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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Now I Get It

Sometimes it takes me awhile to really understand what I’m been hearing. For years I have been processing out beliefs by following phrases, or feelings and memories that leads to phrases, that I can then use to release the emotions associated with them. I have been doing that for so long that I seem to have virtually every last one. That’s what it feels like sometimes. The other day it finally hit me that the energy that can set up residence in my body doesn’t necessarily have any words attached to it!

This came up around discomfort in my neck. What I always thought was funny about it was that it only bothered me when I was meditating. For may years, it was there all the time, worse when I was under stress, but for the past several years it had almost completely disappeared. Yes, I had used all the tools I had on it, but nothing would make it stay away. It was a slippery beast until the lightbulb went on and I tried processing it as pure feeling. Then I made real progress.

When you get into habits, it hard to break them, and this was no different. I was difficult to process, I kept, instinctively “reaching” for some words to invoke the feeling, rather than just letting the feeling invoke itself. That sounds odd. It was like diving into a pool of pure experience where I had to resist the impulse to let the voice in my head talk about and describe what was happening. That pulled me out of the experience.

I’m just realizing now that I probably couldn’t have done this process before. It’s taken me this long to be able to quiet my mind, to a sufficient degree for this idea to work. You get what you get when you’re ready to get it, not before.

My life has been tough lately, and sleep doesn’t always come easy. I’ve been using specific meditation techniques to turn off the jabbering in my head and allow me to sleep. It helps a lot, but there is still something going on inside my head that I don’t understand, so I have to use it over and over each night. I have realized that when I thought that I wasn’t sleeping, I was actually falling asleep and waking up, over and over each night, and, each time I had to go through the whole process all over again. When I didn’t realize that, it seemed like the whole exercise was pointless. The question now is, why do I keep waking up anxious, over and over again? Is there something going on in my dreams that brings it all back up? I was thinking about this last night and early this morning, and I noticed that something did seem to be going on, on a deeper level that I could only just get a peek at.

All in all these are more questions for another time. Every time I figure something out, it leads to more questions and more things to deal with. It seems endless, but when I find myself talking to someone and realize where they are and notice how far I’ve come, it makes it somewhat better.

Christmas Day Reflections, 2015

Christmas day I was sitting in the same room where I spent every Christmas day for the past 30-odd years: The living room of my now ex-in-law’s house. A lot of things have changed here, the place has been redecorated at least twice, and rearranged more times than that. It’s easier to say what’s the same than the differences. The old piano, sitting in the same spot it has always sat, as far as I know. The small bookcase, also unmoved, but the old books it held for most of that time are now gone. They included something by Bob Hope and a book by or about Nixon.

I notice the fireplace, like I always do. 60’s modern brickwork and a mantle that warped noticeably, sometime in the distant past, and was never fixed. I look at the gaps ever year between the top and the sides and wonder why Jack never got around to fixing it.

None of the other relatives showed up. That’s not new, we’ve been the only ones at most holidays for some years now. So, in place of a tree, they had an artificial evergreen in a plastic pot with some decorations on it. I arrived late so it took me a while to realize that’s what it was. I suppose with nobody coming, there were no presents for grandchildren, so, why tree? Makes sense to me, but a little sad just the same.

This first Christmas after the divorce could have been really awkward, but wasn’t. In a way it was a little more heartfelt for the difference. It wasn’t just an obligatory holiday to survive. We were actually paying attention to each other and listening. At least I was. And I seemed to notice a difference from in-laws as well. That made it more relaxed and easy than any other holiday in my memory. It didn’t hurt that it was the first time in weeks that I didn’t have anything I felt I should be doing. The past few months have been filled with divorce stuff, finding a new place to live and establishing myself as a independent person again. A lot harder than it looks, believe me. It doesn’t help that a lot has changed since I was last single. Cellphone and internet make a huge difference, and now I have a hybrid car, and I need a place to plug it in. That’s a requirement/problem that didn’t exist a few decades ago. Anyway, in the evening I found myself dozing on the couch, to Dr Who reruns, finally relaxed.

On the way home, I thought that I would feel the loneliness set in, but what I felt instead was peace. For too long now, holidays have been about being and doing where and what you’re supposed to. Then doing your best to deal with the differences and conflicts and conversational games without getting drawn in. Going home by myself was a relief, the day was quiet and I didn’t have to take a. I’m sure that other feelings will set in, over time, but right now I’m too busy to allow them in. It almost feels like I’m holding my breath. I don’t have time to feel stuff, there’s just too much to deal with, too many decisions to make. Someday soon, I’m sure it will all come down on me, when I have time to let go, but for now I need to just keep on keeping on. One foot in front of the other, step by step into my new life.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

My new email address


Hello,

For all of you that don't already know, my comcast email account is going away soon. Please use this address from now on:


Please change this in your contacts, or we will lose touch. 

Blessings,

Rod Whitehouse

Friday, November 13, 2015

As You Believe, So Shall It Be

I listened to this video by Alon Anava, in which he describes how a profound near death experience (NDE) forced him to completely change his life from a totally secular to ultra-orthodox Jew. His story is interesting and entertaining, and he has a lot to say. His experience seems much longer than most, which I attribute to his upbringing. Most people who have NDEs don’t change their lives to the extend that Alon did, but I believe that his story illustrates the principle of As You Believe, So Shall It Be.

What I mean by that is the “afterlife,” for you, will be what you believe it to be. This can be bad news because we often are not really aware of what we really believe, what’s ingrained, deep down, from our earliest teachings. You may deny it now, you may swear up and down that you’ve completely given up all the crap that they drilled into you in Sunday school, but it very well could still be there. And it will determine what you experience after you die, at least for a while. In eternity, nothing lasts forever.

The good news is that it’s not all as bad and arbitrary as it sounds. You chose a mission in this life, you have a goal and a purpose. Your upbringing was a part of that purpose, more or less. Not that everything that happened and happens to you is part of some grand plan. We all have free will and you, and others, can go wildly off track, if you choose. That’s probably what happened in Alon’s case, but I say “probably” because you can’t really know that the arc of his life wasn’t part of his plan from the get-go. Truly, his message is much more powerful, and he reaches a lot more people, because of his struggles, but there’s really no way to know.

There simply is no question, even among skeptics, that NDEs change a persons’ life, in significant ways, and permanently. Perhaps the amount of change depends on how far they had deviated from their life’s plan. Or, perhaps, they needed to present a message to the world in as powerful way as possible. Everyone who experiences an NDE accepts, without question, that they have seen the afterlife, or at least the interlife, that stage where souls still retain their human personality and outlook. I guess skeptics like to reduce NDEs to hallucination or delusion because it allows them to reduce all religious experiences to mechanistic processes, which, by extension, reduces all human experience to mechanistic, and meaningless, processes. I question the sincerity of these skeptics. I have never met or heard of anyone who truly believed that their life was completely meaningless and pointless, that wasn’t suicidal. Many, many people profess a strict materialist and mechanistic philosophy, and brook no compromise is discussion, but still get up every morning, go to work, date, marry, have kids, and plan for the future, with no hint that it’s all a pointless, meaningless exercise. That’s because, deep down, they have hope, they are just too busy being right to admit it.

You are in no way a slave to what you may have been taught or some, unknown, “life plan,” you are free to do what you want, be what you want. But, the thing is, most of us have trouble in this life because of external things like society and expectations, the beliefs taught to us as children, and the “rules” we think we need to obey. Some of us are taught ideas that align with who we are, and we find we need to return to them as adults, while others, not so much. They need to break away from childhood teachings, in a profound way, to live a fulfilled life.

In a way, an NDE makes things easy. You now have a first-person, unshakable understanding of “what it’s really all about.” The rest of us have to struggle to understand what it’s all about and what’s best for us. There is no one path or belief or truth that is absolutely right and perfect for everyone. So we have to find our own, we are the final judge in implementer of our fate.

The funny thing is, NDEs show that atheists generally have it much better than the religious, they enter with no preconceived notions and thus have a pleasant experience. The religious like to think that they have the shortcut to heaven, but their beliefs of trials, judgment, and hell can very well be played out, as they expect, requiring them to work through it all, and let it go, before they will be able to “reach the pearly gates,” so to speak. This is not something imposed on them from above, but by their own beliefs. They create their own reality, for good or ill. The good news is that we all get there, sooner or later, it’s just a matter of how long it takes each person to shed their ego-based conceits, biases and prejudices, and see what is actually there.

The point of the journey to enlightenment is that your beginning that process early, so you’ll have less to deal with, when the time comes, and, as a bonus, you get a happier, more fulfilled life.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Stop Pretending

Last night I went to a past-life regression MeetUp. I didn’t intend to, I thought it was a hypnotherapists reunion at my old school, but once I was there it seemed like a good idea, so I went with it.

I met some new people, and ran into a client, even though it was a town 40 miles away. Things like that happen, I suppose. We live in a relatively small spiritual community. Funny how it is, this valley has hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other people, but the number that are interested and actively inquiring into the mind, consciousness and spirituality is pretty small. I tend to run into the same people, even in different towns. Maybe that means that my group of friends and acquaintances is finally growing.

My experience was a bit confused and scattered, but I think I got something useful out of it. The leader tasked us to find an intension for the evening. What immediately came to mind was finding a place to live, where should I go? And the one word that summed it up was “home.” So, that’s what I went with.

