The following was written by Phoenix Wolf-Ray ( http://phoenixwolfray.com ) and reprinted here by permission from the author.

The Secret, the Law of Attraction, Conscious Language all involve changing the shape of thoughts through the exercise of will; in other words, thinking differently in order to harness the power of positive thoughts to create a better reality for ourselves. Considerations of what sort of reality we try to create with these thoughts aside, it’s a very good idea, but like many good ideas, there are problems in practice.

In my experience, darker thoughts often spontaneously rise to contradict conscious intent, and this effectively cancels out positive reality-creation potential. Part of me believes while another part sneers in the background, seeing only the shadow cast by the light.

Example: “I love myself. I’m beautiful,” evokes an immediate, hidden, unconscious response: “What a crock. Nobody else loves me. I’m ugly even if I think I’m beautiful.” I can say positively, “Cancel that thought,” or “I release the judgment that nobody loves me and I’m ugly,” which helps, but until I get at the root causes for these thoughts, changes are merely cosmetic.

Becoming aware of the echoes and unconscious reactions to attempts to change and grow is an enlightening process, though changing the pattern of the thoughts isn’t quite as simple and easy as choosing differently, regardless of what ‘they say’.

In my experience and understanding, such rebellious and reactive thoughts simply can’t be controlled, and when we attempt to exert control, we fan the flames of our internal war which is reflected by the external conflicts plaguing the planet. Peace begins within, and is not attained by pouring oil on troubled waters nor through any form of enforced discipline. This is a consensus reality, and until we achieve true (ie, unforced) inner consensus, the majority will rule: so far, the majority of our being is confined to the subconscious.

These parts of self know something that the conscious mind doesn’t, and yes, they are sullen, rebellious, angry and intractable. Why shouldn’t they be? They know exactly how little we trust them, how unwilling we really are to face them, ask them who they are and what they really want. They know us better than we know them, for the divers in the deep can clearly see the swimmers in the light who circle above them, but the light-centric selves are blind to the denizens of the darkness, not to mention uninterested and judgmental.

When we judge some thoughts to be good and others to be bad, rather than exploring all thoughts from source to consequence, we ignore and effectively deny our power. The negative matters, yes, and we do know its potential for destructiveness; that is why we are so earnestly bent on controlling it. But we have no idea what might happen if we truly embrace our negativity and ask it to teach us what it knows.

Thought experiment:

Positive thought: “I am radiant and creative.” Negative response: “I am so full of shit.”

Ask: who said that?
Answer: somebody who knows your secrets.
Ask: what secrets?
Answer: everything, and I mean everything that you don’t like is within you. There’s no escape from your shadow.

Solution seems obvious: embrace and love what you have not liked. Sounds simple, but it’s not easy to pull off. We need to humble ourselves in the face of our dark, angry, hurting, frightened, cynical selves, to accept that just maybe they know something we don’t. We have (the conscious ego) sought knowledge for so long, and attempted to teach, train, condition and control our subconscious minds which seem the source of so much unruliness, chaos and anxiety, but never have we slowed our search down and simply asked our wayward feelings, what do you know that I don’t know?

Answer: everything.
Ask: such as?
Answer: the premises of the reality under which you operate are fundamentally flawed. Erase and start over. Now.

We don’t like to hear that answer, nor do we want to believe it. Still, to pretend it is wrong just because it is inconvenient to believe appears insanely self-destructive. According to the view from below where such things can be seen, the very foundations of reality are cracked and rotten. All attempts to heal it have so far taken the form of concealing the rot, not changing anything in any real way. Like painting over rotting floorboards and covering them with a nice carpet, then acting surprised when the floor caves in.

Somewhere in the basement an alarm bell is clanging and all the positive thinking, profound discipline and learning in Creation will not make it stop. Only stopping what we are doing and letting ourselves feel how scared and angry we really are will do that, or at least open space to feel what to do and where to go next.

When we stop, we can feel the movement of the spheres, we can hear ourselves breathing. When we end the constant stream of mental lectures and instructions directed toward our lesser selves, we can begin to hear their point of view.

Listen: your body knows things that your mind does not. The flow of understanding has to start to move in different grooves, through circulating loops of feedback, and the knowledge can’t source from somebody else’s system, not ever. You have to feel your way through the particular weaving winding multidimensional labyrinth that is your own personal path, and nobody can teach you how.

Your body is your guide and guru, and it is only mind’s egotistical pride that insists on resisting the impulses that come from your physical wisdom. Your body is always right, even when it is wrong. Indulging in your compulsions is the only way to understand them, but you have to do it with attention and intention to understand, not throwing up mind’s hands and surrendering in a huff, saying, “Ok, you get your way, wake me when you need me for inevitable damage control.”

Your body needs you to stay awake and alive no matter what, no matter how it looks or feels, and to seek the self-trust that provides the magic ingredient for alchemization of your experience.

You learn by doing; you will know you are there only when you actually are there. You will be healed of addictions when you no longer crave them, but the path of resistance can never take you to that desired end. You will always desire things that your mind judges to be wrong until your mind stops judging and starts seeking to understand the meaning of what happens while it is happening.

Your mind is blind, deaf and dumb, the victim of the numbing barrage from the collective mental freak-out, the rebellious, reactive shouting of the unconscious masses. Stop listening to them, and start listening to your ownself.

When you crave with blind raging desire to stuff yourself with sweetness, oblivion or altered awareness, don’t fight the craving. Give in consciously and stay self-lovingly aware as you indulge. Taste what you eat, notice how you feel while in altered states, breathe into your experience with curiosity and the will to accept and understand. Break habits of thought and control first, and physical habits will follow when they are really ready. Don’t say grudgingly to yourself, “Alright, but just this once.” Don’t impose conditions. Don’t condescend.

Give in lovingly, compassionately, without superior understanding. Know that you do not know what it means, and accept not knowing. Seek not answers from books, teachers or anyone outside your own body of truth. Ask the Consciousness of the Whole for help and support in your journey. Forgive yourself. Constantly.

Forgive yourself, not for what you do, but for the ways that you judge what you do to be bad, wrong, unhealthy or otherwise unacceptable in your own eyes. Forgive your own conditional love for your sweet self. Forgive your petty criticisms, your assumptions and your arrogance. Accept all of your being, the light and the dark, and listen to all of your thoughts, the positive and the negative. Negative thoughts have a teaching to offer: they let you know that a part of you is unhappy with what you are thinking or doing. This does not mean, cave in blindly to every unhappy voice. It means, give each unhappy voice your loving attention and allow its response to be your own. Own it, in other words, as yourself.

Sample situation: suppose you are at a meditation retreat for the purpose of raising your vibration and becoming a more positive and fulfilled being. You are chanting mantras and doing breath exercises in a group.

You are aware of an unhappy voice in the background of your mind:

“This is bullshit. I hate this.”
Query from consciousness: “What do you hate about it?”
“It’s stupid and annoying.”
“What is stupid about it?”
“Nobody asked me how I felt about doing this. I hate sitting still. I hate repeating rote thoughts as formulas.”
“What can I do, seeing as how we’re here and committed to the experience, to make it better for you?”
“Listen to me. Feel me.”

Then, allow yourself to do it. Feel how much you hate what you are doing, without abandoning your awareness of the other parts of yourself which are enjoying and thriving in the experience. It is you thinking these things, after all. These thoughts tell a truth about how you really feel that you have not noticed because you believed that to feel it would interfere with having a good experience. Allow the goodness to continue and embrace the badness at the same time. You can do it. You are a great being with room for many internal contradictions and a wide variety of experience. Do not ignore your sad hurting selves.

