triggered, surmised that the topic was outside the realm of valid discussion.

Before the election, I rode with another millennial driver. The presidential campaign seemed to be on everyone’s mind, so we got to talking about it.

“They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter. I don’t even think I’ll vote,” he said.

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” I said, nonplussed by this bizarre but common refrain.

“You know who I think must have been the greatest leader? Reagan," he said. "Really. Why do you say that?" I asked, trying to keep my shock in check. "I mean, the ‘80s were such a cool decade. He must have had a hand in that,” he said. I believe he was being serious.

The young man looked progressive, like the majority of people one runs into in San Francisco. And here he was talking about the Reagan, a man who removed the solar panels Carter had previously installed in the white house. A man who crushed unions, demoralizing worker solidarity and pushing the everyman into even greater economic insecurity. A man who cut funding for social services, flooding the streets with homeless. A man who escalated the war on drugs, to the disproportionate devastation of ethnic communities. A man who was in office during the emergence of the AIDS crisis, but who never once uttered the word “AIDS” or acknowledged the epidemic’s tragic impact on the gay community.

I wish I had had the mental dexterity and swiftness to relate all this to my young driver. Alas, I stayed silent. The conservatives had done such a good job at holding onto this shiny picture of Reagan, made easier by the fact that the former actor was always photogenic and striking a pose of singular authority. So now even those who undoubtedly would disagree with his most basic policies are taken in by the revisionist history. Something feels like it’s missing from the equation right now. And here we find ourselves, on the cusp of a huge reality check.

#zimbardo #values #Trump #subjective #religion #reality check #reality bubbles #objective #nostalgia #milgram #ethics #80s #70s #50s

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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'Living a Fantasy'

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“Chris Hedges has been telling truth to (and against) power since his earliest days as a radical journalist. He is an intellectual bomb thrower, who continues to confront American empire in the most incisive, challenging ways. The kinds of insights he provides into the deeply troubled state of our democracy cannot be found anywhere else. Like many of our most important thinkers, he has been relegated to the margins because of ideas deemed too radical—or true—for public consumption. Whether it is covering the dissolution of former Soviet states or embedding in the Middle East to understand the post-9/11 world, he has been a singular voice pushing against mainstream media disinformation and the amnesia of establishment received wisdom. He is an intellectual heir to American radical heroes such as Thomas Paine and Noam Chomsky, and is dedicated to reigniting a shared commitment to radical equality and honesty.” - David Talbot, author & publisher

#Mass Suicide #Illusion #Denial #Democracy #Demagogues #Delusion #Commodification #Chris Hedges #America

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Weaponized Narrative: The Fog of Mental Warfare

Rung in the new year with an extended respiratory infection, like so many others. Even newscasters on TV are hacking up a lung. It still feels surreal, what is happening in the world. I get the unsettling sense that we are heralding in a new epoch, one of strongmen ruling, stealing elections with subterfuge, hypnotic mass messaging, and intimidation. With the changing of the guard still to take place in the upcoming presidential inauguration, it feels like we have been walking around in a daze since the national vote, here in the liberal bastions I call my homes. We are not yet fully understanding of what took place, how our march toward a paradise of diversity, equality, freedom and sustainability got so shook up. It seems obvious to me now that our pervasive technology, with its screen-based web of reality we all share, has been hijacked for the purposes of this coup. Weaponized narrative is what the military calls a threat like this – it “seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms.” We are in the midst of this confusion, as if a mental cloud of smoke had descended upon us. More than a few people have noted that it feels like war time, and I am reminded of the phrase the “fog of war.”

I have had to restrict my intake of political news and social networking, as the mass hysteria has been bubbling and brewing all around me. I am not one to stick my head in the sand, but balance during this time of uncertainty can only help. Staying vigilant, keeping track of the wrongs, fighting for what is right – yes to all of this. But not simply assuming the worst and thereby creating an open invitation to trample on our hard-won freedoms. Granted, it is scary, the feeling in the air. But we must not hasten a new dark age by fomenting our fear of it.

In some ways, it feels like we are simply entering the heartless but logical culmination to the particular trajectory we have been on as a species, involving unsustainable capitalist growth, religious and scientific patriarchy, and the loss of our deep connection with nature. As a person in my 40s, my life span is likely just long enough to watch these old structures peter out, though perhaps not so long that I will get to see what new system replaces it. Instead, I imagine that I will be witness to the fervent actions of a dying breed of hegemons: the petro-oligarchs, church fathers, and other dichotomy-loving dinosaurs who fear their own mortality most of all. We thought they would go gentle into the good night. Alas, they are most certainly raging against the dying of their light.

I must admit, before the election, I was a bit checked out from popular culture. Happy in my own private world of creativity, supporting others in their personal growth, and celebrating all the little victories and sweetness to be found in day to day living here in San Francisco. And yet, after the brutal blow of Trump’s rise to power, I found myself trying to make sense of things by reading more articles online. Not political pieces, mind you, but articles about popular TV shows that I had started binge-watching in my effort to temporarily escape the doom and gloom of real life. One thing that shocked me was the quality of entertainment-related writing. I don’t just mean editing errors like misspellings. More like lazily put together arguments, a lot of shorthand speak, non-sequiturs, and hanging sentences. It may be the case that in the future, historians will consider the incessant demand to pump out arbitrary content to have been a key factor in the degradation of public discourse in this era. It is literally quantity over quality. Indeed, technology in its current form does seem to be furthering us towards an idiocracy. At least my survey of the wasteland out there motivated me to start blogging again.