After the induction, my first impression was of black boots. Clean black boots with no cuts or scrapes. That evolved into a female, tall and strong, and not human: sort of a cat hybrid. She was mostly human looking, but her face had cat-like proportions. She was standing, alone, in a field of thigh-high dried grass, golden in color, surrounded by dark trees. The sky was cloudless, the ground was hard and dry, and the sun was bright and hot. She was doing some kind of ritual dance or practicing some form of martial arts. Her movements were smooth, precise and controlled: “Arm here, hand there, and foot just so.”

I really couldn’t tell what she was wearing. It seemed like there were fringes and flowing stuff, but it seemed transparent. There was something tied around her calfs, like a fringe with some kind of metal parts the jingled slightly as she moved. She might have been carrying some kind of stick, but I’m not sure. “Mr. black boots” was somehow meshed into this picture. He was dressed all in black, with a hat, like an old West gunfighter. He wasn’t there, but perhaps he was in her thoughts, someone she wanted to impress or was worried about.

Moving forward, I found myself on the ground, laying on my side in the grass, and I was now a black panther, well, a big cat, anyway. I got up, started running, and quickly found myself in a heavy forest or jungle, running up a branch of a large tree. It was really cool because I had claws and didn’t have to worry about slipping. I just dug them in and ran on up. I soon reached the center of the tree and a nest, of sorts. The place seemed warm and brighter than the surrounding area, and there was another cat there. She was just an impression: she seemed smaller and kept her distance.

Right about then I got the impression of glass, big glass windows. Then the camera zoomed back and I could see that the cats in the tree were being watched by the cat-people. They were sitting in a futuristic room with large windows or screens, in chairs the were large and comfortable. Me, the cat, was getting confused at this point, I knew I was being watched, but I was also getting a lot of impressions and feelings that I couldn’t sort out and make sense out of.

In the next scene, I was or watched, (it’s really not clear) the same, or another black cat climbing up. He climbed up into the clouds, higher and higher until he could sit down and watch the cat in the tree and the cat-people in their viewing room. Soon he was joined by a being. This being was all white and could hardly be distinguished from the white-cloud background. They proceeded to have an animated conversation where they discussed what was happening below, in a very dispassionate manor. I have no idea what they said, but the cat had very human mannerisms.

When it came time for the death scene, I saw the cat-woman, lying on her back in a bed, in the same viewing room where the watcher had been before. The chairs were gone. The bed was angled up so she could see out the windows. The room was otherwise empty, but there were people in an adjacent room that I could see through an open door. The cat and the being were still watching from above. When the cat woman died, her spirit rose up and tried to reach the clouds, but couldn’t quite make it, like she hit a flexible barrier. But she was actually held down by the things she couldn’t let go of: hate, mostly. She hated perfection. The perfection she hunted all her life, the perfection she could never achieve. That obsession tied her to this plane and she was drawn back down to incarnate again. This time, hopefully, to learn her lesson.

When I asked about the meaning or purpose of what I saw, I got “Stop pretending to not know. Stop pretending to be stupid. Stop pretending to not remember. Stop pretending to not understand.”

I’m still pondering what this all means to me. Still sorting out my impressions from the experience, and the things that I couldn’t make sense of at the time. And I’m going to meditate, a lot, on “pretending to be stupid and not understand.” I don’t know what I’ll find, but it’s nice to have a new direction.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Change Hurts

Change isn’t easy. Any change is a real pain in the butt. Even if you need it, even if it’s really necessary and you know it, It’s still a royal pain. It seems like it should be good, it should be really great to Get Past, to Be Free, to get “out from under,” but it’s still filled with petty problems and annoyances. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to end, it seems like the goal will never get here, and, at the same time, I dread the looming deadlines. I want it to be over, but I don’t want to pass through all the crap that is between here and there.

Sometimes it’s not so bad. Other times I’m depressed: I want to cry, I can’t seem to focus and I want some routine to fill the time. Often, I just don’t want to think, and, sleep is hard. I suppose it’s the constant stress. I don’t know where I’m going and the prospects don’t look real good. Things are too expensive around here but I’d rather not move away. On the other hand, if you must, you must.

I managed to find some work, but that’s hard too. First of all, it’s a major step down from a 6-figure engineering job to Home Depot. My ego has some adjusting to do. And I’m not making enough to break even, I will have to continue to live off my savings. That hurts. It really brings home the debate about minimum wage. Years ago I could work jobs like this and make enough to get by, but now it’s hard to see how that’s possible, with rent and food and insurances constantly going up and wages have hardly changed in 30 years. I always got this point before, but now it’s more personal. All those years of minimum wage jobs used to be in the past, but now all that’s in my face again. I would have hoped that after 30 years, I would have earned some degree of choice in my life, but it seems like most of that is gone. All my choices lead to difficult outcomes.

My options were to stay in an unhappy marriage, with all it’s emotional frustrations and the endless “putting up with,” or to go it alone. With the kids gone, that means really alone. It doesn’t help that I let my wife define my social life for most of those years, not having any friends, or family, of my own. In the last few years, I have begun to change that, and now have a group of casual friends and acquaintances. Most of them have never met my soon-to-be ex, because she wasn’t interested in meeting them, being involved, or pretty much anything that’s important to me.

I made the mistake of letting her define who I was. I entered into this relationship so desperate for someone to like me that I was willing to put up with pretty much anything, thinking I could manage it. She took full advantage of that to try and remake me into, I don’t know, something acceptable to her and her friends, I suppose. I put up with a lot of it, because I thought that was what you do, that is what marriage is all about. You do things together and do your best to get along. It took me some time to figure out that I was on a never-ending path of subservience. It was a power game. I would never be good enough, there was nothing I could do to get the approval I needed to feel good about myself. No amount of success or doing or giving in would ever make things work.

For a long time, I would try to include her in my interests. At first, she acted interested, then, as time went on, she pulled away from all that. I thought that we should do things together, so that meant that I pulled away as well. It took me a long time to understand that I was erasing myself. We only hung out with her friends, her family, doing things that she wanted to do. The classic pattern of being under the thrall of a control freak. I know she has a different point of view here, of course, but this is my take, and I’m allowed to believe what I want, even if she doesn’t like it.

Various events and awakenings caused me to question the life we had. Not just my marriage, everything. I really tried to take her along, but she wasn’t and isn’t interested. I learned a lot from watching her and others along this journey. What I saw brought home the truth of something I’d heard when I first started. When I first began to understand the power that was available through breaking away from the common mold and awaking, I was told that you didn’t need to worry about the wrong kind of people gaining access to the kind of abilities that could make the dangerous, because their very nature would make that impossible. And then I watched, as this played out among all the people that I met on this path. Most of them interpreted the teachings and insights in terms of their existing world view, instead of changing their world view by accepting the teachings. I could see how that was limiting them and, in many cases, stopped them cold. That made me sorely question my own thoughts and actions. Was I going to use what I’d learned to further my agenda or was I going to adapt my agenda in light of what I had learned? This has been an on-going struggle. There are times when I feel like I’m doing a good job, and then I get slapped in the face with concrete evidence that I’m not being true to my values. I understand, intellectually, that this will be a process that will never end, but emotionally it hurts. I still want to “get it,” to understand, to “have it down” so I can feel like I’m “done.” But that’s never going to happen, and that really sticks in my craw.

My strong suit is to learn. That’s how I tackle every problem in life: I study to understand and accumulate facts. That works very well in any endeavor where knowing facts equals success. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of those in life. There’s always social stuff, the fuzzy subjects, that refuse to be reduced to facts and numbers and procedures. I’ve gotten that I need to face my fear in those areas of my life where I felt completely out of control. That it’s ok to not always be “in control.” Trying to control everything is what made my life miserable. It caused me to slowly back away from anything I couldn’t control, which is pretty much anything, so my life kept getting smaller and smaller. Giving that up is freedom, but it’s also really hard, which brings me back to where I started: Change is hard.

Things around me are changing. I have to change. I have to make decisions that will effect me for years to come and there’s no right or optimum answer. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the near future, and that keeps me on edge. Control is gone. People tell me when to work, where to be, what to do. My everyday choices seem to be evaporating while the hard choices won’t get done. I keep telling myself to trust and everything will fall into place, for the reality is that I can adapt, no matter what, but I don’t like it. I want there to be a clear path ahead of me that I know leads to the right place. Not having that hurts, physically and emotionally. I am starting to learn to reach out to friends for support, but it’s never enough and I’m always worried about using up their good will. So I ask as little as possible. I hate not knowing what to do when the situation is so important. Even meditation isn’t the comfort it was, probably another symptom of stress. I want to think this marks a transition, but, for now, it’s just one more unwelcome change.

I want to end this on a positive note, but I’m having trouble. I really wanted to write something and get this stuff out, but I’m having a hard time feeling the upside right now. There is one, I am sure, but it doesn’t feel that way now. I am so looking forward to having everything resolved and being on my own. I’m going to have to build a new life, boo, but that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? They say you can’t cross a river in two jumps, and now I’ve gone as far as I can by just inching along, I either have to take that leap into the unknown, knowing that there is no going back, ever, or give up. I know I’ll look back on this, one day, and see it very differently, but for now, I’ve jumped and I don’t know where I’m going to land, and that friggn’ scares me.

Monday, October 5, 2015

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

A lot of things have been changing and it’s hard to keep in mind what is happening, from one hour to the next, in order to write it down. What seem so important in the morning, feels meaningless by the afternoon, when I have a chance to write it down. Perhaps that is just a symptom of the process.

