I am often touched by people’s pain. I feel this is a very good thing because it reminds me that others feel vulnerable too. And I’ve had the bad habit of taking on the pain I feel from someone else sometimes.  Especially if I care about them or have some stake in their happiness. 

Because of the work I do, if I wake in the morning feeling depressed, anxious or burdened, I check to see if the feelings I’m having are really my own. My mind will always tell me it’s about me and give me all sorts of perfectly possible reasons why I might be feeling scared. Often feeling scared IS my true feeling, but not because of circumstances. It’s because I’ve taken in someone else’s pain in an attempt to help them feel better, so I feel safer.

Only problem is, it doesn’t actually benefit them or me at all.  

The habit was established in my very early childhood.  At 65, after 25 years of training myself to hold compassion for people without trying to modify them, I’m still finding lost, scared little infant parts of myself heroically trying to help other people feel better by absorbing their negative emotional state.  

I don’t do this nearly as much as I used to, but after a week where I spent 12 hours of visiting my Mom in her utter helplessness, I’ve been given the opportunity to embrace more of these little lost parts of myself. He’s not wrong or bad for reacting the way he does. As an infant it was all he could do that actually seemed to make a difference in how safe he felt. Temporarily. Since he lived only in the present, that reaction became a habit. It didn’t matter to him that he gradually began to feel worse more of the time.

Turns out, taking in someone’s else’s pain only dims my inner light. It doesn’t enhance their light.  It doesn’t help them find their light.  

The way I understand it now, my light comes from taking in other’s light, but only the frequencies of their light that actually nourish and build my light. My spiritual energy body already automatically operates this way, filtering the energy from every other being through a receptor just for them in my “Soul Membrane” (the edge of my energy structure.) Then there is a sampling circuit that instantaneously introduces “outsider” light to my inner self-light and says “YES!” to the frequencies that build my light. This process could be thought of as spiritual digestion I guess. When I am connecting to other beings of light this way, my light increases, making more of it available to anyone who might benefit from it.

Taking in someone’s pain and suffering only temporarily reduces the pain they are feeling and over time increases the backlog of unprocessed pain in both people. It may come from sympathy but, in my experience, it’s always to help me feel better in the moment. When I unconsciously do this at this stage of my life, I feel much worse in my own body almost immediately.

The soothing, invigorating, boundless Light of Love I’m looking for is already within every cell of my body thanks to the amazing tiny bacteria known as mitochondria that metabolize carbon compounds. The light they release shines brighter than the surface of the Sun. It’s in the center of my soul where the perfect frequencies of light from all beings combust into my unique pattern which radiates out to the far corners of the universe and beyond.

So when I get up feeling awful, if I find I’ve taken in someone’s pain, I identify where I have stored it and I give it back to them. It is, after all, their process of embracing their shadow to find the gifts in it and not mine to take on or try to change for them. 

Then I welcome the energy of the little infant self that unconsciously absorbed the other person’s darkness… I let him know he’s brilliant and precious and that he no longer needs to hold someone else’s “bad” to feel safe. I show him the huge beautiful light, love and warmth inside and give him a huge hug. Finally I celebrate having released more of the shadow of taking on problems that are not mine and bask in the resultant confidence and trust I’ve given myself.

When I was in my thirties, I was goaded into exploring what was going on inside myself by my partner at the time who said to me “for someone who is so curious about everything, why have you explored so little about your own motivations?” That was when I met a very important person in my life: David Mars PhD., a Licensed Clinical Therapist with an emphasis on somatic awareness.

One of the most amazing breakthroughs in my life was in an “Authentic Movement” session with perhaps a dozen or so of David’s clients.  Suffice it to say that Authentic Movement has a LOT of very clear rules about how to maintain the safety and confidentiality of all participant’s experience. At the time, I chafed at this a little.  I was still very attached to my rebellion against what I felt were unreasonable rules and very depressed by years of overdosing cannabis to both numb and stimulate myself because of the pain and tedium of my life.

You have to close your eyes as you move in Authentic Movement, and you are witnessed by half of the class that is not moving. I began to explore the wall of the room.  Pushing up against it, shoving my self into it, banging it, resting on it, slumping into the angle between the wall and the floor and allowing myself to feel the full weight of my despair about the limitations of my life.  

Something shifted in me and I began to feel the support of the wall and the floor.  I felt the beginnings of the comfort that comes from accepting what I cannot change.  I began to become clearer that walls and rules can help me to help me determine what I CAN change: I can change my attitude about myself and I can let go of perceptions, belongings, people and even some rules that do not enrich my life or someone else’s life.  I can let go of my distractions. 

