Tag Archive for: healing

Ancient Teachings Give Insight Into Current Times

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Today is the Presidential Inauguration Day. It is greeted by cheers or sadness or anger. It marks a shift in the endless cycle of collective thinking. No matter how you interpret this shift, whether forwards or backwards, it can be viewed as an opportunity for growth as individuals and for society. Keep in mind that the state of the world often mirrors back to us our own inner state of light and shadow. How we react and respond to the outside world determines how long we have to stew in the karmic cycle, or how soon we can transcend it.

I came across a newsletter article that puts the current transitional period, both as individuals and society, into a much wider lens. The article offers ancient spiritual explanations for the current state of the world and of ourselves. It was humorously and insightfully written by Joan Pancoe, a spiritual teacher, trance channel, karmic astrologer and psychic therapist in NYC since 1976. Please enjoy:

 

“Many have shared with me how sad and disheartened they’ve felt about the state of the world, especially since the election. The good news is that: Sadness is not a toxic emotion that will adversely impact one’s health. That being said, if we do want to consciously allow our emotions to flow through faster, it helps to:

1. Remember that we’re in an ephemeral plane of constant flux on inner and outer levels and that which rises falls away.

2. View reality as a dream, Cosmic or Divine Play, in other words, live entertainment, also called: Leela.

3. Practice a daily mantra of “This too shall pass.”

4. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude for what we do have now.

Conversely, it’s important not to indulge in, act out on or repress feelings of fear, anxiety or metaphysical angst, not to mention varieties of anger and impotent rage, as these emotions DO make us sick—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. Added to this, whatever emotional tone we emanate is affecting the mass tone in the ripple effect. The challenge is to continuously release and dissolve toxic emotions or thoughts ONCE they arise, as this is one of the few things we actually do have absolute power over.

This grows increasingly more consequential moving forward, because we may be feeling more aware than ever before of our powerlessness over mass events unfolding and the illusion of any semblance of control over external people, places and circumstances disintegrating at a more rapid rate as our new normal.

What we can do is make it a priority to cultivate and maintain the witnessing perspective of the soul, where everything is always evolving perfectly for our karmic healing and soul growth in the Divine Plan—personally and en masse—and hold the faith in this as the permeating primary tone of our Self and our personal reality. As Ram Dass says:

“We are in the perfect circumstances for our Souls to learn whatever they designed this whole game to learn. What is freedom? It is awareness not trapped in attraction or aversion.”

If you are feeling really stuck in negativity or despair and find the above ideas challenging to implement on your own, I encourage you to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Transformation and Healing to help get you started.

 

The Taoist point of view is that everything is part of the Tao, i.e., Divine or Flow of Life, and that the conscious energy which makes up the Earth, which is a plane of duality, moves naturally in cycles of life and death, yin and yang, light and dark, expansion and contraction, moving forward and retreating, and so forth.

Right now, linear time is accelerating more rapidly in this New Age in human history because of what I call “the Quickening,” i.e., a continuous downloading of high frequency energies from beyond this plane to assist in speeding up the evolution of consciousness.

This means that, within the divine orderly chaos of the Universe, the mass consciousness has been stretched like a giant rubber band—as far as it could go without splitting apart. And what we are experiencing now as a natural part of this extreme unprecedented expansion is an even more extreme retraction or snapping back in reaction to this stretching open.

If we view the mass consciousness as one giant organism, or as I like to call it, One BEING with billions of faces, WE have reacted en masse from having too much Light and Unity Consciousness enter too fast, so that a natural reaction of flipping back into our collective shadow of darkness and separation has occurred. Ultimately, this will come into a balance of not “either/or” unity or separation but “and” and “both” simultaneously.

I have seen this phenomenon occur hundreds of times on a personal level when working with clients over the last 40 years. When people in psychic therapy raise their vibration and spiritually expand or accelerate more rapidly than their little self or ego/personality can handle, then after the therapy is over, there is sometimes an extreme retraction or snapping back, like an over-stretched rubber band when released.