In earlier posts, I talked about a session exchange with another practitioner who told me to “remove the mask” and start dealing with all the fear that I allowed to rule my life. Over the past few weeks I have been recognizing the game I was playing with myself. The game was trying to keep a foot in both camps and being “neither fish nor fowl.” By playing it safe and not wanting to look too “woo woo” to the outside, I found that I really couldn’t be any use to the people who really needed my help. Another thing I realized is that, because I’m not a licensed professional, (hypnotherapists aren’t licensed in California) I’m really not on equal footing with all the licensed therapists out there. The one that do hypnotherapy in addition to their other, more conventional, practices, or don’t see any value in it. That leaves me with a problem: If I try and compete along conventional lines (stop smoking, weight loss, phobias, anxieties, etc.) I will find myself in the position of trying to explain why anyone would come to me, instead of some licensed professional with, presumedly more training, and insurance companies will pay for.

So, what I’ve chosen to do, is to stop pretending to be a “conventional” therapist and embrace the “woo woo” side of things. This is really where I want to be anyway. There are many people out there that can’t talk to anyone: The things that are happening to them just don’t fit into our medical system. I have heard plenty of horror stories, some from my clients, about what the “conventional” medical and psychiatric response is to un-conventional symptoms. In my time, I was lucky to find a therapist that embraced some out-of-the-box therapies when I needed them. Many others are not so lucky.

So, in my fashion, I’ve come out of the closet, again. I’m embracing and own my weirdness to stop waffling on some of the hard questions. It’s real or it’s not, get over it. With that in mind, I’ve redone my MeetUp to reflect this change. Now I trying to attract the attention of people who are also in the position of having experience that they’re afraid to talk to anyone about, or they’ve tried and nobody’s listening. And then, when I meet them, I give them the straight dope. No more “some say that,” or “it could be like so and so.” I tell them what I’ve discovered and that they are not alone, there are plenty of people just like them. So far, it seems to be working, I’ve seen a steady increase in the number of members, and more people are signing up for meetings. They don’t all show up, but there’s no news there. It’s a simple fact that still hard to talk about this stuff, everybody’s afraid, whether they want to admit it or not.

I’ve started reaching out to therapists again as well. Same deal. This time I’m committed to explaining that my expertise lies in dealing with spiritual issues that other therapists are explicitly not trained to handle, and may refuse to acknowledge. Sure this will probably turn off any number of possible colleagues, but those probably would not have been any help to me anyway. But, even so, perhaps the conversation will plant a seed in their minds that might flower at the right time, when they’re confronted with the reality. The fact is, I can’t start a conversation with the struggling, without starting the conversation. I need to create a conversation and put it out there where they can find it. They are not all crazy, they are not alone, and they can learn to manage and even turn these experiences into something positive.

So, I’ve seen results from my changes to MeetUp, and I’ve started this conversation with potential clients. Not enough time has passed to see how much fruit it will bear, but the feedback so far is very encouraging. I’m sure I will get significant push-back from certain quarters, but that is expected. I want to redo my web site, but I’m still getting stuck on exactly what I need to say, and how to say it. I’m working on it.

What’s odd is that my outlook has changed as well. Everything isn’t “wonderful,” far from it. I have days when the dark cloud and nasty feeling just want to overwhelm me, but having this positive direction helps me through it. What’s really odd is that I read things differently than I did just a short time ago. Perhaps I’m allowing myself to absorb and understand things that I was pushing back on before. I didn’t want commit being one of “them,” so I put a lot of ideas and concepts aside, not really try to understand and absorb them. Now I see them as possible and that makes all the difference. There is a whole lot of very useful information and instructions out there, if you allow yourself to see it. People have been trying to tell us why we are unhappy and what we can do to take control of our lives for millennia, but we won’t listen. Though it may have a lot to do with how difficult it is to loosen the stranglehold of the cultural framework we are all raised in. Volumes have been written about that.

I’m thinking it’s time to revisit the concept of beliefs. I was having difficulty in explaining, before, exactly what a belief is. It seems so simple, until you begin to delve the power and pervasiveness of beliefs in this reality. I was reading something today that opened my eyes to the idea that beliefs go much deeper, and are much more powerful in shaping our personal reality, than I had previously understood. Which makes the ability to alter or removed beliefs, extremely powerful. Much more powerful than I had realized.

If life was a game, I would say that I’ve stepped up to a new level, with new powers and new challenges. Unlike a game, the transitions are not clearly marked, and they can be long and sloppy. Often, you don’t realize you’ve made a transition until some time afterwards, when you look back and see how much has changed, and where where the inflection point was. That’s enough for tonight. I’ll save the rest for tomorrow.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Take Off the Mask!

“Take off the mask!” That’s what one of my clients said a few weeks ago, and I have been thinking about it ever since. I keep wondering about how I would do that and what it would feel like. What I have noticed is that, without really, or consciously, trying to, I’m giving up pretending everything is alright, when it’s not. It feels funny to do that. I’m sure that I’ve always thought that I should keep bad stuff to myself, sure that nobody wants to hear about my problems or feelings.

I learned that lesson early on. But, perhaps, I got the wrong message. Nobody wants to listen to someone always complaining about life, the universe and everything. I’m sure that I wasn’t the happiest person to be around in my early years, I was quite depressed and I’m sure I was a real downer. So I took that to mean that I should keep my mouth shut and pretend everything was fine, which had the side effect of me not having anything to say. I’m pretty sure that that really didn’t fool anyone, a depressed person is a depressed person, whether they talk about it directly or not. Which probably explains why I have always had few friends, and no close friends, for most of my life.

Things seem to have changed. Maybe it’s because I absolutely have to, or it’s the result of all the personal exploration I’ve been doing, but I am starting to accumulate friends. People who I can relate to and we have significant things in common. We can talk about stuff that matters to me and to them, and, this is really important, it’s not about complaining about stuff. I can tell you, it’s so refreshing to have conversations not based on mutual dislikes, or on superficial things that really don’t matter.

I can’t say for sure, but does seem like I’m acting differently, more honestly. It’s so hard to judge my own behavior because I am my own yardstick. I mean that if my values change, then my perception shifts as well as my behavior. It’s like having a ruler that continually changes size: It seems like all the stuff in the world keeps changing size, when in reality it’s your ruler that’s changing. I don’t think that is really all that important, other than to be aware that it happens. Otherwise you can get pretty confused when people start acting strange: Maybe they’ve changed, or maybe you’ve changed.

I also notice that I’m handling my clients differently. I’m more direct, less likely to be tentative about what I really think, more willing to ask personal questions and dig deeper. It feels to me like I’m able to focus more on the client, when I’m less concerned about myself.

Wow! A perfect case in point: I just had a conversation with our mail-person who needed me to sign for a package. I met her for the first time just a couple days ago, when she came to our garage sale. But now she wanted to talk about how we’d never met before, even though I’ve lived here for 20 years. Next thing I know we’re talking about sewing and she’s offering me and my family “free stitching!” In that vein, I offered her my services and gave her a few cards. That was something I would not have done one year ago. Perhaps I am learning what it means to “take off the mask” and be who I really am!

The End of September

Now it is the end of September, the days are shorter and weather has been odd. Alternately hot, then muggy, with some spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I’m finding the reality of my situation is coming over me. Being alone didn’t bother me so much, but it seems like the grayness and general bla-ness of the weather is washing all the joy out of my outlook. My persistent lack of work and it’s attending lack of purpose is leaving me with nothing to get out of bed for in the morning. I want to stay optimistic, but there is so little color left and not a lot to look forward to.

Yesterday, a fellow practitioner sent me this note: ”Jealousy is fear. Release it today!” Sounded right to me. I sent back what I felt was a thoughtful answer, but later I realized that it was dismissive. Being honest is a never-ending challenge! I wonder if I will ever get to the point where I can trust myself to not dismiss and deflect the truth when it stares me in the face? I will soon find out if she calls me on it or not. Jealousy is a persistent issue for me whenever I read or hear about other people who have these great spiritual experiences. It makes me feel like a failure. It didn’t take much thinking to find myself back as a 6 year old, being so afraid of being left out, to the point of being excluded by the neighborhood kids because I was so whiney about it.

At any rate, the more I looked into it, the deeper the rabbit hole went. I went as far back in my memories as I could and I saw myself as a small, scared, child. I tried to imagine comforting him, but I couldn’t. I tried the technique of getting my mother to seem better by working with her as a child, but I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t ever picture my mother as happy and feeling safe. And I recognized that I have always been afraid, and I didn’t know what it felt like to not be afraid. Ever. It’s always there. It doesn’t matter what else is on top of it, or what I’m doing, there is always that undercurrent of what’s going to happen when it’s over. Whatever “it” is: The party, the job, the friendship, the marriage. I have tried, and still try, to hold my life in a death grip of control. I am sure that I will have security by keeping everything exactly as I want it. But even I can see how that doesn’t work. That line from Star Wars “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems slip through your fingers,” sums it up nicely. The tighter you hang on, the less you have.