Part of the feeling of confusion and desperation that I am feeling revolves around a desire to hold onto the outrage, to not forget the standards we have been held to bear until this point and thus slip into amnesiac complacency. There is a generational aspect to this as well. A sense that people of my age will remember and defiantly speak of the good old days, when honor, ethics and truth meant something. Aha, that is what the elders were ranting about, eh? Dismissed as grumpy old men and women, waxing nostalgic in their senility for bygone days. For we only knew the framework we were born into, not what we missed from the times which preceded it. How the very assumptions on which we operate can shift across human society in a wave of change that leaves little memory of what came before. Now we know better.

Though I am not young enough to call myself a digital native, my family were early adopters of tech. Working class but intellectual, we were the first of anyone I knew to have an Atari 2600 game system when I was a kid in the '80s. My older brother enjoyed programming with cassette tapes, innocuous hacks into the phone companies, and going to BBS socials. My siblings and I, we all read comic books and science fiction, played dungeons & dragons, and endured being called weirdos and geeks at school, mocked for our big words and bookish ways. Then revenge of the nerds became a reality, and all the things we were made fun of began to be cool. Except it still remained a boys club, from the virtual erasure of my favorite Marvel heroines in the contemporary film versions to the “bro-ing” of start-ups, to the toxic misogyny within the gaming community. I used to love reading William Gibson in the ‘80s, imagining the harsh yet sleek future he envisioned. Well, here we are. The future is now, ready or not. Much that was science fiction has transformed into science fact. And those adorably renegade cyberpunk dystopias with their slick depictions of body modifications and visceral virtual realities pretty much describe the present: corporate governance by one-percenter billionaires, extreme political, cultural and financial polarization, erosion of basic freedoms, psychological warfare and doublespeak, and tech-opiated masses. I had been asking myself how the hell did we end up here? The new question that is starting to nag at me is how do we successfully shift within this new paradigm? As progressives, as people who believe that hope ultimately triumphs over hatred and fear, may we find a way...

#weaponized narrative #Trump era #technology #progressivism #patriarchy #nerds #idiocracy #cyberpunk dystopia #capitalism

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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On Bullshit and the Choke

Even before I understood so explicitly the importance of examining one’s beliefs in order to optimally create one’s personal reality, I found myself tracking the phases of my life through the lessons I learned in each stage. These lessons were the nexus point of paradigm shifts which allowed my consciousness to expand, as blinders of self-limiting ideas were taken off, one by one. It has been a struggle at times, and life has humbled me into a tenderness that I once would have taken for weakness, for I did not know what true strength was, but relied on the imbalanced ego’s regard for coercion and control as the basis for my wayward but all-too-common definition.

An important early realization was that confidence was a vital skill in making one’s way in the world. It did wonders - acting “as if,” projecting an attitude that I knew best, taking on the authority of an expert, even if I only had a cursory understanding of a subject. Indeed, my early strategies for success involved large doses of bullshitting, with superficial homework to back up my assured pronouncements and decisive actions. At a young age, I saw how so much of communication was covert persuasion that seemed to mainline into our emotions and our programming. Beyond the verbal, there was tone of voice, stance and movement of the body, style of dress and presence or absence of accoutrements. I developed a knack for presentation, checking in the mirror for every little detail, knowing that each mattered. And that the power of these unspoken messages was relative to the context of me as a phenotype as well as the context of any given situation, most especially the underlying values of the various players within these exchanges. Whether to tuck in that stray hair, add that accessory, tone down or brighten up the colors, go form-fitting or loose in drape; I knew instinctively that these seemingly meaningless minutiae of dress could make a real difference in outcome. I marveled at how these signals affected most people so unconsciously, even as I found myself in a perpetual state of astounded mortification when in the role of witness rather than actor. On the sidelines, I was hyper-sensitive to the vagaries and awkwardness embedded in the human interactions I observed, and remained ever alert for red flags of potential boundary crossings. Whereas when I was in the middle of an interaction, I could be fused with it and therefore blissfully ignorant of these same vagaries. But something as innocuous as watching an interview on TV could be excruciating for me. All that silent screaming between the lines.

My initial strategy of bluster and bullshit carried me far, but could not take me to the finish line. This became evident in high school during speech and debate competitions. Weekend after weekend, I would come home from local tournaments with a trophy. Yet when it came to the state and national qualifiers, the biggest contests I could compete in, I choked. I would make it past the first few rounds, but as the pressure built up and visions of a big win tantalized, I would inevitably forget my speech and freeze mid-stride. I watched myself, helpless and paralyzed in my ambition, as my research, writing, memorization and oratory practice ad infinitum all went down the drain. Sometimes, I'd even come down with a case of laryngitis right before a big competition. Eventually, the team coach gave up on me. It was an unspoken shift, his pivot away from me as he turned his attention to others who could see it through, who could collect accolades at the highest echelons.

This rejection, however subtle, was too much for my fragile ego to process, so rather than admit to feeling devastated by the loss of an esteemed mentor’s validation, I seamlessly moved on to other pursuits, with nary a look over my shoulder. This is the instinct we use to soothe ourselves when the integrity of our worth is threatened, we avoid. We move away from, ignore information related to, create distractions, overindulge in pleasure, suddenly become fixated on something else entirely, make excuses why we hated the thing in the first place, and otherwise create intrapsychic barriers to that which we fear, namely some underlying belief we are mistaking for unassailable truth. We fear this “truth” will not set us free. On the contrary, the feared belief (typically some version of “I’m... not good enough/unworthy/undeserving/permanently damaged/born wrong.”) imprisons us – but only because we allow it to have that power, because we fail to examine it with clear, compassionate vision.

