Category: Looking at things differently

Tradition:

Similar to a (good) habit.  Helps all stay more easily on the path of choice.  Both tradition and habit are watched over by awareness.

Traditions are forged through the courage and effort of our ancestors:  they are our rich inheritance.  They should not be thrown out on a whim. 

Tradition holds together the community of the past, present, and future as one, while allowingconscious change across time.

The Covenant or Creed is the most important tradition for a spiritual community.  It should hold clearly what has brought these people together; what they are trying to live up to together.

A delightful experience in the supermarket.  I was in line to check out when an old Chinese man in the next line came towards me looking at my cart, then at me, then at my cart.  (I knew he was Chinese by his long white stringy chin-beard, like out of some ancient poem).  I asked him “Can I help you?”  In pretty good English he said, “I look ideas about healthy food.  What you have?”  This was just a quick stop for me that day.  I pointed to my stack of cheap t.v. dinners – “These t.v. dinners are just $1 each,” I explained.  I buy them for the tasty sauce and then add more meat and vegetables, because I’m no good at making sauces.”  Then I showed him my two bananas, my Brownberry bread – “This is healthy,” I said,  and my organic lettuce.  And then it was time for both of us to proceed to our checkouts.  Finished with our transactions, he came to me again.  “You write for me name of these things?”  I took a paper and pen and wrote “Michelina’s t.v. dinners, Brownberry bread,” etc.  He pointed to the word “t.v.”  “What is this t.v.?” he asked.  “Television,” I explained.  “You microwave these and have a quick dinner ready.”  “Oh!”  he said delighted.  “Eat while watch television!”  “Yes,” I affirmed with a smile.  “You my teacher!” he exclaimed twice, and with a head bow and warm smiles we separated.  It was all so unusual and delightful, I wondered if I ought to get his phone number or something!  I felt such warmth for this lovely person, and wondered “why”, as we often wonder when the unusual happens.

    My first reaction later was to feel how glad I am to be 70 years old. Had I been younger I might have felt embarrassed by his approach or afraid those behind me in line would be impatient or judgmental.  But we were two old strangers interacting with the freedom of elders, feeling secure with each other in some indescribable way.  We were beyond caring what we look like to those around and could just be open and human with each other.

    I later remembered a news story that in Japan there’s been a rash of petty thefts by senior citizens.  They’ll steal a loaf of bread, get caught and taken to jail for a night, and then released.  Then they do the same thing again.  It seems they’re lonely!  In jail, they have people to talk with.  Perhaps my old Chinese friend was just looking for an excuse to chat with someone.  If so, he made my day.

   And now, I pay attention in grocery stores for folks who look like they just need a human chat.  That isn’t hard to do…

An Unusual Cranial Sacral Treatment

With Nancy Paul, March 21, 2014

     Cranial Sacral Therapy is a gentle way of helping the body release whatever tensions or blockages it itself is trying to release. By feeling the various pulses in the body, the therapist senses where the body is trying to let go of restrictions and puts light pressure there to help the body’s own effort. Ultimately, the membranes and fluid surrounding the central nervous system from the head/cranium down to the bottom of the spine is the area most affected by this healing. A wide range of physical and emotional problems can be released through CST, allowing health to flow. I’ve been receiving this therapy from Nancy Paul for two years. She adds her own excellent intuitive skills plus training in the healing methods of Zero Balancing, a gentle touch therapy to clear energy blocks, and Reiki, a type of spiritual energy healing. Nany is also able to facilitate whatever is happening with the spirit as the body releases. I often talk as she quietly works.

The thoughts going on in my mind this March day were a hodgepodge. I had just read a short review of a new book by Eugene Gendlin on using the body to interpret dreams. A recent discussion with a friend had also revealed that we both still felt unfinished with some old conflicts in our lives and unclear about how to resolve these in our hearts. Upon arrival at the CST office, Nancy shared briefly that she’s finishing a book by Brian Weiss, well-known past life regressionist. All of these coincidences seemed to set the stage for the unusual experience of this day.

     One factor you must know to understand my experience here is that much of my world-view is based on the writings of a personality who calls himself Seth, channeled through the psychic Jane Roberts. Seth’s unusual ideas on the nature of reality have made sense to me and matched my experience, resonating more than any other worldview. His concepts of what we call past lives, plus probable selves and aspects of our larger eternal identities, emerged here on this warm table in this dark quiet room with Nancy’s fine facilitation.