On the plus side, I can see that. I can see how letting go and dancing in the flow can bring joy. But then there is always the uncertainty. I’ve never been big on trust, of people, or circumstances. In the back of my mind there’s that knowing that I just need to let things be and continue to put out into the universe what I want to come back. And what I put out can not be out of control or neediness or desperation, because, if I do, that’s what I’ll get back. I has to be honesty, trust, friendship, acceptance, and, someday when I can manage it, love. And it has to be the real deal: Unselfish, non-judgmental, and accepting. Otherwise it’s just more of the same “make me feel better,” or “what’s in it for me,” crap I’ve been dealing with all my life. When I’m objective, I can see that I’m have made a lot of progress, I have a few genuine friends now, which is something I never allowed myself before. But on gray days like this, when the future looks bleak, it just doesn’t seem enough.

When I look at things objectively, there is no reason to think that I won’t be OK, at least for the next few years. But, somehow, a lack of purpose eats away at me. A job would give me a temporary respite from all of this, keeping me busy, allowing me to meet new people, giving me some cash and providing me a piece of stability over the next year, while I rebuild my life after the divorce. Funny how you never think it’s going to happen to you, until it does. What you have may not be great, but at least you have your future planned out and you know what’s going to happen. Then one day, the rug comes out and everything is up for grabs again.

People don’t talk about this stuff, and it’s too bad. Maybe we should have divorce parties and divorce magazines, “How to play the ultimate divorce!” And showers, or a combination garage sale and shower: The two new singles need stuff and they, usually, have a lot of stuff to get rid of. What if it was like a gift exchange? Friends bring in stuff needed to set up a single household, and take away stuff that the former couple no longer need or want. I suppose I should contact a divorce support group. I keep thinking about it, but I haven’t done anything yet.

As usual, writing this out has lifted the grey for now. When all is said and done, it really doesn’t matter if anyone reads this stuff or not, just writing it is an end in itself. It would be nice if this might be some comfort to someone else, or perhaps someone would like to send me a note of support. I’ll just see how that goes.

Monday, September 14, 2015

The Darkness Inside

When I traded sessions, a while back, I got acquainted with my fears. Before that, I thought I knew what fear was, and what it felt like, but I have been learning a lot since then. I have discovered the many ways fear masquerades as something else: Often anger. It starts out as reluctance, “I don’t want to,” then escalates into annoyance, then into full blown “pissed off,” if, whatever it is, doesn’t back off. So many of my preferences are really fear, it makes me wonder who I really am. I’ve been processing all of that, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something important.

One piece of advice I got from the other session was, “Look inside,” and I’ve been doing that. A lot. I don’t like what I see, for I see darkness. I also see that I’ve never let anyone in, ever. Not a super surprise that, but still. I wouldn’t have characterized myself as quite so cut off, but there you are. I can see that I’ve spent most of my life holding people at arm’s length, at best. Over the past some years, I have been letting some people closer and closer, to the point of letting them in a little ways, but no one gets all the way inside.

I don’t even know if that is a good idea. You really don’t want to let everyone inside, do you? At least, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t think that everyone wants to see everything that’s going on inside me. It seems that there should be some people who, what, want to help? Huh, I’ve had enough of “helpers” thank you. They just want to listen, a bit, then offer cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all advice. Then get pissed off if you don’t take it. Or not. I know because I’ve played that role. Not much of a relationship there if all you do is listen to offer advice. That role was comfortable and safe, but I eventually figured out that there wasn’t anything there. I was always the “strong,” Mister Advice Giver, who couldn’t show any problems, because, that would mean that I didn’t know what I was talking about after all. That’s a pretty lonely life.

So, in my problem solving mode, I realize that I need a new set of friends. I find that there are a few people that I have been able open up to, under the right circumstances. There’re not many, because I have tended to surround myself with people like myself, but I have been slowly moving in the direction of hanging with a different kind of person. Another problem I have is I don’t know how to Be with these people. I don’t have any experience with sharing without some kind of goal in mind. Part of my mind still has a problem with that. Everybody wants something, right? Anyone I talk to will either want something, or expect that I want something from them. I don’t know if that’s true, it’s just been an unspoken assumption all of my life. So unspoken that I just realized that it was there.

Can I honestly be sure that I don’t want something, that I’m not working some kind of angle? Here is where things get weird. I find myself trying to carefully convince them that I have no agenda, while never 100% sure that it’s true. I don’t even want to think about how that must come off on the outside, I must seem pretty odd, at times. Hey, I blame it on my upbringing: I have no idea how people are supposed to behave in these kinds of situations.

There was no affection, of any kind, my family. Well, that’s not quite true, I remember a one time when I felt close to my mom when I was pretty small, but that’s pretty much it. Nobody “talked” in my family. They yelled, complained, gave orders. But talk? Nah. My number one priority was to survive, and saying anything that might come back around to haunt me, was something I worked very hard to avoid. I was schooled from an early age to say as little as possible, because, no matter what I said, the older kids would find a way to turn it against me. And then I always blamed myself for being stupid enough to let something slip out.

It took me at least a decade, after I left home, to learn to have a conversation. Even a trivial “Hi, how are you,” was a strain. In my head was the ever present calculation about how much did I have to say to get them to go away, without revealing anything that they could use against me later. Work was always like that. Sitting in the lunchroom, hiding in a book, listening to other people’s conversations, wishing I wasn’t quite so alone, but knowing that I just “didn’t have anything to say.” Over time I built up a supply of harmless conversational items I could pull out, when necessary. Sort of like conversational flash cards where I could whip out a canned comment or response. What I said didn’t always fit in with the rest of the conversation, but it was better than nothing.

Over time, I gradually realized that “saying nothing” really wasn’t working all that well. After a point, the conversational nothings become so meaningless that you want to slash your own throat, just to get it to end. I was pretty clear that I had surrounded myself with people who worked on that superficial level, and I was growing to hate it. I am still learning, but I’ve picked up a few things that seem to help.

First, find different people. You can’t always pick your co-workers or family, but you can pick your friends. So find a community where you can say what you want without it being turned against you. I’m not saying that’s easy, stepping outside of my comfort zone to talk to a different class of people is, well, uncomfortable. You don’t know what you’re going to get. You have to use some judgment. Get out of your “lost puppy,” “Will you please be my friend,” mode and value yourself a bit. You don’t have to accept everyone who does you the honor of bestowing their presence on you. Take some time get to know if you really fit before jumping all in and making commitments.

The next thing is like the first: Learn to shrug off hurtful or unkind comments. Then, keep at a distance from people who continue to make them. Again, this comes back to valuing yourself, because you truly don’t need anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself. Even if it’s only part of the time. I’ve had trouble with this, as do many other people. But I’ve pretty much gotten to the point where I don’t want or need someone who won’t hold up their end of the relationship.

Now, for the last thing on my list, learning to accept and meet people where they’re at. This is a far as I’ve gotten, so I have no idea what it’s like to fully achieve this or what might lie beyond it. At this point, I should be able to tell what’s appropriate for each person and situation and share at that level, respecting the boundaries of the other person. I am still learning how this works, how to be intimate on some levels without jumping in whole-hog. I’m really getting that relationships do take time, no matter what stories or movies you may have seen or heard, and the vast majority of relationships only go so far, and that’s the way it should be. A relationship isn’t a failure because it doesn’t meet your initial expectations. They are what they are, not what you think they should be.

I believe I’ve come a long way, but there is a ways more to go. When you stop holding people back and keeping them out, the question then becomes, how far is far enough? And, far enough for what? Now with my divorce, I’m staring at the possibility of having other relationships at some point. What will they look like? How will I know that I’ve actually found something I want to stick with? At the moment it feels like I have this really big emptiness inside that I’ve never really looked at, or allowed anyone else to see either. At the moment, it appear really dark. But I sense the possibility of something wonderful there. All I need to do is learn how to see it.

When letting people in, the first hard lesson I learned is that you can’t force people to be what their not. If they can’t/won’t be what you need, you need to move on, no matter how hard that is. You don’t have to burn bridges and slash-and-burn your way out: You can let them go with love and be friends. But you do need to let them go. The same thing goes for new people: Accept them at the level where you both are comfortable. You don’t want to be a bully or a doormat. It can be really hard, sometimes, to not lay too many expectations on any relationship, we are all human. I’m still learning all this, so I really have no idea what’s going to happen next. I’ve already moved way past anything I ever imagined before, and these are just friends, so who knows what might actually be possible? I assume that I’ll never know it all, but I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to explore.

Monday, September 7, 2015

My Colors of Fear

I thought I knew what fear was, I didn’t know jack. Earlier this week I had a session with another practitioner and discovered fear comes in many flavors and shapes, and I had managed to hide myself from most of them.

We traded sessions. It’s a practice among us practitioners to help the newbies gain experience. I use it to help keep myself grounded. With over a 100 clinical hours under my belt, I’m no longer a beginner, but I’m hardly the seasoned professional either. I need to ‘check in’ from time to time to ensure that I’m not drifting off course. I’ve done a couple of these trades over the past few weeks, but they didn’t work out as I had hoped. The sessions were I was the client went poorly, because I am still significantly blocked from getting access to my subconscious. I was hoping things would have gotten a lot better, but I was disappointed. This time, access was a lot easier, but it was still far from easy and wasn’t of any real value. The past lives were interesting, though odd, but no real information came through, as I can remember. (The other practitioner had trouble operating my recorder and so my session wasn’t recorded.)