If a baby cries at a party, somebody needs to care for it, yet the party can go on. Your unhappy thoughts are your own babies crying. You are responsible to them, and ignoring them has long-term consequences.

Allow your body to shift in small ways, to shiver, to quiver in indignation at imposed stillness. Inasmuch as you feel safe to do so, allow small sounds. Notice everything about how it feels to be doing this, stretch your awareness to its limit. Exercise your loving attention. Let your attention go toward, not stopping or controlling your negativity, but increasing and expanding your awareness, acceptance and understanding of yourself. Keep yourself safe by allowing your expression to be appropriate in the context of the situation, and love all parts of you.

Be lovingly-intended toward yourself. You deserve it. All of you.

The following quote was taken from a discussion on emotions from a well-known website:

“Emotions are not thought about. Emotions are experienced. Emotions are felt. Emotions are sensed. Emotions are integrated into our consciousness through feeling the sensations in our body.”

I would also like to add to this list a *key* piece…emotions are *expressed through the body via bodily movement, sound or tears*. It is the allowing of our triggered emotions to *make sound* that causes the vibration that evolves the emotions from their current state. When the emotions are expressed, they vibrate, and when they vibrate, they evolve, and as they evolve, they *release the buried treasure of understanding* so the light of our spirit may shine on them and understand what the root cause of the emotion is (often different than the surface trigger that stirred the emotion to life). This is a synergistic experience of mind and emotions where, once expression has occurred, healing happens.

Many of us have become willing to notice, acknowledge and feel fear in our bodies, seeking to find root cause, but have not fully found evolution in the fear responses they normally have to the same stimuli over and over. This is because this last key piece is not being allowed or is not known about as the key piece.

There are root judgments not only about what is feared but about daring to actually express the fear in pure wordless sound (shrieks, keens, yelps, barks, crying out…these are some examples) or tears or bodily shaking, quaking, chattering, kriya jerking, or however. A root judgment we all share is “If I dare allow this fear/terror to express through my body, I will go crazy/never survive it/create more of it/become dysfunctional”. This fear and judgment of our own emotion of fear (”there is nothing to fear but fear itself” is a piece of bullshit that needs to be dismantled) is barely even noticed anymore unless one gets close to considering releasing/expressing it in the sound and movement it would naturally like to make. And of course we need to find safe space in which to express…that is a given.

Judgments of our fear and judgments of what is feared can be formally and verbally released, out loud. This is very effective in removing the “denial stopper corks” from our bottled up energy in the form of fear (which by the way can, over time and deeds once safe expression becomes the norm, evolve into trust and love once expressed and *fully* understood for its cause, thus ending the whole tempest in a teapot issue of “fear versus love” once and for all). “I release the judgment that if I give into my fear, it will never end. I release the judgment that if I express my fear in sound I will become crazy, I release the judgment that expressing fear through my body is just plain wrong.” These are some examples of widely held consensus beliefs about fear that can be released verbally out loud in formal statements just as I have described. The out-loud release undoes the black magic spells in our minds that we have woven with our judgments of fear that we have stated in the past. There are many more.

I have discovered that we can’t just accept and notice our fear or any emotion with our minds/awareness or feeling bodies. I have discovered we must take the additional step to express any triggered emotion to truly evolve them to the point where they can teach us all we need to know about how to heal, survive and live well, and change their outpictured reality on the mass scale.

That big reality out there is a scary picture that feels overwhelming if we really feel it…and we can each do something about it to change it. (most of us hold judgments that we can’t have any effect on the large scale picture out there). We can feel and EXPRESS what we feel about it all. It *can, does, and will help* the more of us who can dare to bring these emotions back inside ourselves through full acceptance of our emotional natures, which can be done by allowing ourselves to express emotions whenever triggered, starting now. It is the nature of emotions to express…and we were never taught that growing up, most of us. We were taught the opposite in many overt and subtle ways…to hold them in. And so, we have this large outpicturing of this state of denial before us on the world stage.

My first awareness of a contract of any kind came to me as a child, in the form of the ubiquitous electronic presence in my life growing up — the TV. “Lost In Space” was one of my favorite shows, and in one memorable episode “The Trader”, a Mephistophelian rogue from another planet bound Dr. Smith to a contract. Smith and the space family Robinson were marooned with little food, and Smith decided in his inimitable self-first way that he was going to trade spaceship fuel for food. Little did he know there was fine print attached to the Trader’s contract which Smith signed by imprinting his hand in the soft-clay surface of a box. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, this contract actually bound Smith not merely for delivery of getaway fuel from the lost planet, but also for his very life and essence. Smith had signed a deal with a devil.

During my first year after moving to B.C. a friend who is a kinesiologist and a psychic gave me my first and only psychic reading. During the reading she spent a long time talking about the intense psychic family contract that I have been bound by at a subconscious level. Such family contracts are not uncommon, and can be incredibly powerful and binding.

The theme of The Contract varies, but all families have them to one extent or another. Also referred to as “unwritten rules”, these contracts vary in strength and enforcement depending on the family. My family’s is quite rigid, strictly enforced, with consequences for those who dare attempt to break it!

Some families are comprised of powerful and talented individuals with huge potential, both realized and latent, but unfortunately that power is often tied up in or bled off by strictured, structured energies that do not allow the co-existence of free choice and a flow of love without strings attached. Much love, personal power and latent greatness is tied up in The Contract itself instead of being manifest in the lives of individuals within the family.

Everybody in a family can feel or describe the presence of The Contract if they tune into it. The individuals within families are obviously all very closely connected psychically as well as physically / genetically, whether there is conscious awareness and acknowledgment of it or not.

Roles in families are played out, unconsciously but inexorably perpetuating The Contract. Some examples of tenets within family contracts are: an unspoken agreement among members of the family to study and work hard, get ahead by finding and keeping an upwardly mobile but traditional job in a company or similar hierarchical organization, save for retirement, become as wealthy as possible, turn the bulk of energy and attention back into the family, sacrifice any personal dreams while having kids who, although allowed to have fun and playtime growing up, must never break the family mold once they become of age, including paying back the family for the sacrifices the family made for them. Self-sacrifice is a hallmark of the classic family contract. Many family contracts call for the current parenting generation to sacrifice for the next generation.

There is usually an “executor” member of the family, a patriarch or matriarch, who models the tenets of The Contract while enforcing their necessity with a heavy hand upon others, either children or siblings. To balance the executor there must be one or more “black sheep” across the generations, the rebel, the iconoclast who attempts to break free of The Contract.

Within the family contract paradigm there are also “law-abiders” who don’t necessarily prosper under or enjoy the rules, but believe they have no choice. The law abiders stay within the bounds of The Contract and make the best of them. Often in this subgroup there is significant unprocessed rage and hurt about their own childhood interaction with and shutdown at the hands of their own version of the family contract. The Contract is subjective to some degree and does morph and shift through and among the generations, as each new family branch gets brought into the psychic mix through marriage or other conjugal arrangement. In order to prevent that old emotion being stirred too close to the surface, the law abiders participate in backing the executor in enforcing the shutdown energy inherent in The Contract, outwardly mirroring the inner shutdown of the individuals involved.