                                ****

      As I lay down comfortably on the warm table in the dark room, Nancy asked if there was anything particular on my mind that I wanted to explore while she did the bodywork. I shared about my conversation regarding unfinished conflicts, noting that some people seem to haunt my mind when business is incomplete.

At first I shared what I was experiencing, then I fell into silence. Appropriately, Nancy didn’t ask me to continue talking. She was very active with my body treatment, moving herself around as she sensed changes happening.

     Some of these people from the past who haunt my brain began to show up again. I saw myself with a giant eraser and tried to erase one of them to see what was behind. What would it feel like if this person were truly absent from my mind? Then I did the same with the others. This put me in a beautiful scene, but alone. These people were like markers that keep me in my life, in my identity, for better or for worse. Also my house, my possessions, and my many “projects” that feel so important, all the people positive or negative and the memories of all the experiences I’ve had positive or negative, were all like a fence, a corral, that enabled me to stay familiar to myself. Now, out here in this very large landscape all by myself, I still looked like myself though my back felt straight, my body slender. So even my physical handicap and characteristics are part of the corral! Are these optional? Here I experienced myself as it’s said the dead experience themselves once free of their bodies – at their best physically.

      The landscape was a wide-spread valley in front of me with a broad mountain range beyond. The sun was shining, the grass was green everywhere, it was all lovely, though unfamiliar to me having grown up in the Midwest, a familiar part of my personal corral.

      I notice being alone, but presently sense that someone is beside me. This seems to be an angel, wings and all. She lovingly takes my hand and we slowly begin to float upward. Still holding her hand all the time, I begin to sense how to move myself around a bit by my own intention. She leads me downward into the valley. It’s an interesting sensation but now I can’t see the sun. “It seems darker,” I say and so she brings me back to where we were. Then she leads me higher up and over the mountain ridge.

On the other side is an even larger view. Gorgeous, expansive. There are several little villages below, none that are familiar. In front of me the sun looks enormous, brighter than I’ve ever seen it though I can look straight at it. The Sun is beautiful, the scene is beautiful. My guide is still beside me.

      Eventually we rise up and move backwards over the mountain ridge again. I see my corral and slowly, softly, float down and lie flat on the ground in the middle of it. The posts of the corral are the people who hold my old identity fast. I realize a hammer can pound them flat into the ground. They may pop up part way and I can leave them there or pound them into the earth again to reduce their effect. Now knowing what it feels like without others defining me, my identity feels somewhat freer.

      Still lying flat, I’m aware of Nancy working gently on my body, helping it release tensions in different areas. Awareness begins to come of some of my past lives. These I’ve learned over time, some in dreams, a couple were dreams that led into waking awareness, one was encountered under hypnosis. I feel that I’m in the bodies of these other lives, one by one. They are experiencing lying on the table here being worked on. The men, in particular, find it odd and wonder “What’s going on?” But each one of them seems flexible and willing to have a positive experience of this.

      The wrestler, a short stocky, quiet, black-haired man whose life is particularly connected with mine, is particularly present. He’s surprised to find himself on this table with someone moving his body here and there, this way and that. I allow myself to feel his strong back, his largeness, though I can’t quite feel my arms as muscular and large as his. He doesn’t move as freely as I, but he allows himself to be moved some. I realize that because of me several of my other lives have body problems related to mine that are mysteries to them. He also has psychic experiences and vivid dreams and doesn’t tell anyone about this. He’s looking, waiting, for the right person (probably a woman) with whom he can share about these strange experiences that come to him. He’s a semi-professional wrestler, in addition to some other kind of work. He could be professional but chooses not to walk that path.

      Nancy does some energy work over my throat chakra (chakras are energy centers in the body). Immediately I’m aware of my life as a very large, quiet shy man in Iceland. I know the ending of his life after an accident, and because of Nancy’s work here his experience changes. He’d had to pay more attention to people after his accident, because he needed help. During this chakra energy work, he finds himself talking more. First he listens to what others say more attentively (he’s fixing fishing nets), then after listening awhile he begins to talk more and more, to his own surprise, and others find his thoughts helpful.

      I’m aware of a life as an actress in England or perhaps France, blond, in some rowdy time period, with four children. She finds this experience of lying on a table with someone working on her body unusual but not difficult. By practicing the profession of acting, she gained a lot of flexibility in personality and is not as defined by others as I seem to be.