My first life was as a dark-haired young man, in what looked like renaissance Italy. He was wearing expensive clothes and a puffy hat. I don’t remember anything else about him. The next life was as a young girl, about 10, with long gold hair and a red velvet dress. It seemed like England, sometime in the middle ages. In the first scene she’s sitting on some grass, smiling and listening to someone sitting on a stool. I don’t know if it was a teacher or a storyteller. The next scene was a party in a large hall, but now she seemed only about 2 or 3 years old, holding hands with some really big person. In the last scene, she was old, with long grey hair, sitting up in a bed in a clean, brightly lit room in, what felt like, a small cottage. She seemed content and not afraid to die. i remember that there was a purpose to the life, but I can’t remember what it was. Then things got strange.

I jumped to a scene from depression-era America, the great plains. I saw the same girl, this time barefoot, in a plain dress, standing outdoors. Everything was dusty and cloudy around her, like there was a dust storm. Behind her I could make out the shadows of a small farmhouse and a windmill. She was just standing there, hand straight down at her sides and staring straight ahead, right at me. She seemed frozen as the wind blew around her. She seemed very unhappy, in stark contrast to the first time I saw her. Her eyes were hopeless.

After a while where nothing changed, I finally got the idea that she was stuck and I was supposed to help her ascend. I tried, and achieve partial success, as part of her seemed to go. But part of her remained. I tried showing her the light and showing her love, but it was a struggle. I should go back there and have another try. I think that what I’m seeing there is part of me that is stuck, somewhere.

The subconscious portion of this session was a bust, as I remember, I was so busy fighting the process that not much came out. I remember almost nothing.

But things finally got interesting when we switched and I ran the session for the other practitioner. Things went well, and at the end of the session, I sometimes the client’s subconscious if there is any message or advice for me. Usually I get some some simple advice, “Keep doing what you’re doing…” etc., but this time I got a whole conversation. A whole conversation about fear. Yeah. I know I’m blocked, but this conversation really showed me that the blocks were fear, in stark terms. I don’t mean that I was told about it, I mean that as the conversion went on, I was remembering and feeling the different kinds of fear that were there.

I remembered when I was working with someone on my LinkIn profile, and how reluctant I was to accept what she was saying. At the time I was thinking “I don’t know how,” though now it’s clear that I was afraid. I’m not sure of what, exactly, but we I was feeling was fear. I never realized that before. I also noticed arrogance. This is hard to explain, but I saw myself in recent situations and realized that what I thought was helpfulness was actually arrogance, and the need to force my opinion on the other person. It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve done that, but it’s the first time I recognized it for what it is. It seems that everywhere I look in my life, I see fear. I am hemmed in by fears on every side. Here I though I was so enlightened and so in control of my life, when I’ve been actually navigating a torturous path among the rocks of my fears, while pretending I was sightseeing.

That’s what the past week has been like. I’ve been doing it so much I’m getting weary of the whole thing, but truth is truth, and hiding from it just makes me feel worse. I’m beginning to question the authenticity of my words and actions in almost every interaction. I’ve started short posts, retyped them several times, taking over an hour, then ended up deleting them entirely because I couldn’t convince myself that I had anything worth saying. I’ve been serially doubting myself. But then, this morning, I read something that moved me and wrote a reply, and it just felt right. What I said isn’t important, but it was honest and genuine and authentic, and that’s what matters. I find myself reading certain things that provoke me to think and remember when I’ve been less than honest, and deal with confronting what was behind those actions and feelings. (I also seem to be expressing myself differently, or at least it seems that way to me.)

That seems to be my job, for the time being, confront what I’ve kept hidden. To pull penetrate the facades, remove the masks and peer through the disguises on all the things that I have been pretending were something nice, or at least acceptable. I’m done with pretending, so what if everybody else does it, I don’t want to do it any more!

What's the "Truth" about Ghosts?

Someone posted a question on a web site asking about the "Truth about Ghosts." I wrote this reply.

Ah, what is "truth?" First of all, "spirits" of all kinds seem to exist in the stories of every culture, as far back as we can tell. And in every culture they take on their own, unique, characteristics, which generally reflect those of their culture. People have been having Spiritual experiences, well, forever, as far as anyone can tell.

Today, in the U.S. alone, surveys show that millions of people admit to having spiritual, paranormal or unexplained experiences, many of them on a daily basis. Yet the culture as a whole insists that these are all just stories, that there is no evidence that any of these phenomena exist. Well, that is true, if you ignore the testimonies of millions of people, and all the research over the past 100 years.

Consider this: Scientists have been looking for Dark Matter for about 100 years. They say that it makes up 96% of the universe. That includes you and me. So far, they've found exactly nothing. Zero, nada, zippity-do-da, nothing. Yet it's perfectly acceptable in scientific circles to talk as though it exists and spend millions to dollars looking for it. Yet those same people will go out of their way to ignore and discredit anything that might show evidence of something psychic, on the basis that there is no evidence.

It's understandable, I suppose. On one side, you have the materialists who blindly insist "there aint no such thing," and on the other, you have a gazillion religious and spiritual groups who all put their own particular spin on spirituality and the paranormal. Often these groups are at odds with each other, each insisting that their interpretation is the only correct one. So, even though most of the people in the world pretty much agree that there is Something Going On Here, in regard to spirits and the paranormal, the is no concusses on even the basic characteristics of what that Something might be. The poor researchers in this field have to take fire from every quarter: Not only from the materialists, but also from the religious/spiritual types who are afraid that the researchers will find something that contradicts their beliefs or might take some of the "mystery" out of their faith.

To be purely objective, there is plenty of empirical evidence that "ghosts" (or paranormal phenomena) exist, but we all know that almost nobody is completely objective around this subject. Do your own research: There is plenty to read about Near Death Experiences and all the phenomena around them, which, together with the reincarnation research of Ian Stevenson, strongly suggest that there is more the afterlife than "Science" currently wants to admit. Remember, science, by it's own admission, can only explain 4% of the universe, what's going on in the other 96% is completely unknown.

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And now for something completely different: I am going through some extremely difficult times right now, emotionally and financially. I don't know where I will be six months from now, in a lot of different ways. If anyone would like to meet, talk, visit, share a cup of coffee, that would be really nice as I really need to get out of my head. Thanks.

Friday, August 28, 2015

Do Ghosts Exist?

Do ghosts/spirits exist?

What's really interesting about this question is that you don't need postulate any new physics, or anything else, for that matter, for ghosts to exist, you just have to recognize and accept that fact that the body of science isn't complete. Or, to put it another way, "science doesn't know everything." Just have a look at what we have already: There is "dark matter," something nobody's ever seen or detected, despite over 100 years of looking, yet scientists say makes up over 90% of the universe. You and me included. Also, thanks to quantum mechanics, we have particles that behave like naughty children, doing one thing when you're "watching" and something quite different when you're not. (Double Slit Experiment)

The debate is still raging about what it means that you can change the outcome of a physics experiment simply by observing it. I mean, how do the particles "know" that you are looking at them anyway? Isn't that a case of human minds directly influencing matter, i.e. a "psychic power?" If not, why not?

Getting back to ghosts. What are ghosts? A common definition is that they are some form of consciousness, disconnected from a material body. Millions of people around the world claim to seeing or interacting with spirits every day, so there plenty of empirical evidence that they exist. However, it is all subjective, and there is no, really good, object evidence, so far. (Before you say "Ah ha! If it was there they would have found it by now!" Remember, they have been looking for Dark Matter for 100 years, have not found anything, yet it's still respectable to spend millions of dollars on experiments looking for it.)

Now, before you declare victory for the materialists, consider this: There is no hard, objective, evidence that consciousness exists. Yup, there is a group of respected scientists that believe the consciousness does not exist, and the thing that you call "consciousness" is merely an illusion. (The hard problem of consciousness) Even among those who agree that consciousness exists, nobody knows what it is. Since we can't detect it or measure it in any way, we have no way of knowing if consciousness is dependent on the brain or not. Thus we have the two main models: Brain as Generator and brain as Phone.

Brain as Generator says that the physical brain generates consciousness. Brain as phone says that the physical brain acts like a cell phone, a conduit through which the "spirit" interacts with the physical world. These two models are debated, but the phone model not given much credence. All the evidence that I can find for the Generator point of view, consists of noticing that damaging or stimulating various parts of the brain effect perception and consciousness, and saying that demonstrates that consciousness is created within the brain. On the other hand, is someone out there willing to argue that messing with the inside of your cell phone, so that it doesn't work so well, or not at all, proves that the voices, texts and internet content it displays are generated within the phone? If not, then the Generator model has no evidence at all.

The empirical evidence implies that consciousness survives death and does not need a physical brain to exist. (i.e. "ghosts") But we're not likely to find out more than that anytime soon, because the real question is, why is it considered rational and scientific, to ignore the vast body of empirical evidence, and ridicule anyone who attempts to do serious research in that area, in favor of a position that, admittedly, has no evidence, even anecdotal, to support it's position?



Sunday, August 23, 2015

Asking For Help

I haven’t been writing much lately, I’m finding it hard. My life’s in a bit of turmoil, what with finding a job and all, I just seem to have a hard time focusing. I’ve also been told that, since I’m looking for work, I should back off on the touchy-feeling stuff and focus on technology. I find that a bit hard to do because I just don’t care that much about it. It’s what I have to do for a living, I don’t really want to think about it in my spare time. 

I used to think that knowing a lot about tech made me cool or special, in some way, so I forced myself to read a lot of magazines on science and technology so I could “keep up.” It seems that having a bunch of current “technological tidbits” at my fingertips made me feel like I had something to say. Heaven forbid that I actually share something about myself or listen to what the other person had to say. Now I realize that I tended to hang out with people that did the same time as I did, talking only about stuff “out there.” I did it because I was uncomfortable talking about anything else. I didn’t think that my life was interesting and other people’s lives made me jealous, angry or depressed. No wonder I always had dysfunctional relationships.