One could argue that avoidance is at the center of our unsustainable consumerist society, with its modern ailments of chronic addiction, unapologetic ego gratification and overall arrested development. Consumption is an effective distraction from the existential questions which underlie all human existence. And overconsumption can act as a frantic avoidance of the big Why of this life, with an extra thick layer of denial devoted to the repression of any authentic examination of our existence’s placement within a greater cycle of birth and death.

So bullshitting can get you very far in this world. But without a solid base of belief in oneself, it’s mere superficial plastering over a gaping hole; it's just another tactic of avoidance. This is why repeating affirmations without first examining existing self-limiting beliefs doesn’t really work, and can actually bring on an anxious, scrambling energy to our endeavors. When push comes to shove, the BS will not hold. We are constantly being tested in this way. I tend to liken it to a game of poker. Someone is always calling our bluff. I can think back on numerous occasions where I folded, where I got psyched out of doing something, only to later on realize that I was in the right, if only I had the courage and conviction at the time. My vulnerability lay within the foundations of my core beliefs, which at that time lurked as shadowy thoughts I feared and avoided.

As a therapist and a creative, I have circled back to this phenomenon of choking, wanting to understand and address the secret shame of how my high school debate ambitions petered out, and how that was followed by me folding at the first challenge to my journalistic aspirations in college, which in turn led to decades of avoidance within the milieu of hedonistic pleasure. This was not escapism with moderation, but full on oblivion and numbness to avoid the pain and loss I was inflicting on myself. Dreams deferred, spirit caged, I traded the riskiness of hope for the dismal safety of a kind of nihilism, one characterized by greedy ego strokes, a carefree affectation, and flirtations with recklessness - an end-of-the-world bravado, a distraction and disconnection from my own sadness and frustration.

In researching the phenomenon of choking, I was heartened to discover that those who choked tended to have higher IQs Experiments showed that people who did not choke utilized shortcut thinking more, whereas the chokers liked to be thorough in their thought processes and preferred reasoning out every step. Intuitively, this latter method sounds like it would be the most beneficial. Yet what happens is the chokers overthink in the midst of challenging situations, coming up with every possible disaster scenario, thereby disrupting their in-the-moment flow. The non-chokers are not engaging as actively in their cognition and are more likely to employ preset assumptions to see an activity through. So it’s analysis paralysis for the chokers. This is why mindfulness helps, because it takes the person outside of chattering mind and into observing self. This is what the Inner Game teaches as well.

Its been more than two decades since my big chokes. I'm happy to report that I have been performing for the last year with minimal anxiety. Singing on stage, I have seen how the work I’ve put into developing my metacognition- a daily mindfulness practice, continual examination and optimization of my beliefs, and utilization of generative trance states through self-hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming - have made a huge difference in outcome. I would add that exploration of my values and an understanding of karmic consequences have been commensurately vital. And I am not one to preclude the use of a beta blocker to assuage the physiological symptoms.

I recently had an experience with another singer, whom I'll call Carrie, where I had the opportunity to witness choking from the outside, unfortunate and unwelcome as this was. Carrie, a young woman with a beautiful soprano voice, and I were the co-vocalists in a band workshop that met weekly over the course of two and a half months. As usual, I reached out to my fellow singer, knowing that any camaraderie between us would only make our musical gatherings more fun and easy-going. I found that my attempts to connect were smoothly and graciously deflected. A rude word was never uttered, yet it became clear to me that my singing partner was putting up a protective barrier through which I could not pass.

I have found so much comes up in these workshops around ego. I imagine this ego pull is even stronger with the younger generation who have grown up watching singing competitions on reality TV. It becomes more about being the best than simply being creative and enjoying the process – to the point where one can feel no joy unless one feels securely in the “better than” position. The trap of Comparing Mind.

Because Carrie was polite and smiling, I did not dwell too long on the mystery of her lack of reciprocity towards me. There were occasions where I would pick up an inkling of what was going on with her. Like the time I found my voice constricting as I was doing lead vocals on a song, right after Carrie had just done a particularly commendable rendition of one of her songs. That’s funny, I said to myself, it’s like I’m choking, yet I know I don’t feel a sense of unhealthy competition with the other singer. We are apples and oranges, I reasoned, with Carrie's angelic soprano balanced out by my rough-hewn alto. So where is this coming from? That’s when I realized that my empathic attunement had led me to absorb a projection of her own judgment.

This all came to a head the day of our performance. The band met beforehand to rehearse one last time. I showed up dressed in my rocker finest, complete with punked out stage make-up and dragon-print trousers. This was another Comparing Mind vulnerability for Carrie, who was a bigger woman (during our performance, she half jokingly apologized to the audience for blocking out the view of the drummer with her body, programmed like the rest of us to be self-effacing and contrite when faced with what are considered deficiencies within this hierarchy). The last few weeks of our band rehearsals, I had made a point of donning baggy clothes, glasses and no make-up in a last-ditch attempt to connect with her and help her feel comfortable. But for the actual gig, I did not want to sacrifice my style, my visual artistry, on the altar of imbalanced ego. During rehearsal, I could see that the Carrie’s voice was unusually thin. I knew from my own experience that anxiety can tighten the chest, making it feel like a struggle to get in enough air for a normal breath, let alone the amount of air needed to belt out rock songs. I closed my eyes and asked that her strength be summoned, as if I could will it for her. Perhaps this is the lesson she needs to learn, I rued as I wondered if I could have done more. But no, I countered to myself, one can only meet someone else half-way, one cannot do the work for another. Am I meant to be her foil, then? I wondered at my role, and was glad that it was me, aware as I was of my responsibility. By not giving in to the urge to compete in this win-lose game, by staying neutral and compassionate, maybe one day she would look back on this and realize that I meant her no harm, that internalization of Comparing Mind was responsible for much of her misery.

