I'm back: Belief Space!

Hello again! I haven’t posted in a long time because I have been getting my life in order. Before you ask, no, I’m not done. But I have moved into a new phase, and I’m now moved to start getting back into the world!

I’ve set up a new web site!  It definitely was time: The site was getting pretty long in the tooth, and was just a stopgap, anyway. Another reason is that I’ve significantly changed my outlook, understanding and methods, so that the old site no longer resonated with me. My views and techniques have really evolved over the past couple of years, so a new look and message was definitely in order. Have a look!

There is so much to cover! I don’t have room for it all here, but I will probably touch on aspects of what I’ve learned over the next several months. Today, I’m looking at something that happened recently, seemingly because of a presentation I’m writing for the local MUFON chapter, but I suspect the shift has been going for a while and this is just part of the process!

Anyway, the trouble started when I actually sat down and started writing the presentation. I realized, after babbling on for a couple of pages, that I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to say, because I was too afraid to take a stand on anything controversial.

I had started out with the idea of exploring the how past life regressions can be used for healing. But that quickly moved to UFOs and abductions, as they occur in regressions, which still didn’t feel right. Long story short, I’m now zeroing in on UFOs and what they tell us about the nature of reality. I’ll have to keep you in suspense because it’s not finished yet, though I’m getting there!

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. Over the past couple of months have experienced an increasing amount of pain in my back, upper and lower jaws, ankles, legs, kinda all over. It’s not chronic, persistent pain, as a rule, but it feels like stiffness from overuse. I have taken on some new activities, but nothing that would explain what’s going on. I constantly have the feeling, especially in my upper back and shoulders, of being compressed or confined, and I’m constantly stretching and twisting, trying to loosen it up, but nothing works.

I went to a Reiki circle recently, and the leader started the evening with a guided meditation. I’m now going to make a scandalous confession: In the 11 years that I have been involved in Reiki, I have never felt anything. I constantly hear about wonderful the energy feels, and how useful the energy is for everyone else, but I have never felt anything of any kind. I’ve never been 100% sure if that’s a failing on my part, or everyone else is fooling themselves.

Well, during the meditation, I confronted this conundrum and noticed that I didn’t want to believe that any kind of spiritual healing works. I had a vision that, inside myself, there is this…I don’t know, call it a “container.” I remember struggling to come up with a word to describe it, but I failed. (“Container” isn’t right, but it’s all that I got, so I’m going with it.) The “container” appeared dirty white, and it represented the boundaries and limitations I have put around my spiritual, intuitive and paranormal abilities. “Thus far and not further,” I had decided what was possible for myself, and what was not and I kept those boundaries firmly in place. But the container is struggling and straining, the abilities want out! I then realized that my physical discomfort really felt like I was a lobster who had outgrown its shell. The shell was starting to come apart, but it hurt! Physically and emotionally.

I would like to say that I have burst the container and my abilities are now in full flower, but, not so much. The container is one of belief and fear, designed to keep me safe, and it won’t be easy to let go of that. However, now I know, so I can work on it.

In the study, METAPHYSICS OF THE TEA CEREMONY: A RANDOMIZED TRIAL INVESTIGATING THE ROLES OF INTENTION AND BELIEF ON MOOD WHILE DRINKING TEA, Dean Radin and Yung-Jong Shiah demonstrate that belief is a very important component in achieving any spiritual, parapsychologal, effect.

I learned, early on in my life, to not trust anything or anyone. I have survived by accepting everything and everyone only provisionally, and then testing for myself whether the thing or person is solid and trustworthy. This has served me well in computer science, giving me a good understanding of how things work, which is invaluable when it comes time to extrapolate what might be possible in designing new systems. Unfortunately, I am beginning to understand that it falls apart completely when it comes to the paranormal. There, belief is a necessary precondition. You must believe a spell, for example, can work before it will work. Totally opposite of the normal, scientific, approach of being skeptical until there’s enough evidence. This implies a whole new paradigm for scientific discovery and validation.