There could also be a fourth subgroup, former “bad kids” who make a few inroads toward breaking The Contract. After some setbacks and consequences directly or indirectly meted out by the executor or law abiders, the “bad kids” fall eventually back into line, neither supporting outright rebellion nor adherence. In some cases this group will deny the existence of The Contract.

The success or failure of the rebel is in direct proportion to the amount of personal power she has relative to the family and the executor. Depending on the executor’s relationship with the rebel and each’s ability to shift and change, at some point the executor must ask himself which is more important, The Contract and its unwritten rules and codes of behaviour or the free will of the rebel and his love for the rebel.

On the other end of the polarity, the rebel must ask herself a similar question: which is more important, my free will or my love for the family? She must be willing to risk this love in order to remain true to herself and her heart’s desire which allows her to break free of the bounds of The Contract.

The Contract needs to be acknowledged, experienced and felt, and finally seen for what it is in order for evolution to occur at all levels of family, such as spiritual families, blood, emotional, and ethnic families and so on. Loving family bonds were never intended to become rules of enforced behavior that hinder a given individual’s free will to choose and act according to how that individual sees fit, with loss of love the price to pay for being true to oneself. A free will action ideally harms none while giving safe triggers. If the rebel makes a free will choice that challenges her family contract, growth and evolution, possibly including some form of death is inevitable.

Most executors have not evolved, for better or for worse, and have gotten stuck in frozen images of “what’s right”. Nobody is unbeholden to their own family contract, whether internal or externally evident. It’s not everyone’s path to rip up The Contract, and there will be a place for “law abiders” in families unless and until a more healed version of this picture emerges.

As rebels break away from The Contract, some executors attempt to artificially create a balance by cutting the rebel out of their heart. When conscious healing has not been involved, the consequence of breaking the family contract has always been, at the very least, a loss of love and estrangement of the rebel from the family. That loss is felt on many sides depending on how many members were intrinsically involved in enforcement or disobedience. The rebel and the executor are sure to be involved in this agreggate love loss.

Law abiders in a family, if they are in contact with the rebel, will often tell her that the executor loves her deep down. Yet that love is no longer accessible to his conscious self. It is denied love, which could be called hate. When the love for his seeming polar opposite within the family is no longer accessible to the executor’s or rebel’s conscious heart and mind, it can indeed morph into hatred. Those executors and rebels who have not deeply explored their emotions on the subject have “gapped away” from the original love for the other that once existed.

When the executor of the family contract excises the rebel from his heart for breaking The Contract, or when the rebel in turn excises the executor, they literally shove the love out of themselves. The love may exist, but out in the dark somewhere, unacknowledged, unowned and unfelt.

A successful rebel voids all contracts, psychic and unspoken, both family and societal ones that enforce compliance or remove love or privileges, and draws in a new family, one that accepts her for who she is and acknowledges her as an evolving, changing being. To get to this point and not recreate the original family scenario complete with acrimony and loss of love, she must feel the feelings and release the judgments that caused her to become originally ensnared in a contract which bound her freedom so tightly.

According to The Contract, the rebel needs to pay back to the executor and/or the family the time and energy that was originally sacrificed “for the children”. When the rebel reneges on her side of that dark, unspoken bargain, the consequences kick in. This pattern continues until The Contract is completely expunged from the rebel’s life. This is done through exploring the depths of the old feelings and releasing the old charge all the way to the bottom of the psyche, to the point where the earliest familial imprints and judgments of how reality is supposed to be at home are changed not only consciously but subconsciously. You will know when subconscious transformation has occurred in this area only when enough time passes in the new family and evolution and joy are on a steady, upward track with no major reversals and loss of love and trust.

Along the way to this full healing, the former rebel can re-establish herself in a new and improved family situation that in some fundamental way “replaces” the original family, unless the original family is also moved to stop following The Contract.

Sometimes our rebel will feel the pull of The Contract, saying “come along now, you must do what’s right”. It can manifest as a feeling of hopelessness and inner powerlessness to resist, sometimes with overwhelming guilt. These feelings have the power to colour her whole day with shades of torpor and dullness, lack of desire to live…”what’s the use”, etc.

Core judgments swim up to the surface of the rebel’s consciousness, and as she releases them, she can feel energetic forms like spiky eggshells cracking off, and pockets of old emotional charge rising to the surface beneath them which she can then vibrate by allowing the sounds they want to make.

There is hell to pay for reneging on The Contract, and the rebel must heal the parts of herself still beholden to that hell. As she processes old feelings and faces her original judgments about how family life just ‘is’, she is in effect ripping and re-ripping up The Contract until it loses the power to control her actions or her life.

In the climactic scene of that “Lost In Space” episode, the barterer from hell shows up to claim his side of the bargain. He holds up The Contract facing Dr. Smith, the hand imprint glowing, and as Smith walks helplessly with his arm and hand outstretched towards the image of his hand imprinted in that contract, John Robinson, our hero, appears on the scene. He blasts The Contract into space dust right out of the trader’s hand with his trusty laser.

Would that it were so easy outside the realms of fiction! Our laser has to take the form of releasing judgments aloud, feeling the feelings that come up when we release those judgments. This allows understanding to seep in and old rejected parts of self to return and fill us in the places where the darkness of ignorance and self-denial had been.

On the macrocosmic level, oppressive governments reflect the unmoving rage inherent in The Contract. It appears to be happening today in the United States, Britain, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Israel and Palestine, and everywhere that there is unrest, a civil rights cutback or civil disobedience. Massive societal change could be precipitated by an overt rendering and popular acknowledgment of the hidden “human family” contract.

Life, and Creation, is holographic. From within the dimension of time and its sequential nature, we humans act out Father’s and Mother’s and Child’s ancient, time before time patterns, until they heal in everybody.

We in our families act out the pattern of Our First Parents, as it has passed down the Family Tree to us. The executor of The Contract is the force of that denied rage, playing the role of the entrenched, angry, wrathful First Testament God that must be appeased, or destruction of everything might just happen. All must live according to His rules and mandates and woe to them that stir the mighty wrath of God by “breaking the law”. So goes The Family Contract, an energy certainly felt by the sensitive.

When I first contacted my rage it was pointed out to me that I was smiling as I spoke angrily. Smiling! We have all been taught from early childhood to channel or mask rage in ways it doesn’t naturally want to, in order to toe the denial line.

What broke me open into a more pure expression was when I got into the woods, deep enough where I felt safe that I wouldn’t be heard. I started to let my triggered rage move through my body by taking fallen limbs and swinging them like baseball bats against dead trees. Eventually I contacted primal desire to express sound by doing this. In the woods I also let myself jump up and down and stamp around, and that also helped me contact my sound, swinging my arms sharply up and down. In other words, I let myself “throw a tantrum” to use the terminology our elders used disparagingly growing up.

Nowadays I realize that “throwing tantrums” is a marvelous way of expressing primal rage. Body will communicate quite clearly how it really wants to express, if we let it. Any forceful, yang, physical movement can activate deep release. Indoors I throw clothes around the room, stuffed animals - things that won’t break – although sometimes anger wants to smash breakable things. Throwing old crockery against a wall when triggered could satisfy this urge. It’s important to intend to allow your sound to come up once your body is in motion (smashing, pillow-punching, stamping).

The moment of “impact” can be a great time to allow a short or long shout. If it comes naturally, let the emotion take over and become screaming, even if you’re scared about losing control. If judgments swim up that say you’ll never recover, make sure to release them when your sound dies back…during these times, judgments can be released more easily.