This means that they regress into old self-destructive karmic behaviors that feed their default karmic rut of identity and gives them the illusion of control through safety, security and familiarity. I call this pattern the “Spiritual Cha-Cha,” one step forward and, at times, a giant leap backwards. And I’ve learned to view it with cosmic humor as an inherent part within the spiraling evolution of consciousness.

But now we are witnessing this Spiritual Cha-Cha as part of US, i.e., the mass consciousness. It’s our challenge, or as I like to call it a huge EGO—f**kin growth opportunity—to view this as an innate, organic part of how the Flow of Life moves. And, imperatively, we need to find ways to use this shadow part of the dance as rocket fuel for the evolution of our consciousness.

Since linear time is operating faster, what once took over four centuries, such as the decline of the Roman Empire, as part of the spontaneous movement of the Tao, might now take just over four years, barbarian hoards and all:). We’ve lived through many dark ages before in human history and learned that it’s all an integral part of the Earth Game. It just means that it’s time, once again, to batten down the hatches, retreat to gather our forces and sustain and feed the Light with like-minded souls, while we wait for the perfect time in the Flow to expand outward again.

Synchronistically, this time in history also coincides with the possible ending of the Kali Yuga in 2025, as predicted by some sages in the ancient Vedic spiritual philosophy of India. The ancients understood time as a circle, not linear, and the circle of ages is comprised of the yugas. Like the four seasons in our year, there are four yugas in the full 24,000 year cycle of the life of the world (Mahayuga). Each cycle has distinct themes and spiritual lessons for humanity. Satya Yuga or the Golden Age, is the longest, with each one getting successively shorter (4:3:2:1) until the cycle starts again.

We are just ending the shortest and darkest era (Kali Yuga), which by some estimates began 2,700 years ago, and lasts only one-tenth of the cycle. It is epitomized as one of darkness and ignorance. Here is a compilation from various Vedic texts and writers about the Kali Yuga:
“People slide further down the path of dishonesty, with virtue being of little value. Passions become uncontrollable as unrestrained sexual indulgences and manipulations run through society. Liars and hypocrites rise. Important knowledge is lost and scriptures become less and less common. The human diet is now ‘dirty’, and people are not even close to being as powerful as their ancestors in the Satya Yuga. Likewise, the once pristine environment is now polluted. Water and food become scarce, as do family bonds.” Sound familiar?
“The end of this Yuga will inevitably be followed by cataclysmic earth changes and civilization collapses, as is characteristic of the transitional periods. We need to be aware of these greater cycles of time that govern human civilization, and the changes that are looming on the horizon. In the Mahabharata—the longest poem in the planet’s history; the Kali Yuga is considered the Darkest Age, a low point.”

So, even if the Kali Yuga does wind down in 2025, the predictions of volatile earth changes, which occur during the transitional periods between yugas—evidenced by the current upswing in earthquakes and increasing incidences of extreme weather phenomena—indicate that we may be in for an external bumpy ride for some time to come. This means, for most of us, for the rest of this incarnation. In 10 years, we may actually look back at this period, even with all the upsets and instability going on, as a relatively peaceful calm before the storm of the earth changes.

What to do? The Vedic scriptures and major Taoist teachings concur: Meditation and various spiritual practices are the natural medicine to help us survive during tumultuous times such as these. Now more than ever, we must strengthen our personal practice and act as a light for those around us who are lost. To find inner peace within the most unpeaceful of times is true spiritual attainment and a most worthy goal.

When I look into the eyes of Syrian refugees, I see hopelessness, suffering and despair. When I look into the eyes of unemployed Trump supporters standing for hours in free food lines, I see hopelessness, suffering and despair. And, believe it or not, when I’ve looked into the eyes of my clients, the ones that are the most unhappy and dissatisfied are the billionaires and super-models.