I clearly have very specific beliefs about what is true and possible for me, around the paranormal. Despite everything I have seen around me, and have experienced personally, I still have it all in the “provisional” box. I’m just too afraid to believe everything I hear. I want some way to distinguish the “real” from the truly delusional, for I believe that distinction still exists. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll keep working on it. In the meantime, I’ll be using meditation and other techniques to deconstruct my beliefs around magic and the paranormal and see where that leads me.

As always, feel free to comment and question. I am absolutely a work in progress.

Take care,

Rodney Whitehouse

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

I had a dream a few days ago. It didn’t mean much at the time, it just seemed silly, but the meaning became clear yesterday. I had a lot of dreams that night, but this one is the only one I remember. That seems how dreams work for me. when I wake up, I can remember snatches of many different dreams but only one is clear enough and detailed enough to recall.

This dream is set in sunny California in the early 60’s. The whole thing looked like a 60’s glam movie, with long, low convertibles, beautiful people, and bright sunshine with saturated colors. It took place in a large parking lot, mostly full, that seemed to be at the beach. I watched it all in third person, the person I take to be me was driving this blue convertible. The “me” in this dream was a “Rock Hudson” type with a pretty girlfriend, at least that’s what she seemed, she came a went throughout the scene. Everyone seemed happy, almost movie musical happy. You’ll see why that’s weird in a minute.

The whole parking lot was flooded with water. Over the doorsills in some places, a little lower in other places. Nobody seemed to care. My car was full of water that sloshed around as I drove. I didn’t look like I cared, smiling and happy. I drove around the lot for a while then found a new parking space where the water was a little less deep, actually below the doorsills. Maybe I thought that the water in the care would drain out. After I parked, the girlfriend re-appeared and I sat there, with my arms wide open, face up to sky, eyes closed, smiling like this was the best day ever. I watched this from above, like it was the ending of a great movie. Roll credits.

Yesterday it hit me, what it means. The water is the “sludge” in our lives and we spend our lives “being happy” and trying to find a place where the “sludge” is, perhaps, just a little shallower. And we celebrate if we find such a place. 

I was struck by the superficiality of the whole thing. Beautiful people, fancy cars, beautiful location, nice clothes, but we all ignore the sludge, for the most part. But we do spend a lot of time “driving around the parking lot” looking for a place with less sludge. Nobody every tries to leave the parking lot. Funny, huh?

What is “sludge?” All the crap that weighs us down, fills our time, yet, ultimately, never adds anything to our lives. Worries: About money, about what people think, about things we can do nothing about. Fear and hate: About just about anything. Fear and hate are two sides of the same coin, you distrust what you fear, you’re fear what you don’t like. 

We are all afraid of stuff, whether we admit it or not. (Not afraid of anything? What about “uncomfortable?” Are you uncomfortable around certain people, in certain situations, with certain subjects? “Discomfort” is mild fear, it doesn’t take a whole lot to turn “discomfort” into something far stronger.) The common way you’re supposed to deal with fear, is that you find the source of your fear and remove it from your life. Then you will “feel safe,” right? Except that doesn’t actually work. No matter how hard or how far you push your fear and discomfort away, it always finds you. I know how that works. I’ve lived in “unsafe” areas, then I get a chance to move to something better, and, for a while, I feel much better. Then, I begin to notice things, and hear things, neighbors talk, incidents on the news, and before long I feel “unsafe” again.

What are you afraid of? People different from you? Be it appearance, income, education, age, beliefs, clothes? The government? Liberals? Conservatives? The rich? The poor? Climate change? Poison, in your food, water, medicines? Look around you and you’ll have no trouble finding people who want to stoke your fears, for their own ends, and once they’ve go you hooked, truth no longer matters, facts don’t matter, all that matters is the “it” that “they” want you to fear. And it’s so easy, because the fear is always there, inside you, just waiting to be pointed at someone or something. What fear? The fear that they will all find out those things we hate about ourselves.

Ever wonder what the fear-peddelers get out of it? Think about it, they all want something and are willing to scare you into giving it to them. They want your money, time, support, or just the attention. There’s always some hidden motive, because, if they were on the up-and-up, there’d be no reason to use fear to sell you their agenda. The thing is, the world has a lot of problems, but none of them are unsolvable! We have the knowledge and technology to solve or, at least, mitigate, everyone of the world problems, and the only reason we don’t is fear: Greed is fear of not having enough. Conservatism is the fear of change, or losing what you have. The need for power comes from fear of loss of control. Bigotry, of all kinds, religious and racial, including misogyny, is fear of anyone who is different. There is enough of everything for everyone, money, food, living space, if we could only get over all the fears. 

