Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Cut the rope: The Fear of Healing

In my experience over the last decade there is a point in a person's healing process when they begin to get in touch with their “stuff,” meaning their past wounds and information they could not previously process. Consequently that stuff is stored in the body as physical anchors or stuck energy. This connection most often occurs in mid level two of Network Care and is also the most common time for people to drop out of care. Holding on to old patterns that don't necessarily work for us is sometimes less scary then connecting and releasing them. I wrote the following song based not only my observations but from the experience of my own process.

You're afraid to want to go to deep; the hill you're sliding down's too steep
You're doing everything you can to keep from feeling it again
You don't want to cut the rope, let go and open up your heart.

The guard is always at the gate, pretending everything's ok
He's so strong but in his mind he don't realize he's blind
He don't want to cut the rope, let go and open up his heart.

There's a little child and he's crying, deep inside feels like he's dying
He's doing everything he can to keep from feeling it again
He don't want to cut the rope, let go and open up his heart.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Wonders of a Transformational Healing Gate

The feeling or experience is difficult to put into words. You arrive on Friday evening and enter a room with approximately five hundred people, most of whom you don't know. So, what's the first thing you do? You begin to judge. She's fat, he's skinny, she's pretty, and he's weird looking. It's a virtually unconscious behavior. Sunday afternoon arrives, you look around and once again take inventory of the same five hundred people from Friday night, only this time everyone looks different. Without the filter of judgment, clouding the spirit, everyone looks beautiful. Quite amazing.

So, what happens in a two and a half day window of time that could effect one's perception in such a profound way?

To begin with, the Transformational Gate, a personal growth and healing seminar, uses a group dynamic to enhance the intensity and depth of the healing experience. Network Care, the main vehicle of the Gate, utilizes the vibration based principle of harmonic entrainment. Basically, energies that are synchronized are more efficient. When you have seventy five people in the same room being entrained together, the energy literally hits you in the face.

Using a frequency of three entrainments daily, talented practitioners guide participants through network levels of care and healing stages of consciousness at an accelerated rate. This greatly advances individual's healing strategies and can provide them with a deeper level of connection than they've previously experienced, opening the door of possibility to their future healing. The experience of connection....

There is a progression of strategies from release of tension in level one and pattern clearing in level two, to the growth and expansion available in the level three experience. Late in the level two strategy, there is a spontaneous expansion of the thoracic cavity and opening of the heart energy. This contributes intensely to a feeling of connection with not only the self, but other people and what might be called the web of life. Many schools of thought suggest that this is a time when connection with the transcendent self is heightened.

Personally, my creativity soared after the last Gate I attended. It took me all of about ten minutes to write a song on the plane ride home and I followed that up with about fifteen more songs in the next thirty days. For me, that was unprecedented. I'll never forget a very intense experience at my first Gate, a dozen years ago. At the end of an entrainment my whole body went numb and I collapsed to the floor in a complete state of peace, where I remained for about ten minutes. There was no concern and no fear about judgment and I recall existing in that state for about a month. It is after an experience like that, when you realize why this is called a Transformational Gate.

The next Transformational Gate offered by Wise World Seminars will be held September 2-4 in Denver, Colorado. If you are interested contact The Center For Holistic Health for more details, in a timely manner, because this event will sell out.

Thursday, July 7, 2005

'It's not about feeling better... it's about better feeling.'

I remember hearing Dr. Donald Epstein say, “It's not about feeling better, it's about better feeling.” At the time he was talking about chiropractic, or at least his version of it. Even back then I understood the idea of restoring life energy and connection in the body as opposed to fixation on symptom removal. I also knew that healing sometimes meant feeling, even if it doesn't always feel good. However, what I didn't understand was the depth of a statement like that in relation to our socio-cultural conditioning.

Somewhere, sometime in our culture we've adopted a story that we have held to be the truth. The story is that we must numb ourselves to this experience we call life and block our selves from having to feel anything painful, physically or emotionally. That sounds like a pretty good idea but I suspect it doesn't really work for us. Even so, it is often the case that cultural conditioning overrides the issue of whether or not any particular version of reality serves us.

I looked in the thesaurus for the word experience, and in the form of a verb it offered several replacements including to feel, go through, face, come in contact with, live through, suffer or undergo. So, it appears, according to this source, that if we are to experience life, then part of that experience might be to feel, or that feeling is part of the experience.

See, symptoms that we experience have a purpose and that purpose is to initiate a call for change. It means something is not working and change or adaptation is required. It just so happens that feeling is what prompts us to make a change (a concept advertisers are keenly aware of). Almost everyone that comes to see me with concern about a symptom has essentially the same story. They've tried one or several methods to get rid of “it” and either they haven't worked or have only worked temporarily. While the variety of methods is endless, the approach is fundamentally the same. They are all geared toward quelling the symptom. Of course nobody likes symptoms but if the symptom is a call for change, and we remove it without having contemplated the need to change any of our thoughts or behaviors then, we have effectively killed the messenger before receiving the message. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perception, there will probably be more messages coming.

Whenever we experience a symptom, or any unpleasant feeling, our conditioning directs us into judging it as wrong. We systematically numb ourselves not only from that experience, but from the depth of the experience we call life. If you visit a wellness practitioner then the approach would be fundamentally different from the previously mentioned. When speaking of wellness, the methodology is one which promotes and supports adaptation and growth.

Intermediate care of Network Spinal Analysis is most commonly the time when we really begin to have a deeper experience of ourselves and a clearing of the physical anchors or patterns of unresolved energy. Along with it can come the fear of this deeper connection and retracing that will likely accompany the process.

Several months ago I read an article written by Cliff Bostick and was captured by something he wrote. “The wound's cure, the unbroken gaze of love, was scarier than enduring the pain of disconnection.” I took that to mean that it's our fear that drives us to avoid a deeper experience of life. This fear, fostered by our conditioning, is what ultimately keeps us from our healing. Well, I'm here to tell you this: Life is about better feeling.... And it's worth it!