      Then I feel myself as one of my Probable Selves. Seth says that no energy dies. When we make a difficult choice in this life, the energy that wanted to go the other way, does! This is an aspect of what we simply call “past lives” but a larger world view in which time doesn’t really exist, all things are actually happening at once and affect each other. Probable Selves are aspects similar to past lives, closely related to our own conscious experience, but moving along the path we think we didn’t take. One of my Probable Selves who is a university professor of literature here in the Midwest, same birth name, and we share the same history up to a point. It feels to me that she is here now and finds this cranial sacral experience especially helpful, having the exact same back problems in both lives.

      It has seemed clear to me that I have a future life as a dancer. Somehow her life follows mine, even though time is said to be an illusion. Wondering about her seems to open a door and suddenly she’s here on the table. Her back feels much more flexible than mine; bending forward and back over and over, slowly she moves her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae. I feel her flexibility in my own body. She loves to spread her legs and leap, jump, run. This feels so healing to me. She’s very aware and careful of her physical self because of all I’ve learned living in my difficult body.

      All this large experience with other lives gives greater flexibility to my own identity. It seems like I’ve experienced what the dead must experience – a larger sense of themselves. I realize what an enormous and varied amount of memories I have here within all these many lives. The memories of this particular life as Marti now feel more temporary, with less power.

      As this session ends, my back feels very different, more flexible than my body has been in ages. And my spirit feels more powerful, my voice even sounds different! The corral seems more illusory and less infuential. I can allow it to hold my current identity if I want, or if I’d like more freedom I can ignore or pound the corral posts out of sight. One really cannot function without some identity, to recognize ourselves to ourselves and for the sake of the plot we’re living forward with other characters. The corral posts offer me stability, a point of view, a location in this world, but they needn’t be a prison.

There’s a true and funny story in my family history. My Swedish maternal great-grandfather had a farm near our small town in western Michigan (currently 700 people). Among his regular “acts of kindness”, he liked to greet the train when he knew that new immigrants were coming from Sweden.

One day sixteen year old Signe Peterson was expected to arrive and he couldn’t meet her, so he asked Bill Cook, the carpenter, to go in his place. Bill Cook was the only black man in town. As a carpenter, he worked for many Swedes and was known for speaking perfect Swedish.

So Bill Cook drove the wagon to the train, greeted the young lady in perfect Swedish, as the story goes, and helped her with her bags unto the seat to take her to her destination. Along the way, they chatted, in perfect Swedish, of course. Eventually she looked over at him, paused, and asked “Why are you so dark?”

Well, whatever Signe’s surprise, she stayed and became the matriarch of the Peterson family; it’s they who’ve kept this delightful story alive.

    Of course this story is funny, but what it puts before us is a feeling of the confusion we might experience when we look at somone who seems just like us but looks very different from us. This has always been the challenge posed by the different races on earth, and genders as well. Whether it’s the shape of the eyes, the color of the skin, features unusual to us, clothes very different from ours, unexpected mannerisms – our eyes are startled. Wherever we live, we’re accustomed to seeing people who look and act predictably like us – we think. Actually, even within any culture, every face is unique! The predictable parts are what we focus on and feel comfortable with. Cultural media presents ideals with which the local citizens identify. When we encounter someone too far from our cultural ideal we’re confused.

Confusion offers an opening, a door to grow beyond the limitations of what we’ve learned thus far. The challenge in meeting someone who looks different from us is to make the jump into feelinga person, rather than just seeing them with the eyes. To feel any person – coworkers, neighbors, strangers – will make us safer in the world , as we will more accurately sense what people are really made of, who is truly a trustable ally and who is not. And learning to feel the inside of a person will make us richer as we find wonderful friends and allies we would have missed otherwise.

Being Caucasian in what has historically been a Caucasian-predominant country I can only talk about the racial and ethnic challenges objectively. Being female, I do at times experience the limiting judgements of gender stereotypes. I know it’s an enormous never-ending challenge for people of non-white races to deal with the unthinking surprise and reactions of some of us white folk. I offer this thought about the gift that people of color offer our closed white culture: to mature, for our own good! For safety. For accuracy in our dealings. For maturity as competent adult humans. And for the richness in friendships that’s available to us.

“It’s only with one’s heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

October 17, 2012

    An experience of the past has been “haunting” me lately; yes, it literally was an experience with the dead. One summer morning perhaps 8 years ago I awoke from sleep with an absolute clearness that a certain person had just died and she wanted me to call my father in Michigan to tell him so he wouldn’t miss the funeral.