Why? Because no matter how much cash and how many prizes they accumulate externally, that can still never fill the inner black hole or void that can only be filled by something spiritual and infinite. Their greatest fear is that if they lost their money or beauty, nobody would love them just for themselves. And since they instinctually know that their external gains are all relative and ephemeral and could possibly disappear in any moment but will certainly all fall away in time, they live in terror of this ultimate outcome.

And the lesson? That all pain and suffering feels the same from the inside and that the only spiritual solution is to cultivate compassion for suffering in all forms. Whether it be our own, the ignorant, asleep or mentally ill:

The Bodhisattva Vow:

Beings are numberless, I vow to awaken with them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them.

Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it.

The awakened way is unsurpassed, I vow to embody it.

A Unique Approach to Heal Anxiety and Depression

Reading Time: 4 minutes

When we put the feelings of anxiety or depression under the microscope of hypnosis, we see that these intense, unwanted feelings are actually made up of subtle, fearful thoughts, such as “I’m not wanted,” “I’m not safe,” “I’m all alone” – thoughts that began somewhere in a past event or circumstance. As life moves forward, we naturally resist looking at these painful mental and emotional wounds. It feels better to avoid them, so we do what we can to bury them or push them aside.

People’s present state of being, and the decisions they make, usually are colored by the past. So when we’re dominated by anxiety or depression, that unwanted feeling is kept alive by subtly avoiding it or pushing it away. Paradoxically, these unwanted feelings can often be extinguished when we focus intently and directly on the emotional energy charge.

The following is a common example of how this process works. A woman came to me (I’ll call her Mary) arrived for a session plagued by anxiety that she had felt as long as she could remember. Although her anxiety had been managed somewhat by dealing with past abuse issues through traditional talk-therapy, there was still a lingering anxiety that was further triggered several years ago by experiencing extreme turbulence on an airplane. This event awakened a deep fear in her and was causing an increasing phobia of flying, which was problematic because she flies regularly.

But within our very anxieties and fears lie our keys and clues for healing.

The first step is to focus on the unwanted feeling and locate where in the body that energy charge is felt most intensely. In Mary’s case, she felt her anxiety in her chest. Even without a traditional relaxation hypnosis induction, she was already focused deeply enough to access the insights and images of her higher mind – the part of her that gives her symbolic dreams at night as she sleeps.

I asked her, “If that part of your body could speak, what would it say?”

She said, “I’m sad, alone and afraid.”

Now we had an emotion (anxiety), a somatic (feeling in the chest), and a mental thought (sad, alone, afraid) – the key ingredients to uncover the root of the issue and go directly to an underlying cause.

By letting her consciousness slide into the middle of the unwanted feeling in her chest and repeating the mental thought program of “I’m sad, alone and afraid,” it took her quickly and directly to a time where she felt this feeling before. Typically a person is taken to scenes in their present life, in which case we follow the steps for an Emotional Healing session. But in Mary’s case, she went to another life, and it became a Past Life Therapy session. In her mind’s eye, she saw images of a cold, damp, dirty alley in Europe. She was wandering homeless, alone and paranoid, with only the clothes on her back. We then went to the time where she first became homeless. She immediately had images of watching a burning house. She was feeling desperate and in shock, because her husband and children were trapped inside and died in the flames. With the deep shock of losing everything she knew and owned, she wandered the streets for years, simply existing and surviving in an emotional state of grief, fear and feeling totally alone. She died with these heavy, intense thoughts, and this thought-form energy residue was imprinted in her soul-essence – stuck in her physical, emotional and mental energy bodies, carried forward into this incarnation and awakened during the traumatic event of airplane turbulence in this life.

Once we went through the death scene of that life, she could rest in the high vibration of deep peace, love and security of the afterlife, and then consciously release the emotional and mental energy charges that had been carried in her soul essence that was attached to her present life body.

Afterward, she observed that the subtle, nagging anxiety was completely gone, she felt much lighter because she had dumped the heavy, fear-based thoughts and feelings. She commented that it was as if cobwebs had been cleared from her body and mind. Suddenly, many feelings and impulses in this life made complete sense. For instance, why crying children caused her to shudder, her deep empathy towards the homeless, and above all, the subtle grief, fear and aloneness that had lingered with her much of this life. A week later, she continued to note a large part of her anxiety was significantly released, yet attention was still needed on other aspects of her fears. Healing happens in layers, like peeling an onion.