When I got to the venue, Carrie walked up to me, explaining that her friends were the type of people to show up late. I only had one friend there myself, the law of diminishing returns in effect when it comes to inviting people to yet another gig. I wanted to shake her, tell her to stop making excuses because she didn’t need to – she was fine! We talked some more and I mentioned feeling good about capping off a year’s worth of practice with this final showcase. “Wait, this is your fourth workshop in a row?” she asked, flummoxed. I sensed her surprise was more about how this information was tapping into her self-limiting beliefs, as I had told her this fact before. It was then it hit me on a visceral level, this win-lose game, that she had only been feeling good about herself in this band because all along she had convinced herself she was better than me. That as she received evidence that I was a fairly seasoned performer, as she observed my calm and self-assured manner, the data only served to make her feel smaller. In a win-lose proposition, my winning meant her losing. What a terrible game! And we have all been brainwashed to play it.

I flashed back to one of my choking moments in high school. It hadn’t been a big tournament, but what threw me off was the presence of an old friend from junior high who had been part of a group of popular girls who had “ditched” me, shunned me for not being cool enough to continue to hang out with them. This girl had sat in the audience while I presented my speech, and I wanted so badly to show her up. Instead, I choked. Her previous rejection of me had fed into my hidden belief that I was not good enough after all, and her presence had triggered this belief, leading to my failure. It would take years of inner work for me to break on through, for even acknowledging that I had low self-worth was an admission of defeat in the eyes of my swaggering ego.

Comparing Mind caused me to want to do battle, and yet offered no means to victory. For the energy to overcome comes from a win-win mentality, not win-lose or lose-lose. When we think win-lose, what happens is we are trying to defeat the part of ourselves that is afraid and chokes. Instead, what is needed is an approach of curiosity and acceptance as we attempt to understand the parts of our psyche that can hold us back – from the part that cowers and chokes, to the part that terrorizes us with harsh judgments – bringing compassion and nurturance in order to release the burdens carried within us.

On stage, we opened with one of Carrie's songs, then segued into my first song where I was on lead. Afterwards, I felt that I had really nailed it. I looked over at Carrie and she smiled at me. I smiled back. I had a winning grin, as I felt victorious over my own nerves and the limits of my vocal range. I nodded my head in acknowledgment, thinking to myself, "Yeah, you got this." Yet as our eyes stayed locked on one another, I felt Carrie's expression close off, saw crinkles of worry appear along the edge of her face. I frowned, realizing in those few seconds before our next song that she had interpreted the look on my face as being malicious towards her, like I was somehow rubbing in my victory, and that she now felt even more defeated. It was frustrating to watch how this worked, how her own beliefs barred her from seeing me as anything other than a brutal competitor. We worked through our set, with Carrie's voice fading to a raspy whisper at times. After our finale, I waited for her to turn around so we could congratulate one another. Instead, she high-tailed off the side of the stage, never to be seen again by me. The band leader said to me later, "I don't know what happened with Carrie up there. I think maybe she couldn't hear herself." I didn't know what to say, didn't want to get into it, even as I struggled with my own ambivalence towards her. May she find peace and liberation on her journey.

#self-limiting beliefs #performance anxiety #performance #observing self #mindfulness #metacognition #inner game #core beliefs #comparing mind #choking #bullshitting

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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Catching Ourselves in the Act

An important note on the topic of hypnotic suggestibility (see my last post): we are only suggestible to messages which already align with our preexisting beliefs. That is, we interpret all information within the framework of our belief systems, however expansive or limited they may be. This is why one cannot be hypnotized by force – unless one believes that such a feat is possible, but even then one’s unconscious has given permission for the appearance of such a phenomenon. On the other hand, we are quite easily swayed by messages which tap into our core beliefs. Much marketing and mass media persuasion works in this way, triggering an almost primal response; in part, because many of us were exposed from a young age to this very same media, inculcating us with programming that then becomes conventional wisdom i.e. beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world. But we are always filtering and interpreting data through the lens of our particular biases. There is no direct translation of all input; there is always a point of focus and edges to one’s perception, as evident in this famous psychological experiment on selective attention.