The clutter clearing Queen Marie Kondo is incredibly popular for a very good reason. If some thing, feeling or person is not bringing you joy or serving a useful purpose in your life, then it is a burden and you will feel energized and liberated by letting go.  The stuff, people and rules we cling to for safety, love and recognition are deeply limiting to the unique expression of who we really are.

Human lives are full of distractions: flashy, scary, stimulating dramas and traumas both real and staged, personal and collective. As long as we are distracted by the next shiny object, scary event or personal drama, we are deeply unaware of how much we are limiting ourselves with the mountains of physical, emotional and legal stuff we cling to. 

Limitation and Distraction are the major control mechanisms of our society (collective mind) at this time.  Of course threats and application of violence are still powerful deterrents to socially sanctioned behavior but distraction has largely replaced brute violence on a day to day basis collectively as a way of imposing limitations on what is socially acceptable behavior and compulsions for what we must do to be acceptable. The poster boy for the “social control science” of propaganda is the inventor of “Public Relations”: Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew).

Collectively, we are at the tail end of a cycle of authoritarian rule that is now applied through the mass media available in the palm of nearly every person on the planet.  The last two years have proven just how powerful it is to deliver fearful “news” and “facts” of dubious veracity to individuals, using endless repetition until they become “truth”. Meanwhile, the world economy has been reorganized and centralized into the hands of a very few powerful individuals and corporations that are beginning the process of unifying worldwide governmental responses and policies through this mass distraction process.  This is their version of the “new world order”.

At the same time the intelligence of the living beings known as the Solar System and the Universe are moving the Earth and all her inhabitants in to a cycle of learning to rely on inner knowingness. You can see it happening already. At the same time the effort to unify control of behavior worldwide is peaking, more and more people are letting go of the fears that have run their life, moving away from the people that insist that they be sick in the same way that they are in order to win their love, and learning to follow the “natural laws” that support the life of all beings. 

The extremity of the limitation and distraction we are experiencing collectively is pushing some of us to choose more carefully exactly what stuff we want to live with, who we want to live with and what we determine internally to be the right way to live for ourselves that enhances the harmony of our lives. This is a brand now way of creating order out of chaos. Instead of imposing ideas and limitations on others in order to make ourselves feel safer, we choose to support each other in finding exactly how and with whom we want to live.  

When we trust in the unique contribution of everyone in the groups we choose to join, the group becomes much more powerful and effective at thriving and contributing it’s unique offerings to others.

Reclaiming Inner Authority

“Fear is Safe” is a direct quote from Richard Rudd, founder of the Gene Keys, but here is another: “Fear does not feel safe, but it is safe to feel fear”.  This is the “Eye of the Needle” I am negotiating right now.  How do I personally maintain calm when everyone is still in an elevated state of alarm most of the time?

Bren and I have been “sheltering in place” in one of the most beautiful places you can imagine. We can swim any time we want and our backyard is a tropical paradise. Yet even here on Maui, it feels more like “lockdown” sometimes.

I really have to watch my attitude to avoid the old bad habit of shaming myself for feeling oppressed by this situation.  Shame as a knee jerk reaction just distracts me from my inner knowingness with an addiction to stress, self-recrimination and sensory overload. Thankfully, this is now quite boring to me and I’d much rather feel my pain and move through it than find ways to go numb so I can tolerate existence.

It’s quite extraordinary to be on a zoom conference with people from around the world and realize, that with few exceptions, we are all experiencing some version of the same restrictions hastily imposed by “the authorities” we empower to protect us.  And some version of the reactions and responses from our fellow citizens, some of which are very uplifting and some of which can feel even more repressive than the rules.

If ever a situation was more clearly collective, I’ve never heard of it before. Yet I still take it personally sometimes. Because I am human, my fears stir up my traumas from my past. All the ways in which I agreed not to be true to myself in order not to upset some volatile someone who had control over my food and safety and approval.

Actually, I believe this is what is happening at a collective level right now.  The World Wide Web is facilitating a deep cleansing of the collective traumatic scars of humanity. In Sanskrit these are called Sanskaras, and in the revelations of the Gene Keys and Human Design, they are seen as being stored in the “Non-Coding” or “Junk” DNA that makes up at least 70%  of all the DNA of every single cell in our body.

To be clear: the COLLECTIVE traumas are held in our own cell’s DNA. This means that what we are experiencing collectively is deeply and inextricably PERSONAL.  Everything that humanity has been through is stirred up right now for each and every one of us.  It’s quite overwhelming and it’s no surprise that every possible response from polemic raging to deep compassion is clearly on display in the social media. 