So, in my dream we were all perfectly happy, walking and driving around shin deep in sludge. We enjoyed the sunshine and our fancy cars while carefully ignoring the mess and the reality that the sludge was rotting out the cars, inside and out. We cope by vying for better parking spots, with less sludge, but nobody considers leaving the parking lot. That would require leaving behind your car, your status and the “parking place” that you have worked so hard to secure. In the real world, things aren’t so cut and dried. Getting rid of all your material things, and walking away from you responsibilities and obligations doesn’t free you from the sludge, It’s not even a necessary step. The sludge is inside and, once you start cleaning that up, what you manifest on the outside will naturally follow as a natural consequence of your new values. In all things, it doesn’t matter what you have, or what you do, it’s why you have it or do it. Intension is everything. 

In my journey of a thousand miles, I have faced and expunged many hidden fears, small and large. They are usually linked to traumas, so the fears vanish when the traumatic emotions are acknowledged and released. This is difficult for us Westerners, we are taught to “forget about it,” and suppress any hurt, “get over it, nobody wants to know.” We are so uncomfortable with feelings. Or we dwell endlessly on how we feel about what happened, which just reinforces the trauma. Neither of these is helpful. It always comes out and haunts us, making us easy prey for any fear monger that comes along. It doesn’t matter how smart and logical we think we are, or how confident we are that our religious or other beliefs protect us, our sludge is there, effecting every decision and coloring every opinion.

The solution that I teach is to use a combination of tools and practices, including hypnosis, with meditation, shamanistic and other traditional and new-age concepts to discover, uncover and release the trapped emotions that keep us stuck in past events. This removes the “scales from our eyes” and allow us to see the world as it is, not as we feared it was, and the fears begin to melt away. This process takes time, and that’s good thing, for having too much change all at once would be a tremendous shock to our system, but it’s not so bad because it pays dividends all along the way. The slow progress allows you to adapt your lifestyle and values as your inner landscape changes. Many people want a new life, without, you know, actually, changing their life. They want to world to treat them differently without changing the way they view and treat the world. That, of course, never works. The simple and powerful fact is, you change yourself, you change the world. Anything else you do, from success seminars to positive affirmations, is no more that driving around the parking lot, or, as some say, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe it looks good, and may even make you feel like your acomplishing something, but it's untimately fultile if you're expecting any real change in your life.

It couldn’t get more embarrassing, could it?

I started this post last week, but I finally finished it up today because it feels like I now have a context to put this in. People who know me know that I don’t like to post things like “I feel bad about this and I don’t know what to do about it.” I like to have some kind of closure around stuff before I write about it. Today I’ve reached a point where I’ve processed this enough to have some perspective on it, and I hope that what I found is helpful to you.

—

I just returned from a hypnotherapy MeetUp (East Country Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, for those in Portland) It’s mainly for therapists or therapists-in-training, but anyone can show up. They keep it fun, but I also find it informative and challenging. This time I had a face-palm insight that has caused me to rethink how I relate to people, in a big way.

At this MeetUp, we usually focus on one particular topic or technique, with a short lecture, and a practice session where we pair off, taking turns being therapist and client. When I walked into this meeting for the first time, a familiar feeling came up, one that I didn’t acknowledge until tonight. I didn’t have a name for this feeling, and it’s not pleasant, but I just powered through it, as usual. The meetings take place once a month, and each time the feeling would turn on when I stepped in and disappear as soon as I left. It wasn’t until the meeting before this that I noticed how it was interfering with my ability to do the exercises: I was too busy being wrapped up in defending myself, by being glib and superficial, to access the feelings my partner needed to do her part of the exercise. I also notice how quickly that tendency disappeared once I left.