    This was back when I had a lot of experience with dreams but not with the dead, but I felt very, very clear that she was asking this of me. Dilemma. Besides the possibility that I might be wrong and then seem foolish, the real dilemma was that I had broken relations with my Dad 3 or 4 months earlier. Years of anger had come to a head, I had said goodbye to him without any big explanation, and then determined I would never speak to him again in this world. I needed to be free of his judgment and never-ending bossiness about how I or anyone should do every little action. I knew he had left my youngest sister 3X as much inheritance as me, and money was always how he expressed his value of people. He wasn’t one to listen to discussion; he ran the show. So I freed myself! Perhaps I was supposed to do this in adolescence, but finally I’d done it.

    I was aware of what this woman meant to my father. She had been my fourth grade teacher. I remember her as wonderful, but I’d felt a little puzzled as a child because she carefully treated me like all the other children. Usually teachers took special note of me because I loved to learn, worked so hard at whatever they offered, never got in trouble, etc. (My fifth grade teacher did a paper on me as “the perfect child.” That’s another story…) Anyway, I didn’t resent the way she treated me, I loved her and respected her greatly, but I noticed this.

    Many, many, many years later – recently! – my dad and I were driving together through the town where this teacher and her husband lived, on our way north to our cottage. Dad wanted to stop and visit them. They were home, and we all sat and visited for a short while, me mostly observing. While there, something fell together in my head. I knew from the sharings of another older woman that my father had dated and smooched around more in high school than I would have guessed. The implications had left things to the imagination. Now it dawned on me that Dad had, at least, dated this woman, my fourth grade teacher; perhaps they had considered each other for marriage. I felt his fondness for her, and her warmth toward him. They were both perfectly respectful toward each other and her nice husband, but I could feel this old affection still there. I found it sweet.

    So here she was! I’m sure she’d have come to me in this situation as I’d probably be the only person on earth who knew both her and Dad and would also be open to receive and believe this communication through my dreaming. Her presence and request felt absolutely clear to me.

    All morning I went back and forth in my mind. If Dad had used an answering machine I’d have left a message, but he did not. Calling him and speaking to him would be hard for me; it would break the silence through which I wanted to speak. I wanted to be silent long enough for him to ask himself a question, like “What have I done to deserve this from my daughter? Why does she no longer speak to me?” Unless he wanted to know, no one could tell him anything and be heard.

    I never called him. Now and then I’ve asked myself if I did the right thing; I always feel the situation again and feel I could not have done otherwise, out of respect for myself. Recently my unconscious has been bringing the event back, as if there’s more to learn here. I go over it again. What would it have felt like to talk with him on the phone? Today I realize something new: I can hear his voice! Just as I clearly as I can hear the voice in my head and actually feel it in my body of my deceased son, of my first deceased husband and of my second deceased husband, of my mother, of my mother and father-in-law, of every friend who’s past into spirit. And when I hear the voice of my father I feel the old patterns of relationship between us.The particular vibrations of his voice call up the old pathways that tied us together, the bonds that I needed to break.

    What is new this morning is my awareness of the “vibration” of each person and how it comes out in the sound of one’s voice. I know the phenomenon of picking up the phone and hearing only two words – “Hello Marti!” – and knowing who it is on the other end. Voices are so unique. And strange that I can feel each voice in my chest when I hear it in my head, and I see the owner’s face.

    Mediums who put themselves between the worlds to receive communications from the dead often ask the living “May I come into your vibration?” before giving a “reading”. Now I’m sensing what this means. I think of a couple other people whose voices “give me the creeps”, because of past negative experiences with them. I avoid not only seeing them but hearing their voices, talking with them on the phone. The sound of their voice raises hackles on my back, fear. Their voices feel like a fisherman trying to reel me into the old confusing or negative pathways that were our interactions. I feel healthier and safer “out of their vibration.”

    “Spooky” = eerie, scary. The spirits of some people – both living and dead – can be spooky. The vibrations of Hitler still move through our world giving our hearts confusion and fear – What is our relation with this terrible man? Does his vibration make a path for further atrocities in our world? On the other hand the vibrations of wonderful loving people hang in the air indefinitely bringing warm positive vibrations to the earth, no matter where they are. The vibrations of Mother Teresa, of Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of J.F.K., Helen Keller, of Ann Frank, Elinor Roosevelt, all still move through our world lifting our spirits, inspiring goodness.

    Some say the only separation that exists between the living and the dead is vibration – when we’re freed of the confines of our bodies our consciousness automatically rises to a higher vibration, similar to FM versus AM radio waves. In our sleep when our bodies are vibrating at a very low level, our spirits are freer and the division between the worlds is thin and accessible.