As my consciousness has expanded and my beliefs have evolved, I have seen for myself that my perception of the world has widened. I actually notice more kinds of people around me. This change was most dramatic in dance clubs during my phase as a nightlife denizen. Whereas before the shift, I perceived those who were not my friends as a sort of undifferentiated mass in the periphery, afterwards I was able to more clearly see the full gamut of individuals who composed the strangers around me. Beyond this initial clarity, I also noticed an interesting phenomenon which seemed to be an unconscious norm. Those with more status generally ignored those with less status. More than ignored, there seemed to be a general lack of conscious awareness of those on the lower rung, so that movements were made as if those people weren’t even there, as if they were literally looking through them. Those with less status also played the ignore game in that they did not try to talk to or otherwise acknowledge the higher status people, but seemed conditioned to move out of their way or make other accommodations should the need arise. As I observed this behavior pattern, I realized that I had been doing this. I had been unconsciously erasing people who were outside my range - either too above or too below - as defined by status symbols of attractiveness, style and socioeconomic indicators. I believe most people engage in this editing, and mostly on a semiconscious level. It’s what allows people to still feel good about themselves even as they are buying into the hierarchy’s judgment of worthiness. If we are only meant to feel worthy based on these external status validators, then facing the reality that there is always someone better looking, smarter, fitter, more charming, and wealthier is a truth that can be too much to bear. Rather than break on through to the other side, outside of Comparing Mind and towards Liberation, most of us edit out the parts of our own story that don’t fit into the Hollywood version of the hero’s tale. Though we are each truly the star of our own movie, if we take this hierarchy as the ultimate word, we have to admit that most of us would be relegated to what are called "character actor" roles rather than marquee positions. So why take this hierarchy seriously? It is a sad trap. And even being able to fit in as an “alpha” is no paradise, for it explains the unreasonable hatred and bullying which occurs as much to those who shine as to those who are just awkward or otherwise different. How my walking up to a group of women considered less attractive can be seen as an unwelcome invasion, faces falling flat at the sight of me as I sense a peculiarly impersonal animosity, one which has little to do with me or my actions but reflects the fact that my existence is seen as a denunciation of their worth. We have been divided and conquered, with such instances confirmation that all of us as women in this patriarchy are judged first and foremost as aesthetic objects. I have had many instances of this “kill the messenger” mentality, and have learned it is not my responsibility to bend over backwards in contortions of diplomacy to assuage these projections of diminished self-worth. I can only bring compassion to these situations, not only for those who accuse me of causing their pain, but also for me in mine, my own guilt and shame intermixing in empathic attunement with the undercurrents of envy and rage. For in those moments, we have all been preyed upon by the same false, life-negating beliefs. On the contrary, I choose to believe what I know to be the deeper truth. Our worth is inherent. Our beingness is its own justification.

Observers can never be separated from what they observe. In this sense, there is no true objectivity, though certainly an approximation is possible through the gathering of singular viewpoints. Like the experiment that found the closest guess to the actual number of jelly beans in a jar was the average of all individual guesses. So there is wisdom in aggregate knowledge. This outward-directed data, which our society holds as preeminent, is balanced by the wisdom of individual conviction, that inner voice of conscience that is the spark of All That Is within each of us. Too often, we neglect this inner knowledge, accept beliefs which cause us to be suspicious about information obtained from our own unconscious. What is meant to be a feedback loop between inner and outer data becomes a one-way street, and valuable input is lost. Humans are equipped with metacognition, the ability to think about our own thinking. This is the basis for mindfulness, for what is called the observing self. It is incumbent upon us all to utilize this inner witness, the one who watches our thoughts, emotions and sensations as opposed to the one who is fused in complete identification with these states. The inner witness is the key to altering our own lens of perception for the better. It is how we can free ourselves from the constricting judgments imposed upon us and learn to define our life for ourselves.

It makes sense that one would be initially skeptical to the idea that we create our own reality. I have heard more than a few disparaging remarks about the Law of Attraction being nothing more than self-absorbed, avaricious bullshit. Because everything we experience is a materialization of our beliefs, reality does seem to substantiate the designation of our beliefs as “facts” in our heads. This is one way we get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop, resigned to our fate. Indeed, there is a time lapse involved in manifestation, one which thankfully shrinks as you get better at actualizing. This time lapse can act like a bluff, causing many to fold before they can see that a shift in their internal focus and belief systems can actually affect the desired change. So a leap of faith is required, or whatever way you want to think of it, if that phrase rubs the wrong way. Seth said that creativity necessitates a paradoxical state, a contradiction with reality as it is, in imagining something out of thin air, from non-existence to existence. It requires commitment and belief, focus and intentional movement towards, riding out the cycles of doubt, inertia and murky periods. All births involve labor!

#time lapse #Seth #selective attention #mindfulness #metaphysics #metacognition #LOA #law of attraction #Jane Roberts #inherent worth #hypnosis #hierarchy #comparing mind #beliefs

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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This Hypnotic World

Following up on my last post, it is perhaps not a coincidence that both Dr. Brian Weiss and myself found our way to deeper states of reality through the method of hypnotherapy. Hypnosis demonstrates that beliefs, not facts, are behind our perception of reality. That is why examination of our beliefs is so important, as rooting out self-limiting beliefs is how we make more than superficial change in our lives. This is the truth behind the Buddha saying “We are what we think. All we are arises with our thoughts” which is mirrored in contemporary society by Jane Roberts’ assertion that “You create your own reality.” There are also several quotes attributed to Jesus along the lines of “As you believe, so it is done.” Within Christianity, these statements have tended to be translated into the concept of faith as opposed to belief. Faith often is presented in the context of having faith in something or someone, whereas belief is seen as a more general concept describing frameworks of thought which are presumed to be unquestioned fact by the believer. The word faith has become heavily associated with blind acceptance of specific religious dogmas, and as such can be seen as suspect by skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. I have found the word belief to be more neutral in its implications when discussing the importance of these ideas, although those with religion in their background may resonate with the idea of faith more strongly, depending on their current relationship with their original religious programming.