I am trading sessions with another practitioner this weekend. I was disappointed with my session, I didn’t get to the answers I was hoping for. I did see an interesting “past life:” but wasn’t able to reach the subconscious and get any clear answers to my questions. I’m constantly blocking myself and this truly seems to be a theme of my life.

The “past life” took place on some other planet and I was humanoid, but not human. I was very tall and thin and wore a dark blue, suit-like thing. It resembled a stylized business suit, but I had the impression that it was more than just a covering, that it helped me maintain my shape, in some way. There were a few scenes with parts of the suit removed, and the body seemed like a blob that couldn’t hold it’s shape.

All the scenes took place on a kind of platform, high in the air, that stuck out from the side of some dark, cliff-like thing I that never really got a good look at. These images seemed stylized, almost like colored pencil sketches around the edges. The platform had no straight lines or any consistent curves, it’s outline resembled a stylized flame, with the tip of the flame pointing a way from the cliff. The surface of the platform wasn’t very flat, it was shaped somewhat like a frozen wave. Near the end of the platform was a fairly ordinary upholstered chair, with something like a skeletal end table/lamp nearby. 

I saw most of this from the outside. It’s like there were two somebodies: One doing the stuff and me watching. We both looked the same, though it seemed that I was larger. It seemed that I was both watching and being the other being. I could feel what he was feeling and know what he was thinking, but partially from the inside and mostly from the outside. Hey, I was beside myself!

At first, I was standing near the base of the platform, looking out at the chair, and past that into a hazy-cloudy vastness. I/he went and sat in the chair. He could control what he was seeing out beyond the platform. I don’t know how, there were no controls of any sort, I knew that he could. He was looking at rolling agricultural fields with scattered houses. He had some kind of job to do that partially related to the weather. 

My memory is a bit fuzzy here, but there was a scene where he was sitting on the edge of the platform, dangling his legs over the edge, and watching thick, billowy, clouds. There was no sky visible, just clouds, ranging from light gray to dark. 

The final scene had fire. I couldn’t see much more than an angry glow and a few glimpses of bright flame, the smoke was too thick. He was on the edge of the platform, watching, feeling remotely sad and like a failure. He was feeling like he’d had one purpose and he’d blown it, but the feelings weren’t all that strong. But still, there was a feeling of emptiness, and pointlessness to it all.

I disappointed with the rest of the session. I couldn’t get a purpose or a lesson from that life, and the subconscious wouldn’t come through. Looking at it now, I’m a little surprised that the lesson has nothing to do with failure, but revolves around being alone, and doing “it” all by myself, Never asking for help, reluctantly accepting help or assistance, no matter how much I need it, and believing that I’m “not good enough” unless I can do it all by myself. Wow. Never really brought that into focus before. I’m going to have to ponder that and see what comes out of it.

In a few months I will be living alone, for the first time in my life, if roommates count. Clearly a new experience. In a way, I’m already living it now. Knowing it’s coming is already putting me in that space. Now I get the feeling that a bad relationship is better than being alone. I hope this will pass soon. I don’t need to feel isolated, it’s just that the reality’s sunk in and it’s going to take some time to get used to. Having a job will help to give me some sense of purpose and a sense of self worth. Transitions are always hard, no matter how positive they eventually turn out to be. I’ve heard about this stuff forever, but this is the first time I’ve been self-aware enough to see what’s happening as I’m going through it. 

The past two years have been good preparation. I’ve been finding new interests and making new friends, getting out and doing stuff. I used to be such a homebody. Now I won’t be stuck by myself 24/7, but I’m going to have to make some choices soon, as my current path is not sustainable. Once I find my new direction, I will probably have to rearrange, or give up, some things that I like. I suppose that’s a good thing, that there are enough good things in my life that I don’t have room for all of them at once, but it’s more change.


Perhaps I should truly take the lesson of that “past” life to heart: Ask for help, accept help, accept assistance in small ways and large ones. I have this thing about not being a bother, I don’t want to annoy anyone, that asking to hang out or something, is being a stalker, or weird, or just plain awkward. Now I get to spend the next period of my life figuring out how all that works. It could be worse: It could be raining.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Paracon 2015, Part 2 - Impressions

Some more thoughts on the Grey Ghost Paracon aboard the USS Hornet. This is the just the second time I’ve been to a “haunted” place since I’ve come out of the closet about the paranormal, both to myself and to world at large, and allowed myself to notice and feel whatever there was without discounting it. The evening “investigation” tours took all the attendees, in small groups, to many of the shipboard hot spots. My group was led by a woman who was an intuitive, and was a member of an investigation team that is based on on the Hornet. She had many personal stories to tell, which I find more interesting than the second hand ones.

The first stop was CIC. Though somewhat technically interesting, it was also hot and stuffy. I felt there was zippo activity there and the tech people got nothing as well. I the next stop was a Ready room, I think. This was the most interesting for me. There I had impressions of two people, one in the hall, outside the room, and one inside the room. It also seemed to me that these entities were less than full-fledged personalities, they just seemed two-dimensional, somehow. Perhaps these were what are called “residuals,” more like recordings than spirits.

The one in the all seemed to me to be a cook. He was sweaty and dirty and a little angry about something. He was stuck in the hall because he wasn’t allowed in the room, officer country, maybe? The other person was at the other end of the room from me. He was wearing a flight jacket, but he wasn’t a pilot. It took a while to sort out the impressions, but finally I realized that he was dressed more like a WWII Army pilot, not navy. He was extremely angry about something “she” had done.

The tech seemed to react more here than anywhere else. Near the end of our allotted time, I felt both impressions leave. A little while later the guide suggested that we move on, and I spoke up, for the only time on this tour, to vote yay because the entries had all left.

The next notable spot was one of the emergency generator rooms. The guide had a great story about what she, and others, had seen and felt in this room. All the interesting stuff happened on one place, but I couldn’t see where that was, because of the dark and all the people and equipment blocking my view. After she finished her talk and had answered questions. I wondered about the general area and got strong chills in one, particular, spot. I don’t know if that was “the” spot or not. (I’m not too worried about being “right” these days, I just want to experience what I can.)

Sick bay was the last interesting spot. This consists of a suit of rooms including offices, and a variety of examining, operating, testing and treatment rooms. It was interesting because of all the equipment and other details of the era, and because of a general feeling of the place. I had strong chills when I first looked into the entrance, and occasional “bumps” in various places.

I have now accumulated several first-hand accounts of ghost encounters aboard this ship. Most of them seemed perfectly ordinary, except that the “person” vanished, inexplicably. They happen to people alone in the dark, and on the hanger deck, in broad daylight, with hundreds of people present. Most often the ghost was seen by only one person, but sometimes more than one. I can’t help but wonder if many more people see these things, but just never realize it. I mean, how would they? If you saw a “sailor” on a ship with lots of veterans and others wearing various kinds of uniforms, would you notice?

This is an idea that has been forming in my head for a while. If the paranormal exists, then it’s part of nature and it’s happening all the time, all around us, the effects are just too subtle to notice, as a rule. On the other hand, we don’t want to notice this stuff, so it’s easy to edit it out of our experience. We chalk it up to inattention, confusion, wishful thinking or coincidence. Many great scientific discoveries have been the result of someone noticing a series of anomalous events, errors, odd things that were considered not worth explaining, and “connected the dots” to realize that there was a pattern here that said something new about the world.

Right now, the whole paranormal/psychic phenomena area is a mishmash of weird stories and scientific data points. All very confusing and mostly anecdotal, with no clear rules to sort the wheat from the chaff. By far, most investigators and ghost hunters are out to find cool stuff, so that have a good story to tell. It’s not really about advancing understanding, which really isn’t too surprising. I guess we are still waiting for a Newton or Einstein who makes the one, critical, observation that begins to make sense of it all.

Friday, August 14, 2015

A Wonderful Freedom

Growth happens when you don’t expect it.

I had a client recently that was very attractive, and, in a way, I kinda didn’t notice. Well, I noted it but I didn’t feel any response, and that struck me as odd. She certainly seemed pleasant enough, but there was absolutely no reaction inside me to her prettiest smile.

Another practitioner mentioned something like this, in passing, a while back. She had noticed that, as she worked her way up the “spiritual ladder” so to speak, she reacted less and less to the world around her, and people thought her cold. I am also beginning to notice something like that, but I would amend it to say that I react less and less out of habit, and to things I don’t care to react to. But in areas that matter to me, I feel more deeply, and more profoundly than ever before.

I think it’s a matter of removing all the triggers and habits, and “ought toos,” so that I’m free to care about only what matters to me. And it’s a matter of being comfortable with who I am, knowing what I’m about, what I am and am not, so I don’t get all flustered and flattered when a pretty girl smiles at me. It’s kind of nice to realize that I’ve reached a level of maturity where my ego doesn’t run around like a hyper-active dog, humping everything in sight, unable to resist any sign of approval, from anyone.

The downside is that some people may consider me unfeeling, or think that I just don’t care. And that’s ok. I’ve also learned that if I want people to know what I’m committed to, I tell them. If people can’t get that it’s possible to be passionately committed to something, without all the desk-pounding, hyperbolic, over-heated rhetoric, that stands in for intelligent discussion these days, then that’s ok with me. People either get me or they don’t, and since I have no control over how people’s beliefs will cause them interpret me, I no longer worry too much about it. Not needing the approval of the masses is a wonderful freedom.