Note to self: Context is everything. If you are on any kind of self-improvement, personal-growth path, you know what I’m talking about. Just when you think you’ve got something handled and it’s all good, then, Bam! there it is again! You can get really frustrated and upset with yourself, and feel like you’re falling backwards, but it’s not that way at all. The same issue, (or issues that are very similar) can be linked to many different contexts, and only show up in that context. This is really important. You may think you’ve handled your social anxiety, but if you’ve only done it for family dinners, it can come up again at work functions, school reunions, restaurants, bars, and church functions. Each time keyed to different internal and external cues. I have gotten to the point where I’m pretty confident in social situations and meeting new people, but this group throws me right back to school, when I felt sure that I was the stupidest person there, and was afraid to say anything lest I be teased or, worse, wrong. I feel I have no trouble being open in most situations, but in this situation I can feel the vail of dumb descend over my mind as my defenses go up. I just know that everyone in the room is smarter, more skilled and knows more that I do. In this case, I even hit by the sights, smells and sounds of those college classrooms where I felt so inadequate.

This issue is really powerful, and one of it’s aspects is that I have to pretend “it’s all good,” while I’m furiously scrambling fake it, while hiding my ignorance and incompetence. Mostly by doing as little as possible until I can get out, hide, and try and figure it all out where no one can see me. Because I can’t think when anyone’s watching.

This really caused me to drop the ball at last month’s meeting, when I was the subject and couldn’t break through my “vail of stupid” to authenticity answer the questions. What’s worse, my partner was an experienced therapist who, I’m sure, knew I was blocking and resisting, I wasn’t fooling anyone, which made it even more embarrassing. She graciously let me off the hook, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

—

Exploring this issue more deeply I have uncovered a surprisingly deep well of fear and self-deception. I am so afraid of not being the smarted person in the room, because that’s the only way I can feel safe. I can play analyst here and say that this clearly goes back to being bullied and endless teased as a child. My defenses were to say and do as little as possible, to deprive them of ammunition, and to be smart and have clever comebacks. Now I find I can’t really trust people I perceive as smarter than me because I can’t be sure I will be able to see the attacks coming in time to defend myself.

Quite a pickle. The good news is that all this introspection has really turned down the volume on this stuff and I’m beginning to cut myself a little slack. What is, is. Deal with it, don’t wallow in it. It’s time to allow myself the same compassion I would easily give someone else in the same position. And, the funny thing is, now that I’ve gotten over the initial angst of making this discovery, I do feel better about myself, I’ve released some things in my life that didn’t serve me, and, all in all, I feel better about myself, strangely enough. And my relationships seem better as well, cleaner, purer, somehow. Maybe being less afraid allows me to show up more and just enjoy the experience.

As usual, send contributions and comments to AQuestioningSpiritTherapy@gmail.com.

And So It Begins…

Last night was one of the worst in recent memory. I couldn’t sleep for my stomach was tied in a knot, which was caused by something that happened earlier in the evening. Sometimes being on a spiritual path knocks you upside the head, and this was a big knock. Things are not over yet, and I expect that it will be some time before the full meaning of this, comes clear.

I held my MeetUp last night, at a local coffee shop. Only one other person showed up, a recent friend of mine that also happens to be a retired English professor. I had mentioned earlier that may guides had told me that I was going to write a book. I had also said that I had no idea when or what it was to be about. When I became clear that no one else was going to show up, she proposed to help me write that book, in exchange for help I had given her in handling a spirit in her house.

We discussed the idea and she outlined how I would get started. For my part, I was resisting, but I’m not sure exactly what I was resisting. I don’t mind writing, (obviously!) But something about the situation was bringing up something, something I couldn’t put a name on, but I have felt before.

This something first popped up when I did my first QHHT session as a client. I never really got much detail, but an enormous about of guilt and grief came to the surface. It seems that I had been someone who was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions of people, and wholesale destruction as well. Despite the powerful feelings and the physical symptoms from that session, I have never been 100% convinced that I didn’t just make the whole thing up, well, to be important, and all that. Once the session was over the emotions slid back beneath the surface again, only occasionally reappearing, in brief flashes.

Last night, I’m still not sure what I felt, but it seemed like I was feeling the huge swells caused by some powerful force below my awareness. Something so large that it only needed to roll over in it’s sleep to cause tidal waves on the surface of my mind. I can never leave well enough alone, so, like most boys do when they see something they don’t understand, I kept poking at it with a mental “stick.” Unfortunately that left me stuck inside it most of the night, with my stomach knotted, thoughts swirling in my head and unable to sleep.