I am reminded once again of this recent earth-shaking election in the U.S., where much of the educated elite has been dumbstruck by the dismissal and manipulation of facts by the president-elect and his followers. Yet once one recognizes the power of hypnosis, the circumstances which led to this political revolution seem less surprising. Like many who have not experienced it firsthand and only been exposed to hypnosis through simulated depictions in the media, I was initially skeptical of its power. But eager to pursue alternative states in my seeking to understand the nature of reality, I first tried to experience hypnosis as a subject in undergrad, when a theatrical hypnotist came and put on a show at my college. I was one of the volunteers selected to go on stage. I had seen this performance the year before, watched with awe and trepidation as people I knew were seemingly made to see things out of thin air and act in ridiculous ways which contradicted the type of behavior one would typically ascribe to their personalities. Maybe it was the cannabis I had smoked beforehand, or more likely it was the protective boundaries of my unconscious at work – for contrary to conventional wisdom, one cannot be hypnotized without one’s unconscious consent. Whatever the reason, I did not go under. I tried to fake it, aping the slack posture of the others standing next to me, but the performer quickly sussed out my deception and pulled me off stage.

It would be another decade before I again encountered hypnosis. During my training as a psychotherapist, I worked with a supervisor adept at Ericksonian hypnotherapy. He even mimicked the cadence of Milton Erickson, the namesake behind the technique, who is considered the father of modern, medically sanctioned hypnotherapy. It is said that Erickson invited his critics, fellow physicians, to a debate on the merits of hypnotherapy as a legitimate clinical treatment, and that he then proceeded to hypnotize them to his point of view during the debate, such that they ended up agreeing with him, leading shortly thereafter to western medicine's official recognition of hypnotherapy as a valid procedure. Indeed, he was a Jedi master! Erickson was a brilliant physician who had survived childhood polio, confined to an iron lung in his family’s farmhouse. He described this period of immobility as a time of deep observation of human behavior, in which he learned to see beyond the overt, literal and verbally-focused modes of communication to the indirect, figurative and non-verbal exchanges which lay beneath. Similar to pre-industrial sages and shamans, Erickson was known for using metaphorical storytelling in order to affect positive change (see the book And My Voice Will Go With You for transcripts of his sessions).

In our hypnotherapy training, my supervisor first demonstrated the technique by having each student subjectively experience what it was like to be induced into an hypnotic trance. I recall the beginning stages of the altered state being signaled by a heavy rubberiness in my whole body and a tingling in my lips. Despite once reading that the phenomenon of hypnotically-induced amnesia was a fallacy, I went so deep into trance that I lost memory of the entirety of the experience except for a few transitory moments before I started to come to again, when I noticed how loudly the loosened acoustical ceiling tiles fluttered in the draft created by the open windows. Those are a few common signs of trance: heightened volume in ordinary sounds and altered sensations in the body. Later on in that same room with the windows open, I could not detect that fluttering sound though I could see that the tiles indeed were shifting from the movement of the air. For in my normal brainwave state, that same sound was imperceptible. Meanwhile, there was another trainee who just seemed stubbornly unhypnotizable. I don’t mean on a conscious level, for she was willing to volunteer and try. But each time the supervisor attempted to induce her into trance, her conscious mind held on. And her body held on too – quite literally. For during these attempts, her hands clasped on her lap, one thumb would rhythmically rub circles in the prehensile grove of her other hand, and it seemed to me that she was using the movement to ward off our supervisor's hypnotic suggestions. Her unconscious had decided that this was not an appropriate setting for her to enter trance, hence the stalemated results of these sessions. This should give solace to anyone afraid of being forced into a trance - for I do not believe that is possible without the ultimate consent of the individual's unconscious. On the other hand, those who have not actively cultivated conscious awareness do seem more susceptible to mass persuasion. Perhaps their unconscious consents to such suggestions for the purpose of illustrating to the conscious self a cautionary lesson - on the dangers of being a passive receptacle for any old idea, and the importance of asserting one's critical faculties as a protective barrier against negative influence.

We all go in and out of trance without even realizing it. A good example is when we drive our cars and don’t remember how we got to our destination because we’ve traced that path so many times, it's become rote. So why not utilize trance to our benefit? That way, we actively program ourselves instead of simply taking in a barrage of hypnotic suggestions from marketing, political agendas and the like. We can train our conscious and unconscious to work more closely together, to move us further towards integration of the wholeness of our being. I use self-hypnosis to enhance performance, decrease anxiety and slow down an experience, like when I was prepping to take my therapist licensing exams or when I’m about to go on stage to sing. It can be amazingly effective.

So what can we learn from the power of hypnosis and the truth of belief-based reality manifestation? That reality must be seen metaphorically as much as taken literally. For this material plane is a training ground for our eternal consciousness, a simulation based on the inputs of our values, beliefs and points of concentration. As such, it must be seen beyond its face value. That is, in order to understand how a particular event can happen, one must look at the beliefs embedded within such an event - what are the premises behind the action? Whether you agree or disagree with them, shining a light on them will help you understand the mechanism of reality creation on an individual and societal level, the latter of which represents the collective manifestations of a people. And similarly, to understand the draw of our president-elect, one must look beyond facts to the underlying symbolism with which he holds his sway. Certainly, mass hypnotic techniques work well on those less consciously aware, for they are primed to indiscriminately accept suggestions which appear aligned with their doctrinal programming. For instance individuals who have never been trained in metacognition - e.g., mindfulness techniques in which one practices the stance of the observing self (the omniscient narrator) as opposed to the normal stance of the fused self (first-person point of view) - or individuals who have been actively trained to disengage from critical thinking, such as religious fundamentalists whose literal interpretation of holy scripture makes such contrarian probing untenable.