Monday, August 10, 2015

My visit to Grey Ghost Paracon 2015, Part I.

A Paranormal convention. This was something that wasn’t even on my radar six months ago, and here I was a vender at one. I honestly don’t know what to expect, so I guess then it’s hard to be disappointed. This convention took place on the aircraft carrier Hornet, in Alameda, California. Originally commissioned in 1943, the Hornet served from WWII through the Apollo program, and was decommissioned in 1970. This ship saw a lot of action and is famous for being haunted.

I had never been there before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in the ship itself, so I’m going to have to go back there sometime when I have the time to look everything over and go on the tours. I had first heard about the convention through a couple I had met through my MeetUp group on reincarnation. They had worked on the ship, and so I was able to hang with them and other docents at meal times, got a little peak behind-the-scenes and some of the inside dope on some of what goes on there.

The convention started with the usual stuff, vender tables and presenters giving talks for about two hours, then dinner, and then we were all divided up into “investigation” teams, each with a couple of guides, that toured the ship’s hot spots. After these tours were finished, about 1:30 am, people were free to wander the open areas until 3. I quit at the end of the tour. I was really tired and had seen enough.

During vender time, I set up a table for my services and immediately started learning. The first thing I noticed, is that everybody else had a banner that they hung from the front of there table. I didn’t. Next time I’m going to have to look into that. The other thing I got, was that almost nobody seemed to understand what I was all about. I suppose that I assumed that people really into ghost hunting and the paranormal would, at least, know about releasing spirits and de-possession, but apparently not. Or they only were acquainted with it in a peripheral sort of way, it really didn’t have anything to do with what they were interested in. In fact, the whole concept of de-haunting might actually piss them off a bit, I mean, they’re into investigation, if we clean out the haunted places they’ll have nothing to do.

It seemed like a lot of the conventioneers were from various investigation groups. Now that I think of it, I should have spent more time talking to the different groups and finding out what they did. What little it did pick up showed me that there are many different approaches and goals for these groups. Who knew that there were so many? There was also a group with t-shirt messages I won’t repeat here; Any convention attracts all kinds, I suppose.

I haven’t watched too many ghost shows. I have seen some, but they didn’t prepare me for what I ran into at this con. I really hadn’t realized how much the paranormal world was divided into Sensitives and Techs. (I made up these names, but the division is quite real.) The TV shows I’ve seen give short-shift to the sensitives. (Probably because there’s not much to see there.) There is also a third category, the pure scientist, who is less interested in ghost hunting, per se, and is focused on parapsychology and the science behind the whole phenomenon. I only saw one person in this last group, who I’d already seen at HCH Institute, where he teaches classes. The Sensitives tend to focus on developing their intuition, and so don’t pay much attention to the tech, and the Techs seem to pay little attention to their senses, so the groups seem to have an uneasy partnership, each not really sure what to make of the other.

It seems logical that there should be crossovers, intuitives that also know their tech, but I didn’t meet any. One of the presenters was a fellow that apparently has created and built most of the devices that are out there now. He makes his living selling these devices and doesn’t really have anything to say about whether ghosts exist or not. He just builds stuff that people like and looks good on TV shows. At least, that’s what he says.

For me, this raises a question. I’m capable of building whatever hardware might interest me, but I’m also an intuitive. I find it easier and more interesting to depend on my senses than to depend on a bunch of cranky and clumsy devices to detect and communicate. On the other hand, tech is completely objective and creates a record, so there is that to consider. But, what would happen if the engineers and intuitives got together and built devices that detected what the intuitives felt? I have read up on the tech, to some extent, and it seems that most of it is based on the idea of looking at random signals or input and looking for non-randomness, that is then translated into output. Presumably, the spirits are able to influence the random signals in order to communicate. What if you, instead, searched for things that are sensitive to psychic energy in the same way that other instruments are sensitive to light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet light and other forms of radiation?

One of these days I’m going to have to seriously sit down and consider this whole idea. It seems to me that all the people building tech are not sensitive, so they have no way to reality-check their ideas. It’s like blind people trying to design and build a camera. How do you develop the science and technology of optics for lenses, for example, if you can’t see? My theory is, that any device or detector that you can buy, has already been de-sensitized to the paranormal as much as possible. Because these influences are pretty much everywhere, all the time, it’s just that most people don’t notice them, except when they’re unusually strong, or they’re unusually open to it.

My idea, if anyone wants to fund it, is to investigate sensors and circuits and devices of all kinds that are generally avoided because they “don’t work right,” or exhibit, seemingly, random behavior at times, to see if any of them react to the paranormal things that I can sense. It’s like when scientists that stumbled across x-rays, and had to figure out how to image and control this new form of energy that nobody had ever seen before. I’m sure that there are methods of objectively detecting paranormal “energies,” for lack of a better tern, but these methods have all been discarded by technologists because they appear to be unstable and unreliable by people who didn’t recognize what they are actually responding to. If anyone wants to fund this, let me know. ;)

Paracon: To be continued. There’s lots more to talk about.

Monday, August 3, 2015

How Deep the Rabbit Hole?

Yesterday I had a massive anxiety attack in a social situation. I’ve had the feeling before, and I’ve been in similar situations before. Sometime they trigger it, sometimes they don’t, but this time it was unusually strong. I knew the situation was coming up, and I also noticed the feeling beginning to rise. I decided to go through with it anyway and put as brave a face on it as I could; no reason to be weird in front of my friends.

Anxiety seems like such a trivial word for such a powerful emotion. It seems like there should be some great and impressive name for the feeling that can sometimes cripple me in certain situations, but, as far as I can tell, there isn’t. There’s just this unnamed emotion that sucks all the enjoyment out some social situation. I hope that some people didn’t feel avoided. I did the best I could, but I when I reached a certain point, I just had to take off or, I don’t know. I really don’t know what would happen if I just let it all out right there. In a way, it’s just a huge feeling of dread and the only solution is to get away.

As I said, I’ve been through this before. In the past I just stuffed it down or ran away, depending on how strong it was that time. This time, I decided to follow my own advice and find and remove the beliefs that, I assume, underlie this emotion. And I was in for a surprise.

I kept the feeling present all the way home. It appears that it was time for this emotion to go, because, unlike most times in the past, it was fairly easy to keep it present until I had time to work on it, and I dawdled quite a while before I got around to it. Today I’m facing my own duplicity in the fact that, although I knew what to do and how to do it, I was still extremely reluctant to face and deal with these emotions. In the back of my mind, I tend to fault others for not dealing with the emotions that are clearly making a mess of their lives, and here I was doing the same thing! Reality Check!

Yes I did get around to processing these emotions, and, fortunately, they were still easy to get present to. So I dived in. It only took a little while to figure out that the core belief I was up against was “I’m worthless.” It seems that all the similar beliefs around it had already been cleared, but I seemed to have missed this one. The processing was fairly textbook, though a bit tedious. One of the drawbacks of working on yourself is the tendency for your mind to wander. The more powerful the emotion, the greater the tendency to “forget” what you’re doing. I had to pull myself back on course more times than I can count. When you’re working with someone, they can help keep you focused.

In a way, it’s a relief to be able to depend on someone else. On the other hand, though, you have to tell them all those secrets that you trouble facing inside your own head. And also, it seems to me that sometimes having to articulate my emotions, and explain what’s going on to a coach, can sometimes get in the way of we’re trying to accomplish. I guess in any aspect of health, you just have to take responsibility for yourself, because you can’t expect that someone will always be there to take care of you.

So, I finally made it to the bottom and there got my surprise. There I was at the bottom, and all the emotional charge was completely flattened, and the belief was still there. That was something I hadn’t seen on a long time! Usually, once the charge is completely gone, the belief disappears without any further effort. Not this time.

When I was first taught to remove or “pull” beliefs, we always to go through a lengthy process for each one, and emotional charge was not addressed. Looking back on it, it seems rather odd, for the charge often got in the way. Now I’m sure that no belief can be released without removing the charge that holds it in place, but, at the time, we simply didn’t consider it. For that past couple of years, I’ve been secretly patting myself on the back because I’d noticed that I didn’t seem to have to “pull” things anymore, all I had to do was clear the emotions and they vanished on their own. I was thinking that was a sign of my advancement!

Ah well. Today the reality I’d been ignoring is pretty clear, and the mechanics of how beliefs work are, once again, present to me. “Beliefs,” whatever they actually are, come in two flavors. One type, a core type, just is, in a manner of speaking. It seems to always accumulate emotional charge, but it’s not dependent on it. It always must be explicitly released, but it won’t actually disappear until all the it’s charge has drained off. In the old days, we would struggle with releasing beliefs, trying various techniques and approaching the process from different angles, until it finally went. At the time, we didn’t get that we were, indirectly, draining off the charge through all our fiddling.

The second type of belief, is dependent on a core belief. It also contains charge, but it needs to be anchored by a related core belief in order to exist. These dependent beliefs are easy to release, you often only have to look at them sidewise and they go. But they will return, if you don’t deal with the core belief that they are related to. Once you release a core belief, all the beliefs dependent on it become “free floating” in a way, and will often release spontaneously, as soon as they are triggered by something in the environment. If not, a few seconds of focused concentration will do the trick.