Even in more densely settled environments, it is possible to find safe places to express. Spending time in parked cars at the edges of empty parking lots with the windows rolled up even on hot days, slamming towels off the dashboard and hitting the steering wheel with open palms can work well in cities. This works when no other safe space is available. Once the sound starts to come forth, no matter what you have to do to get it going, it gets easier, and over time, subconscious, kneejerk control over expression in sound begins to loosen.

Our subconscious fear of repercussions for moving rage in sound has got a vice-grip on its organic expression. Focus on releasing judgments of what will happen to you or how you are (”bad”, say the internalized judgments) if you allow loud brash sound to come out when you are angry, and start expressing the fear inhibiting the rage. Fear can express in sound too, and it’s just as important as anger to allow in its pure expression - they have a symbiotic relationship and can often be holding one another back. Fear can express sometimes in keening wails, in teeth-chattering weird noises that vary in pitch, in short clipped barks (that often emerge from allowing teeth to chatter) to sudden yells of pure anguished terror.

Crying can come before or after anger or fear expression. Tears coming after release are golden, because they are only accessible once the rage/terror sitting on top of them shifts. These “underneath” tears connect you to your deepest denials and can bring the most profound healing. Sometimes, anger will express in tears as well, and that should be allowed also.

“Old habits die hard”…”we’re creatures of habit”…”I’m prey to my habits”. Ah, the judgments we trot out in support of the same old same old. Even the contemplation of change can be a challenge, but we really set ourselves up when we equate ourselves to robotic victims of patterns that we expect we don’t have the capability to shift, and therefore can’t muster the desire. Dropping the defeatist self-talk, we can begin to acknowledge ourselves as powerful captains of the ships of our own lives, with the wherewithal to manifest a sea change towards a more realized version of ourselves.

Habits and addictions are related, but they are not quite the same thing. Where an addiction is often a substitute activity for what we really need (love, light, vitality, emotional freedom), a habit is more of an umbrella concept that includes any addiction, any kind of daily routine or any patterned behaviour that regularly repeats without us contemplating whether it is right time in this moment to enact the habitual behaviour(s). They represent the memory of feeling good, though often they don’t reflect the same level of pleasure. Habit patterns can include strung-together activities such as making coffee first thing in the morning, followed by turning on the computer and checking email, followed by rolling and smoking a cigarette followed by a trip to the store. The majority of an entire day, weeks, or even years can transpire in similar chains of grooved activity. We’re on automatic pilot, and we aren’t checking in with ourselves. Gradually Body loses the will to live, since She is not being consulted in the moment about what She’d like to do right now, and illnesses begin to manifest.

Disciplining ourselves to change the habit without deep understanding of what was fueling it will likely only result in the habit changing form, say from being on the computer first thing every morning to exercise. The goal is not to replace an old habit with another habit that is deemed healthier, but to be able to listen to Body’s wisdom about what She wants to do in each moment. Sometimes when I’m entering a period of free time I will intentionally imagine several scenarios that I might engage in now, and then check in with my Body to see what we feel like doing the most, right now, be it what (or whether) to eat, or what to do. At my best, I might not allow my mind/spirit to imagine first, but simply invite Body’s wisdom to present me an unbidden picture of what She would like to engage in.

There are often emotions hidden beneath the habit that the routine has helped us avoid, that can only be entered into when we allow the habit to lapse in order to see what is running the routine. A crucial element in shifting the roots of habit patterns (without merely changing the form of the habit) is gaining understanding as to why we are engaging in the habitual behaviour, whatever it is, and often we need to clear emotional backlog hidden under the habit in order to truly get why we engage in the habit in the first place.

March 3^rd is Virgo Full Moon this year, and the full moon cycle of March 3-17 is an excellent time to engage a shift of habits, with the assistance of the transformative, healing, magical properties that are the hallmarks of positive Virgo energies.

Fear of your own fear is even more problematic than the original fear itself. (Whoever said “nothing to fear but fear itself” was not into healing and dealing!)

The initial stage to transforming the effect of any old emotion within the self is acknowledging that it’s your emotion. We can easily become confused and say the trigger of the emotion is the owner of the emotion, or that we would never be feeling this emotion if it weren’t for them triggering it. We want to change their behavior so our fear can go back to the quiet slumber of denial that it was in before getting stirred to life. But if you’re feeling afraid, the fear is yours.

Acting outwardly in the world to quell the feelings of fear inside is acting out the emotions instead of feeling them. All that does is delay the resolution of the fear, which will draw another situation to be afraid about, another situation to trigger itself. In the long term, acting out emotions won’t resolve them.

A woman worries that her son will contract the prostate cancer that he is genetically predisposed to. She spends significant energy trying to manage his health by giving him information and pressuring him to see a doctor. Some may say this is purely mother love. It is, but this is also worry taking action that can be seen as a terror, deeply buried, of her own mortality. She subconsciously fears death. When we have subconscious feelings, it is standard practice to project them onto someone else close to us because we don’t always recognize that the feelings we’re having are really ultimately about us. The person being projected onto is the mirror for what we cannot easily see about ourselves.

We all fear death to one extent or other, even if we don’t consciously know it, because we have died many times before and we don’t want to experience those feelings of being snuffed out again. Parts of our beings, the emotional, physical parts, hold encoded memories of these deaths buried deeply in the subconscious. These are parts of us that aren’t spirit. These parts do not rise to “heaven” between lives, and these parts have and hold the memory and terror of death.

Projection is a hallmark of our misunderstanding about emotions. Only resolving emotions fully allows us to take personal responsibility for them in any kind of real, gut-level way. It’s nearly impossible to not project an unfelt, unacknowledged emotion. With experience it gets easier to know even in advance of expressing the charge of the emotion that it is really ours.

You can also ask your Higher Power, Spirit, Deeper Self, or whatever term suits you for the Divine to give you guidance in a form you can hear on how to deal with your feelings. This could be a “sign”, a dream, an inner voice or some other way that is just right for you. Remember to watch and listen for an “answer”, something you can recognize as help.

If after all this you are convinced that the fear is not yours, perhaps it isn’t. You could then ask Spirit to remove any fear that is not your own and put it where it belongs. If nothing changes, then you can rest assured the fear is yours, and it will require you to release its backed-up charge from having been denied for so long, in order to transmute it into love and trust.

One last suggestion, if none of the above works: try a therapy group that encourages emotionality. Go into it with an intent of resolving issues you normally project onto others, with a curiosity to discover what your strong feelings about others says about you. Shop around for a group that feels right to you; you are worth the effort. If you have a strong intent to change your emotional patterns then you’re likely to find the help you need.

A friend wondered what feeling her fear was supposed to do for her. She said that what she usually did whenever fearful pictures arose in her mind, which was often, was to suppress the feelings that came with the pictures.

Acknowledging, accepting, feeling and expressing fear in wordless sound or body movement is often extremely uncomfortable, especially at first. Expressing fear safely and with as much acceptance as you can give it actually relieves the pressured feeling inside that any growing, internalized fear bubbling to the surface gives us. That’s what expressing the fear can do for you.

Most people don’t even recognize that emotions are a part of the self, and a part that needs healing because of routine, lifetimes-long denial patterns. We can’t successfully cut off parts of ourselves, but that’s what we are attempting when we suppress. Emotions are a part of ourselves, and fear only feels bad because we have denied it for so long. Anything that gets routinely denied feels dark, monstrous, alien, and scary. Fear doesn’t feel nearly as bad to me as it used to because I don’t deny it nearly as much as I used to.