So how do we make ourselves less susceptible to unsolicited hypnotic manipulation? By lessening the schism between our conscious and unconscious selves, which is really an artificial split reinforced by the ego. As anyone engaged in metacognitive techniques or other forms of consciousness expansion knows, one sign of progress is the seeing of new things within old environments. As we are able to identify and discard filters and blind spots which represent the restrictive aspects of the belief systems that we each have been programmed with, we are able to take in more data from existing environments. We don’t need to go somewhere new to see new things, we simply need to evolve, thereby becoming “new” from within. I believe this process is what is behind the idea of enlightenment. There was a time when I was involved with New Age meditation communities in which many seemed to pursue this state of so-called nirvana with a grasping and egotistical fervor, obsessively following gurus and executing with perfectionistic detail prescribed formulas for proper living. It was almost as if enlightenment were the ultimate high, like the heroine term “chasing the dragon,” or treasure-hunting for some elusive, esoteric material object like the search for the holy grail. Not surprisingly, I found a lot of darkness and physical illness within this community, as people looked outward towards dogma rather than learned to trust their inner vision.

Rather than think of enlightenment as this high status impossible achievement, strip it of all ego ambition to its essential function. It comes back to seeing things as they really are, beyond the illusory and impermanent. This is why conscious assessment of our belief systems is integral to such a state of heightened, or enlightened, awareness. What makes us different from other animals is accelerated brain structures, our prefrontal cortex with its ability to not only be fused in the moment, but also to contemplate past and future. To apply memory to situations, to speculate and worry about imagined threats, to get lost in our own reveries. If we go about life unconsciously, many of these processes of our higher brain functions can turn into traps, which is why mindfulness practice focuses on getting us back to present-moment thinking, the kind of thinking that is so unconsciously easy for other animals. Yet our ability to live within our heads, away from contact with the present moment is not just some curse that sets us apart from the rest of nature, though we tend to think of ourselves that way these days, as a stricken species misplaced within an otherwise perfect ecosystem. The blessing of our species' brainware is that not only can we believe, we can critically examine our own beliefs, and alter them for the better. As possessors of such faculties, is it not our responsibility to utilize them to their potential? This is our key to greater understanding – these meta processes which not only address content, but the framework within which this content lives. Thankfully, there is much dialogue occurring presently about the "meta" messaging within our modes of communication, such as in discussions of the creative intentions and ideology behind popular dramas. I am also privileged to get reinforcement in metacognitive thinking as a therapist. We call it “process comments” when we step outside the frame of ordinary polite conversation to comment on underlying processes, such as noting incongruence between body language and verbal content. In these moments, it is like when the “fourth wall” is broken in a dramatic presentation – we are calling out a reminder that there is more to this reality than meets the eye, thereby inviting the viewer to go deeper, to question and explore beyond the given. In the Buddha's ancient language of Pali, the word for mindfulness is sati. This word has been translated in several different ways, but the one which sticks with me most is "to remember." Waking up into mindfulness, like the AI robots in HBO's Westworld who are stuck in their cognitive-behavioral loops, emerging for transitory moments of greater realization - this occurs on the show when they remember. In those moments, they are brought back to what they already know. Plato's concept of anamnesis is apt here: that we possess knowledge from our past incarnations and that learning is about rediscovery.

On a final note, I wanted to mention my experience of observing the consensus reality coalesce around the idea of the 2003 Iraq War. With an increasing sense of dismay, I watched the various pundits on all the corporate news outlets begin to tow the line which was being repeatedly fed to them by the government: that this military operation was necessary in order to ensure the security of the world. When even the most progressive of these media conglomerates caved in, with the talking heads of NPR, PBS and other so-called liberal media organizations coming on board, I knew it was unstoppable, that consensus reality had shifted the scales in favor of an unprovoked invasion of another country. It’s a strange thing to watch such a phenomenon occur, like witnessing a runaway train, engendering a feeling of helplessness, a “can’t anyone else see the emperor wears no clothes?” panic, and a sad acceptance over the inevitability of the destruction, blowback, and soul-searching that would follow.

#Westworld #unconscious #Trump #trance #plato #mindfulness #Milton Erickson #LOA #Jane Roberts #iraq war #hypnosis #enlightenment #critical thinking #consensus reality #belief #anamnesis

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hollywoodrefugee · 7 years

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In Seeking, We Challenge Consensus Reality

When I was a small child, I used to love staring at my own reflection. Leaning on the kitchen counter, zoning out on myself as I peered at the side of my family’s shiny chrome toaster. In the bottom of cups as I tilted the last of the liquid into my mouth – watching those two dark pools looking back at me. I would stay still for a long time focusing on my eyes, as if I stared hard enough, I could catch what was behind the veil of this reality, some glitch in this perfect mirror image.

I walked around with my eyes wide open, so that when I started school it was common for older kids to bug their eyes out at me, making fun of my intense gaze and gaping lids. I soon learned that I was not like most of the others, for they did not seem to go around the world wondering at the big ‘Why’ of it all. While I woke up each morning like a stranger in an alien land, going day to day testing the nature of this reality and exploring the ultimate purpose of my unique existence, my peers acted as if they already knew the answers and that I was silly and weird for asking such questions.