Let me try and explain what was going on in my head. First there was a buzzing, and anxiety, and a set of memories that kept playing, over and over. The first memory was of a “dream” or past life, take your pick, were I was a priestess, traveling on a ship. Though I was technically a priestess, I was for all practical purposes, a mid- to high-level bureaucrat. One of those faceless people who do the grunt work of managing all the details of keeping a temple complex running smoothly. I was on the ship, with a single, armed, escort, because I smuggling holy artifacts to a trading outpost to protect them from the coming disaster. I really didn’t want to be there, but I was ordered to by my superiors, and there was nothing I could do about it. Apparently politics were such that we were not allowed to admit that we knew what was coming, so we had to make what preparations we could in secret. I kept getting more and more details about this, as the scenes played over and over in my mind.

The next memory was something that happened when I was about five, and playing with a neighbor girl. I was living in Massachusetts at the time, in an area that was pretty undeveloped at that time. The street we were on had houses on just one side and we were surrounded by undeveloped forest and fields. The girl and I were playing in some area away from the houses and she needed to pee, which she did, in front of me. I remember watching with mild interest. After that, we went…somewhere, and the next thing I remember is “I don’t want to feel any more.” Where about that time I disassociated so strongly from my body that it took decades of self work and a therapist to get back in, sometime in my 50’s.

Now for the last memory, the one that turned out to be the key. This is about a girl I had a crush on, starting in the first grade, and on through the last time I saw her in school, junior collage. Despite the fact that we were in the same grade all that time, I don’t remember noticing her very often. The first memory I have of her is in the first grade. We walked to her house after school and playing “horses” in a neighbors yard. Later, as I remember it, I was attacked and bitten by a dog on the way home. After that, I never spoke to her again. I would see her at school, but I was deathly afraid to ever go near her.

I ran into her at our twentieth high school reunion and her story of that time is quite different than mine. Apparently, she followed me around a lot, and hung out at my house enough that she knew my mother. I have no recollection of any of this.

Back to last night. I got up, at some point, very late, to walk a bit, in the hope the my stomach pain was caused by gas and standing up would allow me to burp and release it. No such luck, but, while I was pacing, thinking about my grammar school crush, a strong need to cry came over me, and the words “I am so sorry!” Once I had let that run it’s course, I felt a feeling of release, and then went back to bed. Soon I realized that everything in my head and body had subsided enough that I could finally get to sleep.

Today, my stomach still hurts, and it still feels a bit weird inside my head, but it feel…different, something has shifted. Something has begun and we’ll see what happens next.

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!

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.

A Personal Insight

Today I learned something interesting about myself. It happened while I was exercising this morning and listening to the NPR Invisiblilia podcast “Fearless.” This is going to take a little setup, so please bear with me.

The insight came while I was pondering what I should write for today’s blog entry. I recently went to an open house at HCH Institute, where I am going to have my clinical hypnotherapy training, and I was thinking about writing about that. But I was feeling kind of squirrelly about that. In fact, I finally confronted that fact that I was kind of avoiding anything to do with my new profession. I have been doing that more and more of late, and feeling rather guilty about it.

I had assumed, without really thinking about it, that I was procrastinating out of some kind of fear. But that wasn’t it, so my efforts to handle it that way weren’t very successful. Maybe it was something about the people on the podcast talking about conquering fear, but, when I really looked at what I was feeling, I realized it was a feeling of “deer in the headlights.” What’s the difference? Well, I wasn’t trying to run away, but, instead, whenever I looked at the subject I would mentally freeze. And then I couldn’t get my mind working again until I turned my focus to something else.

This is a big deal for me. It finally gives me a way of thinking and dealing with the one thing that has often kept me immobile when dealing with problems in my life. What’s really interesting is that when I considered my options about what I should write about, this one got me moving. I could have “gotten around” to doing something today, one way or another, but this leaped out and said “Do me first!” The apathy around the whole subject is completely gone. I worked on this idea while I was on my morning walk, and I was thinking I should write about something else today so I would have to delve and meditate on this for more insights. But every instinct said “No! WRONG! Do it now!”