Before you feel it, the fear feels like a dragon in the closet; as you go into it and come out the other side, the dragon shrinks away, perhaps to a salamander. The judgment that comes up for everybody who considers expressing fear for the first time or first few times is, “If I dare feel or express this fear, what I’m afraid of will manifest”. My experience is that the opposite occurs – if I dare to release the fear by allowing its expression it doesn’t need to draw a reflection of itself in order to trigger it. It’s the denial of fear while focusing on mental pictures that attracts what we fear. Often if I can release the fear ahead of any event, the event either doesn’t happen or manifests much more benignly than I’d originally feared. In this context, “nothing to fear but the denial of fear itself” would be an accurate coining of the old maxim.

Worry is a more sublimated form of fear. It’s the tip of the iceberg of a terror held in the subconscious parts of our being. The continuum looks like this: worry->anxiety->fear->terror. They’re all forms of the same emotion, depending on how much of it is consciously felt in a given area. Fear is an emotion, but is not universally understood, recognized or acknowledged as an emotion, like anger or grief is.

Fear can be expressed in several ways; allowing the energy of it into your jaw to make your teeth chatter, allowing spontaneous weird sounds to emerge, or by crying. Private or safe space is best for emotional expression. Expressing fear means giving in to it, allowing it up into the throat, into the voice, and then abandoning control and letting it happen. I nearly always feel better after I release, with more understanding of the triggering situation than before I started. This understanding doesn’t always come immediately, or on the same day, but it does come.

I grew up hearing the phrase, “the less you do, the less you want to do”. It applies here; the less you are in touch with your emotions, the less you want to be. It takes a conscious willingness and intentional effort to go there. Like anything else, it gets easier the more you practice.

Deep autumn is a classic time of year for the pea soup of depression to hit. In the Pacific Northwest, the rains kick in as the sun becomes a fleeting memory, and all the things we’ve been running from for months begin to creep forward into our consciousness, pushing for triggering and release. If we haven’t “cleaned house” in awhile, these ghosts emerging from the depths of our closets have the ability to overwhelm us - and in so doing we become, like our backyards, heavy and laden with muck, mist and bog, and we find we can’t move as easily.

Most of us know what real depression looks and feels like. Even if we haven’t experienced a depressive period ourselves, we probably each know or have heard about somebody who has, and how they were during it. Depression is rife with a feeling that there is no way to get out from under, that nothing can work. It’s a time where we look at all of life through shit-coloured glasses. There’s no energy to do the things we like to do or have to do. The life force drained out, we vegetate, flatline, feel squashed and compressed. We can’t feel. We indulge in distractions and addictions of various kinds. We are uncomfortably numb.

The central theme of depression, if it could be described in one word, is hopelessness. It’s very uncomfortable for the loved ones of a depressed individual (DI) to be around him or her, and the kneejerk tendency is to help them lift out of it any way possible. They try to distract the DI from what ails them (should that even be evident), point out how so-and-so from Iraq has it worse so buck up, become an ad hoc salesperson for the latest miracle pharmaceutical or toss a few hope ropes in case the DI has the strength or ability to grab one and hoist themselves up.

Realistically, there’s nothing a friend of a DI can do that’s more effective than staying close by while the DI muddles through as best s/he can, ready to lend a helping hand when asked. For the DI, it’s a time to find as many mental judgments about his/her situation that can be found, and then formally release them out loud (e.g. “I release the judgment that I am never going to have the life I want,” etc). Sometimes doing this can trigger the tears, rages or freakouts that can dispel the heavy fog.

Whenever I am depressed, what also helps me find my way through is getting into my body. If I can walk a little, do some deep breathing, yoga, Somatics, anything to help me focus inward – it can enable me to get some sound expression happening, which always helps shift me when nothing is moving. It’s said that the less we do, the less we want to do, a vicious cycle. Inertia begets depression begets more inertia. Distraction and medication can be very short term solutions that in the end reveal themselves as circular train trips returning us to the very station we try to escape.

Hating or pressuring ourselves to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps doesn’t work either, it’s another circumnavigation. Sometimes nothing at all works. The best we can do is sit for awhile in the low vibration of hopelessness with what is happening or not happening, accepting ourselves as best we can for being in this place, trusting on the way to trust that this too shall pass.

What is “our truth in the moment”? It can be found in what we perceive, what we do, say feel, believe or think. We have been told as children to “tell the truth, now”, and we’ve taken in many messages since that time that revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is what shapes our character and integrity. I resonate with this to a large extent, while also knowing that honesty and truth-telling is fraught with old pain and damage for many of us.

We have trauma around revealing truth and not being believed; when we have given all we have to give and are met with mistrust and suspicion, it is a grave indicator that we contain large gaps of mistrust of ourselves being reflected by the person facing us. We have trauma around feeling too afraid to reveal key parts of the truth; this unprocessed fear generates its worst nightmare when somehow the withheld information is discovered and the other person responds with feelings of betrayal and hurt. Additionally, we have trauma around the guilt we feel when our truth triggers someone else into their hurt. This guilt within can look like punishment from without; on the personal scale we have been punished for lying, telling partial truths, and for telling the whole truth. On the global scale, withholding or even revealing the truth has resulted in torture, death or perpetuation of crimes against humanity.

The consequence of these seminal scenes in our pasts around giving our truth is that our behaviour can warp when faced with another opportunity to speak our truth to our friends, associates, bosses, families or lovers. Perhaps we find ourselves situated somewhere near the poles of the hiding/spilling continuum, on one end either withholding our truths nearly or totally completely, on the other revealing every low-level detail we can think of regardless of its appropriateness to the situation at hand. Neither polarity offers a balanced response.

Emotional and spiritual process can be vital ahead of time in order to get clear on where to land within this spectrum, and to more accurately align with our own inner sense of what feels right to reveal as opposed to “what we should say”. Judgments such as “they can’t handle the truth” are distorted evaluations predicated on past pain and experience. Releasing any judgments, predictions and projections out loud around what to say and how much or little is right to say can also be extremely helpful in the time prior to approaching someone with our truth.

The payoff of finding a balanced truth to give in each situation is the growth of trust: trust for self, trust for other, and trust for the truth itself. The cultivation of trust is, perhaps obviously, most intrinsically important in long-term relationships, where investing our deepest truth in each moment becomes paramount.

Without knowing how to give our truth, we cannot develop the trust we need in ourselves or in anybody else. Being in our deepest truth can grow with practice, becoming more facile with time and deeds. When we can be true to ourselves first and foremost, thoroughly honest with ourselves at all levels, it can radiate outward into all of our relationships.

Because of chronic and imprinted patterns of denial, we have been cut off from the awareness of the power we have, consciously or subconsciously, to magnetize everything that happens to us. A car crash I was in twenty years ago is certainly nothing I would have consciously chosen to manifest, but at that time my subconscious anger denial was so massive and so in control of what I was manifesting that it needed to draw that huge and dramatic an experience in order to get me off the dime toward a choice to intentionally heal what was buried in my subconscious. I was drawing experiences without knowing that I was.