Deep within the very anxieties and fears that we subtly resist lie the essential keys for releasing and healing those mental and emotional fears that prevent us from knowing our true soul nature of wholeness and completeness. We are always whole and complete, because we can never separate ourselves from our soul. The brilliant light of who we are simply gets covered up by mental and emotional “fear-dirt” from past experiences.

Various types of hypnosis can offer an efficient means by which people can become their own detective and release all fear-based problems through insight and wisdom. Whether we do past life regression or a present-life Emotional Healing session, a person will get a very clear sense of what it looks like and feels like to allow their life to be an expression of the part of themselves which is already whole and free.

An Eloquent Description of Experiences with Past Life

An Eloquent Description of Past Life Regression

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Recently a client shared with me her narrative of her past life regression experience. I am sharing it with you because it such an articulate description of how past life regression can work. Describing your experience can be quite a challenge. One of the first things people notice after a session is the lack of words there are to describe the experience. There is a reason for this…words and language belong to the thinking mind in this physical dimension, and the entire past life regression experience can only be done when this conscious thinking mind is a silent, uninvolved witness. Therefore, information drops into you as a “download” of intuitive inner knowings and feelings along with some visual impressions, like a strong intuitive hunch. Words can only describe the tip of the iceberg of your experience. In fact, describing what is happening during your regression can feel a lot like multi-tasking. But the most important part is that as the conscious thinking mind gives up control of the process, an entirely new information flow is accessible….the same information flow that might give you a strong intuitive knowing about something. And it gives you precisely what will be of most benefit to you, even if you cannot fully articulate beforehand what that is. This narrative provides an example of this. Enjoy!

Past Life Regression

As a preacher’s kid, and pretty mainstream thinker all my life, I was surprised at 49 to discover a new fascination with the concept of reincarnation and past-lives. I was experiencing some pretty major changes in my life and was not handling them gracefully, so I decided to see if a past life regression would help.  I seriously didn’t expect it to be life changing, and before the appointment, prepared myself to walk away believing that in fact it was a hoax.  I could not have been more wrong.

I did three regressions and a life between lives session over the course of a year, and as time went on, I began to see patterns.  While I generally had specific things I wanted to know, the most valuable insights I received had nothing to do with my questions, but everything to do with what was deep in my heart.  The questions I didn’t know how to ask became the topic of the story.

There were many similarities between the different lives that I found are also themes in my current life.  In three of the four lives, there was a big kitchen table that kept showing up, and significant things kept happening around it.  Even today, I love to cook and feed people. That same big table sits in the center of our home, and life still happens around it.  My current husband was also my husband in two of my lives, and my current sister was my wife in one.  In all the lives, I lived in rural areas, and spent a lot of time outdoors, often gardening, which is also true in this life.

I expected that if this whole past lives thing turned out to be legit, I would find some kind of dramatic wisdom, but in fact, most of the wisdom had an elegant simplicity to it.  In one life, there was an epidemic of some kind in our village, and we had to move.  The major scene in that life was the conflict between my husband and me as we dealt with my fear of change.  By the end of the life, we had happily settled in a new place and raised our family, and I died very happy.  The lesson?  Change is ok.  Relax and go with it.  That lesson is not an earthshaking revelation, but at that moment in time, in this life, accepting change was exactly what I was struggling with, and had been unable to see clearly through my fear.  Experiencing the regression and seeing myself successfully navigate a similar situation allowed me to handle the changes that were occurring in this life.  I found a peace that had been out of my reach before the regression.

The regression that had the greatest impact on me was a life where I was a man who was unable to connect with people.  Because of my self-imposed isolation, when I needed my community to help me save my land, they were not there for me. I lost everything, became a bitter mean man, and finally died alone and depressed. To those around me, I looked like a cranky old man, but inside, I was lonely and in pain, with no clue what was causing it or how to ease the pain.  The heaviness of the depression I felt in the latter part of that life was something I will never forget.