I hadn’t come across a core belief in a long time. They tend to be well protected and hard to locate. They disguise themselves so well that we accept them, without question, as “just the way it is.” The most difficult skill I’ve had to learn, in the process I’m calling “enlightenment,” is distinguishing the patchwork of beliefs that make up this thing that I call “reality.” I am coming around to understand that the world you experience is a product of your personal beliefs. Even the most hardened materialist accepts that how you perceive the world is effected by how you feel, and how you feel is determined by your beliefs. But how far does this go, how much does perception create your personal reality?

How much of reality is “fundamental” and how much is a construct of your perceptions? I still don’t know; I’ve been digging for years and still haven’t reached the bottom. How deep does this rabbit hole go?

Friday, July 31, 2015

Are you now or have you ever been...

More Druidry.

I’ve been thinking another interesting insight I out of my visiting the Druid Grove meeting. At the end of the talk, after the leader had laid out a thumbnail sketch of what Druidry is, she asked each of us to tell the group which level of Druid we thought we were. There’s a cool overview of Druid spiritual tradition Here.

The Druid hierarchy consists of three levels: Bards, Ovates & Full Druids. The bards are pretty much what you would expect, singers, storytellers and entertainers. Though, within the Druid world, they take on additional roles of court jester and intelligence agent. By traveling far and wide, and listening wherever they go, and by having the ear of the king (as the jester), they keep the other Druids apprised of what people were thinking and the state of the land.

The Ovates are the healers, judges, justice of the peace, midwives. These don’t move around nearly as much, working within a relatively small area, so they can know and be known and trusted by the people in that area.

The Full Druids are the top of the heap. The decision makers and teachers. Responsible for keeping balance in all things, including things political.

When asked to pick one of these, I saw that I was somewhere between Bard and Ovate. Music, performance and theater used to be a big deal for me and they consumed a lot of my attention. Now, not so much. My attention is elsewhere and I’m more interested in being a healer than in getting noticed as a performer. To my chagrin, I also notice that “I’m not there yet,” at least in my own mind. 

I’ve been told many encouraging things, but, when it gets right down to it, I don’t feel like a healer. I’ve been told this would happen. That I would reach a point, after the initial coolness of learning all the good stuff wears off, when it comes home to me that the real world is not as simple as it appeared in training. The last thing our teacher told us at graduation, was that we now had unconscious competence, and that over the period of the internship, we will move that to conscious competence and build confidence in our skills. There is no question that I have had to face some hard realities about what I know, how to apply it and the limitations of time, money, and what the clients will allow.

Being out of the game for a month has really shaken my confidence. I had a group session last night that interesting, but not particularly exciting. It wasn’t clear if any of the people there had gotten what they were looking for, and that always makes me feel a bit low. I really need to get over that. People get what they need to get, and they may not be too forthcoming about it. They may not realize what they’ve gotten til some time down the road. It’s really nice for someone to have a really cool experience and tell us all about it, but it doesn’t always happen that way and I need to be ok with that.

It’s clear to me that my journey, to being the type of healer I want to be, is going to take some time. And in that time I’m going to have to work a regular job to finance my “education.” I want to travel more and take more classes, and meet more people. I don’t want the classes in order to “learn” stuff or get certificates to hang on my wall, but to have the experience of what that modality will teach me, on an unconscious level. Any type of training, if you approach it in the right way, forces you to uncover and confront aspects of yourself that get in your way. No one training will uncover everything, so it can easily take years to get to the bottom of the blocks and negative beliefs that keep you where you are.

Having a year and a half off has allowed me to let go of an enormous amount of cynicism about the computer industry. Now that I have a goal, the work is a means to an end, no longer the stultifying activity required to survive. This time around, I will find a position that suits my values, at a company that I can have some respect for. In the past, I would take whatever I could get, based on the premise that I had no value and was lucky to get anything at all. It still feels a bit strange to consider myself valuable, with useful skills that should be respected and listened to, but I’m getting there. I’m still working on striking that balance between honoring myself and standing up for my values, and not being an opinionated, selfish, jerk. As I say, I’m working on it.

Druidry has it cool points, and I may head in that direction someday. But right now, I’m still trying to find my footing in this more mundane world, footing that will allow me the freedom to explore my reality in different ways.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Druidry, My Introduction

I went to a Druid Grove meeting. It was part lecture, part ceremony. Mostly it was information about begin a druid as a philosophy and a life style. As pointed out by the presenter, some people treat Druidry as a religion, but she doesn't. In my mind, exactly what makes a religion a religion is a bit fuzzy. Time to Google.

Ok, I’m back. According to Merriam-Webster, religion is:

: the belief in a god or in a group of gods.

: an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods.

: an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group.

Hmm, these definitions kind of imply that almost anything you consider important could be considered a religion. On the other hand, the first two definitions require gods, and the lecturer completely skipped over the mention of any specific deities. Which would make sense when you understand that she considered it more of a philosophy. The main tenant of Druidry seems to be balance, balance in all things.

You can Google Druidry and learn get as much detail as you want, so I’m not going to give a full definition here, I’m just going to talk about the parts that interested me and gave me insights.

The funny thing about balance is that it’s not static. If you stand something up on end, sooner or later it will fall down, due to some external influence. There’s the concept that I was introduced through robotics called Dynamic Balance, which is how people, or instance, remain upright while walking and running. This is opposed to Static Balance, which describes how things remain upright while standing still. Early robots all used static balance algorithms when they moved, and needed to remain completely centered at all times. The severely limited their speed and stability; they were pretty easy to knock over. The newest models now use dynamic balance, which allows them to be “out of balance” in one sense, while remaining upright.

For instance, when you are running, especially when you are accelerating, you are out of balance; your center of gravity is not directly above your feet. You stay upright and move forward by continually catching yourself on one foot, then the other, as you continue to fall forward. You stay upright through a balance between how fast you are falling forward and how fast you are pushing back with your feet. Lean further forward, and you speed up (or fall down), lean backwards and you slow down or stop. Dynamic balance means you are continuously adapting and compensating for the changes the world throws at you. I say all this because the speaker spoke a lot about balance, but seemed to imply that there was a single, static, point of balance, and the job of the druid was to find and maintain that state.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in this context, there is no such thing as one balance point. Everything is in motion, all the time, and don't retain our balance as much as we create new balance every day. What may be a great solution and bring balance today, could be a disaster tomorrow, when circumstances change. And things always change. When we expect change and anticipate upsets, we are able to navigate through life with a certain amount of grace. Ever tried to stand on a surfboard or a skate board, while it’s not moving? It’s Hard! A bicycle is so easy to balance when you're moving, really difficult to balance when your standing still. It’s the same way with life; if you try and fix your life into a single routine and resist change, you will find yourself working really hard, constantly facing upsets as things happen and the world shifts and changes around you. On the other hand, if you are open and can accept change, then bumps and perturbations are easy to recover from. Not to mention that life is a whole lot easier.

I’m as guilty as anyone of finding a situation I like, and, once there, wanting to keep everything exactly the same. Or having an ideal of how things should be, aiming for it, and getting upset when anything in my life threatened that course. When you’re young, change is cool, when you get more set in your ways, change becomes annoying. When Steve Jobs died, I had a sinking feeling that Apple, the Apple I knew and hitched a lot of my identity to, was gone. Of course, Apple is still here, but he Apple that I believed in is not. In reality, it’s probably been gone for years; That scrappy, counter-culture startup with unique products that gave the computer world the finger, had been fading for a long time, but I could pretend it was still there as long as Steve was running things. Now Apple is different, for better or worse, it’s different. Get over it.

That’s dynamic balance. The fact that work, school, church or pretty much any group you belong to, is going to change. You know you’ve been with any group for a while when you catch yourself thinking about “the good old days.” People come in, people go, kids grow up, your interests change, and you find yourself having to make the choice: Do I resist change, ignore new opportunities and allow my world to contract, or do I embrace change and try new things?

When you try and keep everything the same, same job, same friend, same hobbies, same music, same movies, same interests, you risk focusing on the details and minutia of life, and being constantly upset by all the wrinkles that life throws at you. It’s like being on a ship in the middle of the ocean and being totally focused on running the ship, so much so that you pay no real attention on where the ship is going. And then you’re surprised when you look up one day and discover that you’re in a place you never expected, and probably never wanted. That’s a life of static balance.

On the other hand, if you're on that same ship, but you have a clear idea of where you're going, then the details of running the ship are only as important as they need to be, in order to get you there. You give them just as much attention as they require, and no more. If things change, you adapt, because you know your purpose is what's important. When your purpose is clear, you can always find your way back, no matter how many storms, crosscurrents, or other obstacles appear in your path.

Some of you may have noticed that this analogy works on two levels. First, it's a journey to a particular goal. But, if you zoom back a bit, you see that the journey is your life, and the ship is your day-to-day reality. The size of the ship, it's complexity and all the "stuff" on board represent your physical and emotional baggage. And there is no goal, but instead, a purpose, a guiding principle or principles, that inform your choice of direction and give you a context to interpret all the things you see and do along the way.

To be a modern-day, philosophic Druid, is to seek dynamic balance in all things. A balance that allows you continuously adapt to the obstacles life throws at you, and the missteps you make along the way. Even if you fall, you can roll with it and get back up. If the obstacles seem too great, you can find a detour or alternate route. Your guiding principles allow you to adapt to changing conditions while informing you of which changes and actions are compatible with your values, and they can only do that if you release your attachment to the details of daily life.