The more unconscious that denial is for me, the more the experience it draws seems random and the more victimized I feel. Yet, it’s all “self chosen”. My emotional body is my Self as intrinsically as any other part of Self. The backlog of emotional denial I have has a direct effect on how consciously or subconsciously I manifest my reality. The feelings themselves want to directly express, not be hidden away. Expression is their natural state of being – being held quiet is not intrinsic to the nature of human emotions.

These experiences we draw that we cannot explain, we cannot explain because the reasons are buried in the subconscious, where old, denied emotions like rage, terror, and hurt live, apart from conscious awareness. We can only recover this awareness piece by piece by “vibrating” or allowing the trapped emotions to rise and show us, our conscious selves, our minds, what they have been holding and the reasons why. My experiences show me where I am denying, insofar as I don’t understand what they are showing me — they are “reflecting” to me, holding up a mirror, of what I am not currently seeing, as well as whatever portion of it I already do understand.

The entire reason for drawing the new experience is to trigger the held emotion and gain resulting awareness and understanding about why I had a similar, original experience way back in the beginning, in my very first incarnation as a manifested being. Once I gain the fullest, deepest understanding I can get on a particular issue, I no longer have to repeat the same kind of unpleasant experience and can finally move on to more pleasant, evolutionary experiences. I’ll only know for sure that “I’m done” with a given issue when similar types of experiences cease, or cease to trigger me.

Only when we can become fully conscious can we consciously create our lives the way we dream them to be. As long as we have most of magnetic selves trapped in the subconscious, the power to manifest in accordance with conscious desire remains latent. The mirror of our experiences and manifestations shows us unfailingly how far we have to go, and in what direction, if we can begin to learn to understand what they are saying about us, not “the other guy.”

Do you believe everything happens for a reason, or that nothing happens to us by chance? Biological beings are electromagnetic in nature. We have an electric side and a magnetic side. Our electric side is our yang selves, our doing, acting selves, the masculine polarity/left brain/right sides of who we each are regardless of gender. And our yin, receiving, accepting sides are our magnetic sides, the left side/right brain, the feminine. Yin energy has just as much power as yang, but it is an indrawing power. Our feminine sides, our magnetic selves, draw experiences, which explains why we do not live in a random universe.

We draw, or magnetize, exactly what we need to experience in order to grow. And this is why, even if I can’t see it, even if something “justifiably” enrages me, I know I have some responsibility for drawing it to my reality. This is how I “create” my own reality, regardless of whether I like or am conscious of what I have created. I only “choose” my reality consciously insofar as my magnetic/emotional essence is conscious. So often these parts are subconscious due to being chronically denied, but still consist of magnetic emotional essence drawing realities. Here, consciousness is “out of the loop”.

Many of us are so electric in so much of our consciousness that when we haven’t actively executed an action and obtained an obvious result, we tell ourselves we couldn’t have had responsibility. Culturally we are still in the process of learning that magnetic essence draws experiences “out of thin air”. This is how pain is self-created (though never consciously desirable) although most people don’t accept this as a truth. We feel justified in blaming others because when “they do it to me” it’s all “their fault” and none of ours. When in blame, we are righteous victims only. This is a distortion our world has been running on since the beginning. The truth buried in unexpressed, magnetic emotions “underneath” the blame can give us significant clues as to where our responsibility lies. But, in most cases, we can’t access it unless those emotions are vibrated. In order to come to balance in any given conflict, we must first intend to discover what our responsibility is.

Pleasant experiences reflect the accepted, vibrating, conscious parts of self; unpleasant ones reflect the unaccepted, nonvibrating, unconscious parts. When we draw pleasant experiences we feel joy, enthusiasm, passion, etc and hopefully we express those — they are just as important to accept and express as the hard feelings. With unpleasant ones we are likewise called upon to express our true response, be it terror, grief, hurt, rage, etc. When we don’t express our natural emotional response we get a more intense experience than last time. The magnetic essence, just a little more intensely denied and impacted than it was, now needs a stronger experience in order to overcome resistance and trigger itself into life. Living things have a vibration, and dead things don’t. The dead parts of ourselves, judged so long ago to be unacceptable and wrong, can come back to life, but until we undeny them, they sit still in the dark, awaiting acceptance for the treasure they have to offer.

Growth comes from taking risks and making changes. Staying more or less permanently in one’s comfort zone makes it a “coffin zone”. I don’t want parts of me to become so deadened into routines and patterns that nothing ever shifts, as I slide inexorably into various levels of death. I try to keep swinging at something currently out of my reach, in order to continually infuse my life with vitality.

Transformation is possible, but not without major growth at all levels of our being. My path for the past fifteen years been one of constant change. I needed the stability of routines and known courses until I was thirty in order to have a “launching pad”, and to see that the path I walked in those years is no longer my right path. I had to experience what I didn’t want in order to know for sure what I did want. I thank my parents for giving me the gift of a baseline level of stability for those first two-plus decades so that I could build the courage to make many eventual changes, not having burned out on changing constantly in childhood. Parts of me would like more comfort and stability now, but finding the right balance between comfort/stability and change can take time to fully manifest. There is nothing inherently wrong with comfort and stability as long as risky choices and refusal to compromise one’s deepest desires are added to the mix.

Only you can know the changes you need to make. If you desire greater fulfillment you could ask your “deeper” or higher self to bring you visions of what your secret desires are, hidden from your conscious awareness. If you do get visions emanating from your buried desires, I wish for you the courage to reach for and manifest them.

‘Chakra’ is sanskrit for ‘wheel’. We all have seven major energy centers or chakras, vortices or wheels of energy located at key points from the tops of our heads to the bases of our spines. When a vision comes, it may come from one of two directions; descending from your topmost chakra at the crown of your head – or beginning deep in your root chakra and rising up towards your upper chakras. If it “grabs” you, it will pass through your heart chakra, the midpoint, where you will notice whether you love the vision or not. If you do love it, and want to give it life, it will travel on towards the remainder of your chakras to ground and manifest. In the process, it will run smack dab into your judgments and fears of why it can’t happen, couldn’t possibly come true, all the reasons it is not a viable vision for you, etc.

We all have imbalances in various of our chakras. These blocks/imbalances make manifestations come out differently than we envisioned them. The imbalances stem from chronically repressing our emotional responses to various triggers, as well as being physical manifestations of denial such as ongoing addictive behaviours.

You may encounter frustration and fear as well as various other physical and emotional obstacles around making your visions come true, and perhaps find heartbreak that they haven’t happened already. You can allow those feelings to express to the best of your ability and acceptance, so that your beloved visions can manifest in all the ways you originally pictured them. In doing so, you’ll be joining the healing and dealing tide rising on every shore of the planet.

Everybody wants and needs outside support and encouragement to make changes toward a fulfilled life. Fulfillment in this context, despite past associations with the term we might have learned regarding finally arriving somewhere, really means “being on my path in important ways, doing what I came to do.” When movement and change is occurring and flow is happening we are being fulfilled. When we are fulfilling ourselves, we have energy for life. Fulfillment may look like actualizing one’s goals, getting a strong head of steam and progress on creative projects, or making healing breakthroughs from past traumas and patterns that are affecting our present moments. It may look like finding one’s right mate, changing career, attracting greater abundance of (fill in the blank) or moving to another place on the planet to which we’re drawn.

This is hard work, some of the hardest work we’ll ever do. Often when we start to enact changes in our lives, we find ourselves faced with all manner of dissuasion from partners, friends, or family members. Outer resistance such as this reflects inner resistance to change and growth, judgments we’ve bought and internalized as “reality” that tell us we are not able to shift, it’s too hard, too much work, don’t have the time or talent, too much negativity in the space – the litany goes on. Instead of fulfillment of our Selves, we are “self-fulfilling” negative prophecies, and we turn out “right” rather than happy (fulfilled).