Initially I thought the lesson was about the value of connecting with people and learning to work in teams, which I still believe it was, but there was more.  In the weeks following the regression, another theme also began to emerge.  Visiting that life enlarged my understanding of what compassion really is, beyond sympathy for the poor and downtrodden.  Since the regression, when negative behavior is directed at me, instead of feeling attacked, I see pain and fear.  Having lived that pain, I have a different perspective, and tend to feel compassion rather than anger and resentment.  I can’t change people’s behavior, but I can change my own, and find a healthier and more compassionate way to respond.  It has made a huge difference in how I work with people!

By far the most comforting result of these regressions is that I have lost my fear of dying.  Do I want to die now?  No.  But I have experienced death four times, and I can confidently say that it is not the end; it is just the beginning of another season in the eternal life of my soul.  Death, from the soul’s perspective, is neither difficult nor the end, and the place we return to, whatever you choose to call it, is a place of love.

Healing Negative Emotions

The Spiritual Path of Healing Negative Emotions

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As we begin to grow, evolve and awaken to understanding ourselves and the world with more clarity, it becomes increasingly more difficult to repress negative emotions. It may not seem like it, but that’s a good thing. As we embark on the spiritual path, we become freer intellectually, however what we’ve avoided and haven’t faced in our lives often bubbles to the surface. This is because the shadow part of us also wants the light of our full consciousness so that it too can be liberated, thus no longer affecting us physically, mentally and emotionally. It wants to be free as well, just as the ‘most real and permanent’ part of us is already free. Anyone that has done a past life regression or an emotional healing session with me knows that they’re never separate from this liberated part of themselves. According to Buddha, it only gets covered up by the mind which is the source of all our suffering. During the process of this inner work, we “rise above” and become free of the mind’s subtle chatter, thus making it obvious that our past negative emotions which have not been met will keep us bound until we fully face them, usually beyond a level of simply acknowledging them intellectually.

How to discover that part which yearns to be liberated and free? Follow a nagging negative feeling or emotion. As you put the light of your fully focused consciousness on the anger, grief, fear, anxiety, depression, or any stuck feeling, you’ll find that the body is holding it someplace as a sensation. As you continue to feel this body sensation, the emotional roots of it become exposed so that it can be energetically liberated; ultimately serving as a portal to the deep peace within. As you move through the emotional layers you release them from your energy system.

The emotional healing sessions that I offer are not the only way to release the emotional past from your body/mind system. A new, enlightening documentary is now available which is very important for our time. It’s called E-Motion: Lose What Needs to be Lost to Find What Needs to be Found. It features several different practitioners, each with their own unique method to assist people in clearing negative emotions from the past. The documentary scientifically explains and clearly demonstrates how our unmet past affects us physically, mentally and emotionally; thereby creating the lens through which we view ourselves and the world, which in turn impacts what we draw to us through the law of attraction. It also provides many suggestions on ways to heal your unmet past that affects your present. To view a 4-minute preview of the video, here’s a link: e-motionthemovie.com. To view a 25-minute preview here’s another link. If you want to see the entire DVD for free, just let me know and I’ll be happy to let you borrow one of my copies.

In closing, here’s a quote by Rumi from the DVD: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

An Eloquent Description of Experiences with Past Life

Changing Times

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As the consciousness level of the planet rises, we can see evidence of this not only in the conflicts of the world, but also the fact that most people’s mental and emotional issues are beginning to surface….all for the sake of growth and evolution. Dr. David Schnarch, author of the book Passionate Marriage, puts it in a beautiful way: “Nature has an eloquent way of holding our happiness hostage, and the price for ransom is our own development.”

This shifting of consciousness is a time of re-evaluating past beliefs, old systems of doing things and out-dated modes of operation.  Everything from past authoritarian governments that rule with an iron fist, to our own personal beliefs, is challenged.