It’s funny how just knowing that my apathy came from this mental “freezing” has freed up my excitement again. It’s like there was an invisible, teflon coated dome over the subject, and I could only stay focused in it if I stood precisely on the top and didn’t move a muscle. No even a twitch. For if it did I would immediately slide off into another subject.

Is it totally gone? No. But I think that I now have a better handle on how to deal with it, and, through that, great many things. I see that I was also avoiding thinking of, and effectively dealing with, lots of related areas, like finances and self promotion. I was approaching them with a, timid, “don’t rock the boat,” “do as little as possible” attitude that left me in fear. Fear and worry about the future and whether it will all work out. Creating my own self-fulfilling prophecy of failure through inaction.

Maybe the exercises we did at the HCH open house had something to do with shaking this lose, maybe not. But, all in all, the apathy has lifted and I can work again, so I call it a plus.

Outside of the funhouse

Every time I think my life couldn't get any stranger, it does. Maybe, at some point, down the road, none of what I'm going to say will be particularly unusual, but for now it's taking a little getting used to.

Tonight I re-aquainted myself with some people I hadn't seen in a while, and I noticed some connections which were beyond my reach the last time I saw them. (My, how much rings have changed.) One, who I've know for, maybe, eight years, and have always had some affection for, was clearly my sister in a previous life. We were both sisters, and she was the youngest. Although she's older than me, this time around, and I've always thought her a bit, well, odd, I've always felt a noticeable affection and a bit of protectiveness towards her.

Ok, no big deal at this point. I've been seeing connections a lot lately, so what's one more? Well, one thing I forgot to mention when I wrote up my life as a shaman, was that my "father" in that life was also someone knew from before. He's not here, in this life, but we've worked together before and probably will again, just not this time. So, now I have connections from other lives to this life, and other lives to other lives, what else is there? I'm getting to that.

The other person I reconnected with also had some kind of connection with me, but it manifested in a different way: It seemed to me that something about her that didn't seem right. I don't mean that there was something wrong, but that something just didn't seem to the way is should be.

She's considerably younger than I am and pretty and nice enough, but I alway had that nagging sense.  I could never put my finger on what was out of place. Today it clicked: she had the wrong face. Ah, so we've lived together before? No, we haven't. But that didn't make any sense, how could I know her if I've never known her? What gives? There was definitely a strong connection here but where could it have come from if we've never known each other? Things got more puzzling when I realized that she was connected to two other people who I had shared lives with. Just a friend of a friend? I don't know, maybe. But there seemed more to it than that.

It took me a while to draw the obvious conclusion, and once I saw it, I don't see how I could have missed it. All four of us were buddies in, what? the afterlife? A higher plane? Wherever is is that you want to call the place were we hang out before we are born and return to when we die, that's where all four of us hang between lives out and, apparently, have some long-standing partnership or working relationship.

I never occurred to me before to consider relationships on that level, relationships that span, perhaps, thousands of years? More? If that doesn't stretch your mind, I don't know what will. Now, I suppose, I'll be looking more deeply onto all the connections I sense in people I meet, for the universe is a lot richer than I'd realized. I have read about stuff like this, but it all just seemed, you know, kind of abstract, and it didn't really have anything to do with my life. On the other hand, I'm constantly asking to be shown more stuff and be given more understanding, so I really shouldn't be surprised at how odd things are getting. Now that I get this, I better brace myself, for something still odder is probably coming down the pike pretty soon.

And you know what? Bring it on! It seems reasonable that at some point I'll reach my limit, but, until then, Show me more, I dare you! I've never been more unsatisfied with this limited existence than I am now, even though I'm probably happier than I've ever been. I'm living a life that's pretty damm cool. It has it's ups and downs, and I don't know where I'm going, but I'm discovering mind-blowing stuff first hand, and that's as amazing as it gets.

The most significant down is dealing with the blindness and negativity that permeates my culture. But I'm beginning to think that it's not a pervasive as I've always believed. because I've lived my entire life inside the funhouse mirrors of denial, I don't really have any idea how far it actually goes. The reflections seem to go on forever, but I know they don't, so it's clearly time to find my way out of the funhouse and see what the world is really like.