In the absence of 100% validating, positive inside and outside support (Word up! Nobody has this), we manifest or encounter psychic and/or physically manifested obstacles, reflecting in exact measure the relative strength of our inner barriers to fulfillment. Instead of moving forward, we can get discouraged, feel “set back”, slow down or stop when we meet these obstacles. The obstacles are inevitable; it’s important to see them as part of the fulfillment path. They already existed inside us before we started changing something. If they weren’t there we would already have manifested our lives in an exact match of our visions and heart’s desires.

How to deal? We need help. Help takes many forms – one is supportive friends, partners and family members who believe in us, encourage our healthy risks, receive or witness us when we vent, offer analysis and solutions when appropriate, and take responsibility for their own stirred emotional responses to what we are trying to do. If this kind of help isn’t organically forthcoming, we need to seek it and ask for it from our support network, or elsewhere. This in itself is a challenge for many people, especially but not limited to men who were raised with do-it-yourself conditioning. The above forms of help are only a brief list of examples; sometimes we need more or different kinds of help. Sometimes the scope of the help we need is a more integrated approach, something more formal and tangible to help us access and stay present on our fulfillment path.

“The guy’s a fierce competitor…hates losing…great to watch him play.” Sound like the description of any athletes you’ve read about or known? The competitive drive, while well and good in the structured, rules-centric arena of sports events, is not so welcome between friends, family members, co-workers and lovers. “Competition is good, but NIMBY (not in my back yard).”

The drive to come out on top, to be right, to sell the most widgets, or to have the best spot is one we all struggle with sometimes. Some of us deny that we have such a drive, always giving over to somebody else who wants what we want. Others, talented and experienced at competing and quicker than most, take everything they can every chance they get, trumpeting “I got here first, to the winner gets the spoils”. We want to be right so we can feel good about ourselves; we tell ourselves we like to debate or are good at winning arguments. We also want to be right so we can avoid feeling wrong, which deep inside can equate to feeling bad about ourselves, unworthy, and even endangered. “If I’m wrong, what will happen to me?”

Some of the most beautiful epiphanies in life are when we can admit to one we were competing with that we made a mistake or were out of line, without making ourselves wrong for having done so. Humble moments following the heat of battle (either subtle or overt) are paradoxically moments of great strength and love.

Looking under the hood, we see several root beliefs and imprints causing us to repeatedly and habitually dip into the chaotic waters of competition. The scarcity judgment many hold is a big issue. “There isn’t enough, so I better go get mine now before s/he does”. People with a sense of entitlement are oft-admired and yet this sense can come by having competed ruthlessly and won, then forgetting having done so; or worse, justifying past heartless competitive behaviour by blaming, belittling or finding fault with the vanquished in some way. These are folks who as children or young adults were never taught limits or boundaries around overriding others to get what they want. Or, they had things given to them without being taught the need to appreciate what abundance is and from whence it comes.

Every strong feeling in the book gets stirred by competing, whether we like competing or not. In order to balance the reality of living in a competitive world we have to come to terms with these feelings and express them by the fullest means at our disposal. The cost of denying how we really feel about competing and why we compete or don’t compete and what drives all of it is that history will be doomed to repeat itself until we end the denial of our feelings. Ultimately, we need to reveal these feelings to God or Earth Mother or Great Spirit, whomever we each call Deity. We need to show how we really feel about why we so desperately need to be right all the time or why we don’t have enough love or money or resources, about “living in a dog eat dog world”. Are we enraged at Him/Her/The Universe for not bringing enough? We need get real. At that point, we can start to gain understanding about how we can come to balance with these heavy issues.

How do you know when emotions you feel are yours or someone else’s? You can’t necessarily know until after they express, when greater understanding is available. Either way, it’s going to be a “real” expression. You still have to vibrate the anger, fear or grief out of you (i.e. express it in sounds and/or body movement), whether it’s yours or not. Sometimes an empathic person might hold the emotions of another: someone else in the room, maybe a friend, or perhaps, their partner’s . Often, it’s a woman holding the emotions of her man. Generally speaking, this is because a woman’s energy field tends to be more magnetic in nature, whereas a man’s tends to be electric.

An example: a man is always haranguing his wife, a habit which lasts over the course of years. He lectures, bullies, and intimidates, but never really expresses his rage, just sort of “gives” it to her (and she literally holds it “for” him, but it’s really his all along). Finally, she snaps and screams at him and just keeps screaming. She’s trying to “move” the rage back out of herself to him, but he in all likelihood doesn’t recognize that what she is doing is trying to give back to him what was never hers in the first place. Some of it might be hers, but a lot is his.

Ideally, what occurs to rectify the imbalance is that when an exchange of strong feelings gets initiated by the woman, the man does not battle her and perpetuate the war; he instead receives her and has an appropriate response. That response could be his own expression in sound or just compassionate, silent receiving and validation of her feelings. If he can “own” his anger at that point, he will not rise up louder and bigger than her and send a volley of words back. If he feels guilty in response to her anger, he must ultimately recognize that any anger he might feel in response is quite often rage toward his own guilt and is not really about her, despite superficial appearances. Many of us have guilt, both denied guilt and conscious, that says we “deserve” to hold the toxic waste of someone else’s denied stuff.

If all emotional energy could freely travel to its rightful owner by saying a prayer or a ritual, we could all release other peoples’ emotions just by visualizing it happening or saying words with that intention. In most cases, it’s not that simple or easy. Emotional energy is very magnetic and in order to get the stuck energy moving freely, it needs to be vibrated with sound or strong energy of some sort. It needs to be expressed in some way, though not necessarily in raw sound. Some may be able to let it rip in words and feel lighter as a result.

I went through a long period in my early years of emotional healing being terrified of rage. I quickly learned I was frightened of my own unmoved rage. I had to have enough movement of pure, unfettered rage expression in raw sound to make friends with the vibration of deep anger. This helped me stop feeling victimized because another person in the room was angry. The more I owned my own unprocessed anger, the more I stopped feeling afraid of someone else’s rage and of “taking it on”.

In my very first Healing and Dealing Article, I mentioned shallow breathing in passing as a key contributor to “various long-term nasties”. But breathing is so important to our health or lack thereof, it’s worth a lot more airtime than a fleeting paragraph or two. You can go a few days without water, weeks without food, years without exercise but go a few minutes without oxygen and you will die. According to my research, as far back as 1947 there were studies done that showed that normal cells can easily convert to cancer cells when chronically starved for oxygen. Lack of oxygen resulting from an overly rapid and shallow breath rate can contribute to heart disease, strokes, depression, sleep issues, fatigue, premature aging and nearly every malady known to humankind.

The stress and pace of modern life, as well as its conveniences, have in many of us led to decreased outdoor activity and increased work inside the home, coinciding with an increase in exposure to pollutants. Restrictive clothing such as tight waistbands, belts and bras compromises the ability to breathe fully and effortlessly and can contribute to digestive, elimination or gynecological issues. These factors combined with the subconscious fear of triggering the emotions stored in our body help create shallow/rapid breathing patterns. Cultivating an intent to face the emotions that can be stirred by continuous proper breathing helps.