One belief to re-evaluate is how we react to uncomfortable emotions. It may seem that life is about avoiding the uncomfortable feelings, situations or emotions that arise. But this strategy back-fires because of the Law of Attraction. Life events happen that will trigger whatever thoughts, feelings and beliefs within you that no longer serve you. So the best way to move past an issue within you is to fully face it, feel it in your body, extract the gift of insight and wisdom that is contained within it, and release what no longer serves you from your body/mind system. This is how you can change yourself from within. It is then that we realize that the subconscious fears that have been governing our lives turn out to be paper tigers of pure imagination, and we can begin to operate in a manner that is freer and easier. The Present Life Emotional Healing session is an effective means to experience this.

Many times, a soul’s greatest work here on earth can be simply summarized as, “Stop believing the false mind programs.” It’s our egoic mind programs that hold us back or make us feel “less than” or not good enough. Probably the best thing about past life regression is that it connects you to the ‘you’ that is free and transcendent of the ego’s negative conditioning. The false programming that you were given doesn’t make any sense from the soul’s viewpoint, so it’s quite a respite to experience your true self without it. The unconscious mind programs that had been governing your life stick out and seem ridiculous. An awakened teacher, Neelam, once said, “First things first. First find out who and what you really are, and then see if your problem still makes any sense.”

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What is Hypnosis?

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‘Hypnosis’ is perhaps one the most misunderstood words that exists. It is actually the opposite of what most people think, which is often derived from stage hypnotists and movies. The two main myths are: 1) you are not in control; 2) you are not awake and aware. No matter how deep you go in hypnosis, you will be in control and you will always be wide awake and aware. For example, when you are swept up in the drama of a film in a movie theater, you are actually in a fairly deep state of hypnosis. In an engaging movie, you are very focused on the story that is unfolding on the screen to the point that you barely notice the people eating popcorn near you. But of course you’re not asleep…you know that if you wanted, you could get up at anytime and buy popcorn or use the bathroom. The same is true with any form of hypnotherapy – even at the deepest point of the session — if you wanted to, you could open your eyes and declare that you want to use the bathroom, or write something down, etc. It’s just a different level of consciousness that you’re accessing.

Hypnosis is a relaxation of the body and mind, together with a focusing of the mind. A definition of hypnosis is “a bypass of the analytical and critical thinking factor of our minds.” To apply this to the movie example, it’s when we don’t continually tell ourselves during the film: “what’s happening on that screen is not real, it’s only light images from a projection booth, and besides, those people on the screen are only acting, none of this is real, etc…”. If we continually focused on those facts, we could not let go and enjoy the movie. We go into varying states of hypnosis every day, such as when you are driving down a road while being lost in a daydream. Therefore, anyone can and has been hypnotized.

It’s important to know that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. I don’t actually hypnotize you – you hypnotize yourself using my suggestions and your imagination. Therefore, you can allow yourself to go into as deep of a hypnotic experience as you want to be, and you’ll always be awake and aware, knowing that you’re in the chair. During the experience, you may hear a car going by, or a dog barking outside, but none of that disturbs you as you continually focus inward.

The power of hypnotherapy is that we can use it to access and change the subconscious thought patterns that govern our lives. When we dream at night, sometimes those dreams are filled with metaphors that mirror the issues that are going on with us, whether we are aware of them or not. Who gives us these dreams? No one else does, yet we don’t consciously give it to ourselves. It comes from an unconscious, very wise part of us. Using hypnotherapy, we can easily access the same part of us that gives us our dreams, yet the difference is that we are awake and aware during the process. It is a very effective tool in healing because we can access and heal the emotional core of our anxieties or any stuck, limiting pattern where the root of the problem lies – the subconscious mind.

With spiritual hypnotherapy we can also access information from other lives that our eternal soul has lived, simply because we cannot separate ourselves from our indestructible soul self which exists outside of time and space. As we quiet our thinking mind and go deep within, we can tune into our “more permanent”, eternal aspect of ourselves.