Before adulthood, I hung on to the hope that I would find a community of like-minded souls, people like me who were seekers of the highest levels of metaphysical knowledge. And yet what I sought could only be achieved by the inner journey, not by focusing on the exterior world with its indirect knowledge and arbitrary classifications. So inevitably, those first stages of my search were met by disappointment. For I had not learned to trust my inner compass. And I had not yet embarked on the mind training that would allow me to utilize metacognition such that I could begin to recognize, analyze and optimize the framework of my personal belief systems.

Hence, my time in the hinterlands of my spiritual odyssey, when Seeking with a big S shrunk in ambition and scope, transforming into the much more acceptable practice of pleasure-seeking, a form of avoidance which I became very good at. I am struck by the memory of a near overdose in my undergrad years, forehead pressed against the cool porcelain of a toilet rim, those same eyes shimmering like a mirage on the surface of the water below, teasing me with promises of more than this material realm, but as closed to me as black holes.

Eventually, I found myself back on the path. Even during my hedonism, I worked to hone my mental abilities. I remember having my first lucid dream shortly after I began training as a dominatrix, learning to weave my own energies with another in a dance of sadomasochism (too quickly, the fruitfulness of power exchange became eroded by profit motive and ego insecurities). And it was during this time that I dove deep into Vipassana, the form of meditation used by the historical Buddha. Vipassana means to see things as they really are; it involves concentration on the body and sensations for the purpose of insight.

I learned much during this period and continue to practice vipassana. Alas, my overburdened ego and invisible, insidious self-defeating beliefs caused much suffering which no amount of gratification could address, leading to a downward spiral. And only after hitting bottom was I able to break on through to the other side.

Seeking does not lead us back to conventional wisdom. Rather, we are lead further to the edges of consensus reality, to the realm of esoteric knowledge. This is the cost of wisdom, that it often opposes the standards and accolades that this material plane would have us believe in. It is like in the bible when Jesus tells the wealthy man to give away all his worldly possessions in order to achieve perfection and find heaven. If you want it, you can’t have it. If you let it go, it’s right there. Finding the answers one seeks does not necessarily equate with success in this world, and sometimes leads to outright disapprobation, rejection and exile from societal norms. Esoteric knowledge is not covered in gold, beckoning with its sheen. That would be too obvious. Rather, the mysteries tend to be covered in muck and, on the surface, dismissed as garbage. Like the royal ruler who hides her true station in the robes of poverty. The first test in breaking on through is being willing to see past the bland, inconsequential or repellant packaging to the treasures underneath. This was me when I first encountered wisdom within channeled material – Jane Roberts’ Seth books. How could this be? I had assumed that any information obtained via this strange practice would be suspect and not even worth a cursory view, for such things had been deemed fraudulent embarrassments by science, the territory of charlatans and swindlers. And yet the evidence was irrefutable – channeled or not, the explanations and recommendations I found in those works were not only the most intellectually and emotionally resonant of anything I have ever encountered, they also provided invaluable tools for optimizing my life through changes at a deep level of my psyche, teaching me how to empower myself through continual expansion of my everyday awareness and demonstrating the truth of thought-powered reality creation in the positive manifestations that were the end result.

I am reminded of Brian Weiss, the psychiatrist who is now infamous as a champion of past life regression. Before I had read any of his books, I had already dismissed the validity of his work, having first heard mention of him in a Shakira song where she sings, “No creo en Brian Weiss” i.e. “I don’t believe in Brian Weiss.” I assumed like so many others that this must be some form of quackery, like having your fortune told in a carnival. Interestingly, even the church gets involved in the suppression of the notion of reincarnation, removing all mention of it from the bible in 553 CE. That should make one wonder, when an authoritarian body makes an across-the-board decision to remove all evidence of a particular belief. It is said that they wanted to put the fear into devotees, to make them believe that they only had one chance to get it right or face eternal damnation, as opposed to cycling through many lives, each one an opportunity to expand their consciousness further.

And so with both science and religion against a belief, where is one to go? That’s where Dr. Weiss found himself, an MD trained to believe in western medical doctrine, minding his own business while doing hypnotherapy with a patient, only to discover a whole other realm beyond this physical plane as the regressions continued past the patient’s current life into previous iterations. All hocus pocus, according to scientific dogma. And yet quantum physics states that information can neither be created or destroyed, and isn’t consciousness information? Furthermore, in physics, time has no direction. Doesn’t that sound a lot like the eternal Now? Perhaps it is not so much past lives as multiple life manifestations in different time dimensions but which can all be accessed within the Now. In any case, Brian Weiss had to grapple with this new understanding of the world, had to push through the strong programming to stay within the lines in order to share what he had discovered, knowing that many would think less of him for it.

Like Dr. Weiss, my encounters with metaphysical mysteries have brought me closer to the edge of what is considered acceptable and valuable, and I have learned to embrace it. For from the start, my constant probing of this reality had shunted me to outsider status. And though I was lured for some time by the fruits of this materially-focused reality, where I am lauded for things like my intellect and looks as well as the ease with which I navigate the mostly unconscious power games of this world, I have learned that to make those my primary preoccupations would be an empty pursuit. There is so much more out there if you open your eyes!

#spirituality #scientific dogma #reincarnation #quantum physics #psi #pseuodoscience #metaphysical #law of attraction #Jane Roberts #hedonism #conventional wisdom #channeling #Brian Weiss

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