Oxygen is the key component in the production of ATP, the chemical basis of energy production in the body. Deeper, slower breathing increases production of ATP. Increased oxygenation also improves blood quality, aiding in the elimination of toxins. It especially improves overall brain function and pineal/pituitary gland rejuvenation. Skin becomes smoother and stress load on the heart is decreased (thanks in part to greater lung efficiency), resulting in lower blood pressure. Increased diaphragmatic range of motion “massages” the heart, liver, pancreas, stomach and small intestine, stimulating blood circulation in these organs.

The website holisticonline.com describes the “perfect breath” in good detail. It starts with a “lower” breath inhalation that begins in the belly, and proceeds upward through a middle, intercostal breath (the lower ribcage expands to the side), completing the inhalation in an upper or high-ribcage chest expansion. Exhalation reverses this direction, and ends at the bottom of the exhale with a key component – what I call an inner hug, where the lower ribs give a gentle squeeze to the diaphragm. This squeeze not only eliminates the last bits of old air in the bottom of the lungs, but when the ribcage relaxes, the next breath begins automatically! This is where effortlessness can begin. Be in no rush to begin the next breath; pausing at the bottom of the breath for a few seconds brings its own benefits, particularly the resting of Body’s systems. Although oxygen uptake occurs on the exhale and thus slow outbreath is recommended overall, sometimes my body likes to just “let go” the air all at once, without pushing. Allow Body to do either, just because you feel to in the moment.

If executed properly, this breathing style is effortless. Strain and deep breathing do not go together and will likely result in significant “forgetting” or a subtle giving-up by Body if you are pushing yourself. Practice and perseverance will help turn relearning into a new integrated Body function with a huge upside. Try taking the breathing test a few times across time out on breathing.com, another “inspirational” resource, and see if your scores improve. Mine have. Don’t be afraid to care!

The breakneck pace of summer in a tourist economy, or anywhere where speed of life means slipping unconsciously into ways of eating that don’t serve us, requires a balancing time of reckoning for Body. Breaking old consuming habits is a wonderful way to cool down the pace, enhancing our lives and helping us feel good about ourselves.

Fasting gives Body a much needed break from the constant work of digestion, and helps initiate a cleanse of the entire digestive tract. There’s nothing like a fast to break up embedded daily routine (what will you do with all that extra time normally spent shopping, cooking and eating?), dissolve cravings, and court epiphany. Fasting brings periods of detoxification for Body (including mental fuzziness) as well as periods of euphoria and great clarity and energy.

There is no “right way” to fast. Simply going without food for a number of days will help to give Body a break from all the digestion energy she normally expends. Some people fast using supplements and lower bowel tonics, others drink copious water and diluted fruit juice. If significant constipation arises, try taking a spoonful of psyllium twice a day in a large glass of water - or a teaspoon or two of Aloe Vera juice. Master Cleanser, aka “hippie whiskey” is a popular fasting aid, composed of a blend of water, lemon juice, cayenne and a dollop of maple syrup. Whether you choose a fasting/cleansing routine or simply listen closely to what your body wants to do in each moment, heavy liquid intake is a key component in helping cleanse the digestive tract.

Ritually entering a fast helps build and strengthen intention. The new moon , particularly a fire or earth moon (especially Virgo) is a wonderful time to begin, constituting an energetic clearing of the decks and the beginning of a new cycle. It can help to bring other types of intentions to such a ritual, such as intentions for change, healing, or new gifts and desires to manifest in your life. I prefer to fast sometime in the fall and/or in the spring; the extremes of temperature and energy output don’t seem to call for Body to fast in summer or winter.

It is every Body’s choice, moment by moment, as to how long to fast…even a day of fasting can help, though I like a three day minimum. I know of folks who’ve done month-long fasts and felt great. However long you choose, when refeeding time is nigh, introduce foods minimally and gradually build up in volume over the first few days. Notice how your mouth has been resensitized (and how desensitized it had gotten just previous to the fast!). It’s a great time to learn to eat slowly and mindfully, paying close attention to when we’ve had enough, including Body in our food choices, and becoming more aware of how we take in nourishment.

Sexual interaction isn’t only for pleasure and union, it is also a crucible for the deepest and most needful healing and dealing possible. What happens when we find ourselves partnered with a survivor of sexual abuse? Having been in that role myself, I find that the pattern seems to be that the preponderence of pleasure and true union eventually gives way to much time spent in the crucible. (For readability’s sake, I’m going to use feminine pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ to indicate the survivor, and ‘he’ and ‘his’ for the partner, with an understanding that in many couples the genders are reversed or the same.)

There are some key points for partners of survivors to take in deeply. First is that the survivor has been violated in the deepest point in her being, often more than once, and is likely at some point during any given sexual interaction to be triggered into a physical or emotional memory, even if she has already done a lot of recovery work. Because sexual violation touches the core of the individual, the recovery can last a lifetime.This reality does not preclude loving and joyful sex, but can include indefinitely ongoing triggers that arise across time.

Secondly, the partner’s natural sexual desire can also serve as a memory trigger in and of itself for the survivor. Survivors are hypersensitive to the slightest presence of sexual need or hunger in anyone coming on to them. In the right circumstances, this is no problem, but any hesistancy at all on the part of the survivor as to whether to engage can possibly result in her partner “wearing the face” of her abuser, in an emotional or visceral sense.

The most important word for the survivor and her partner is ‘no’. For the most healing result, the partner of a survivor needs to back off sexual advance or interaction immediately upon hearing the word or even the intimation that the original reception to sex has shifted for the survivor. Anything else, such as her partner’s ignoring or negotiating with the survivor’s desire to stop, or his delaying stoppage, results in a reconditioning of the old wound.

The upside of the partner’s impeccability is that the destroyed trust in the core wound of the survivor can rebuild more quickly if she can learn to trust that her ‘no’ has power. This is a necessary stage towards complete recovery for the survivor so that loving and fulfilling sexuality can manifest as the norm. The partner can help the survivor, and in turn, himself by assisting the potential of this manifestation with such impeccability.

Equally important for the partner is his ability to safely and appropriately express feelings of angry frustration, grief, hurt or terror and judgments that “it will always be like this”, “I don’t think I can stand being thwarted like this forever”, etc. It can be terrifying for the survivor to experience her partner expressing or even having such feelings, but is often quite necessary for healing to occur on both sides of the equation. It is crucial that the emotions here are handled responsibly, which is most often a difficult task.

Closing the sexual gap between lovers means expressing and being honest and upfront with feelings on both sides, no matter what those feelings involve. Because of the depth of the issue at hand, this process can be akin to handling dynamite or nuclear waste safely, yet it must be done, no matter how many missteps, for overall evolution to occur in this most sensitive of relational arenas.

I am learning to only do for others if I really feel like it. I know that’s counter to what many people say is loving. I naturally want to give to others, though, so it’s not like I don’t go there much. I go there often, because it feels good. I just intend to do it when I really want to, and that’s partly what re-integrating my true feelings in each moment is about.

There are many judgments against putting oneself first. In perhaps all societies, people on the whole don’t tend to put themselves first much, and certainly not without being stigmatized. The very act of putting oneself first too often is harshly put down and written off as “selfish, irresponsible, self-absorbed and unloving.” “Putting yourself first leads to chaos, anarchy and nihilism” is another popular judgment. Rarely is anyone commended for following his or her own truth if self-firstness is a common personal practice. (I prefer the word “self-first” to selfish.)