I feel quite deeply that this is ultimately a great thing because many more of us are becoming aware that humanity is actually one single awareness on a global level.  Yet this begs the question: what do we do with all this fear that feels so oppressive, that comes from such a long, long history of unspeakable trauma that just goes on and on?

Things were relaxing somewhat around here and we went down to the shore to watch the sunset for the first time in weeks.  We sat down to rest just for a while (big no no) and looked up to see a drone hovering over us.  We hastily got up and went home and we both felt so triggered that we literally dropped into a “morbid depression”! 

After passing out for 3 hours and getting up, determined to be the one in charge of my own vibration, here’s an answer that came out of  me exploring the heart of my feeling of oppression.  May it be useful for you, or at least stimulate something healing for yourself in your own way!  I call it “Defusing the Mindfield”. 

I also created a healing protocol for this that is available in my free Thursday classes or by request.  It is really a very simple procedure but it requires a lot of explanation that I will include here. The procedures offered in the class are a prerequisite for this one, so I request that you attend a class or contact me personally if you wish to learn how to do it.

Defusing the Mindfield

What I recently realized is that whether or not the current situation is manufactured or just arose out of the unsustainable chaos of world-wide consumerism, the ultimate “response-ability” is mine and mine alone. The “truth” is probably somewhere in between these extremes.

It doesn’t make any difference if there are “super-intelligent, evil beings” that are manufacturing this crisis (and possibly the virus) in order to consolidate power and real resources and using mass surveillance to control us through our fear. “They” still have zero power over my ability to respond. 

Alternatively, if this is just some naturally arising “unseen dangerous pathogen” that will kill us all if we don’t respond drastically to beat it back, I still have my “response-ability”.  The outside is the inside, no matter what I believe, and I always have a choice about how to respond.

Here is the contemplation that is the basis for “Defusing the Mindfield”:

In Human Design and the Gene Keys, six of the Genetic Archetypes represented by the 64 Hexagrams of the ancient text of the I Ching are specifically located in the realm of the human mind and have been a critical part of our evolution as a self-reflective species.

HD and the GK’s also state that for the last 400+ years, humans have been evolving our emotional system in the Solar Plexus as the new location for a more advanced and all-inclusive form of awareness. We are learning to rely on a way of navigating reality that includes our instincts, our self-reflection AND our absolute knowledge of unity through the Ocean of Emotion.  When this crisis threw us back into “survival mode”,  all our mental fears came up in the form of anxiety.  Anxiety is worrying about the future based on what happened in the past.

Archetypes are just energies that we can call upon.  We can evoke their fears, or their gifts or their divine powers. That’s how powerful we really are.

The mind is extremely influential because it filters what “reality” is for the rest of the body. Anxiety puts the body in lockdown mode: Your self-awareness retreats to the amygdala which jacks up your adrenaline, shuts down functions that are “non-essential for survival” such as digestion, regeneration and repair of tissues, elimination of toxins, and immune responses to internal challenges. (Sound familiar?) What’s more, even if the trauma is just a memory, the body reacts as if the trauma being recalled is “happening now”, so remembering past collective traumas such as the holocaust can actually put us into severe physiological distress.

This procedure is for the purpose of “defusing” the fear-based states of mind that compress your Third Eye, prevent you from receiving your higher knowing, seeing and hearing, and compromise your health and well-being. I “saw” these fears as a kind of “Crown of Thorns” created by 6 “screws” that compress our mental viewpoint and the third eye chakra from all sides.  I created the procedure using the metaphor of “loosening the fear-screws”.

Description of the “Six Mental Anxieties”

(and the higher frequencies contained in them) I have included the traditional I Ching numbers and names of the Gene Keys outlined here:

Hexagram (Gene Key) 47 “Oppression”

“Oppression” is the quality of mental fear that comes out of the collective Sanskaras stored in the “junk DNA”.  It’s a victim posture that reinforces the need to repress all memories from the past in order to be able to “soldier on” in the present.

I see this as a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from the upper right corner of the skull.

“Transmutation” is the “gift” frequency of the same genetic archetype.  It’s a deeply alchemical quality of witnessing the dark traumas of humanity that can perceive the immense value that comes from learning “How we DON’T want to feel and behave” towards one another and all living things so that we can see “how we DO want to behave” and it creates a safer and more loving world for all beings. 

All gifts are mutations of the “shadow” states. They are the unstable process of transforming the relatively stable shadow state into the stable state of the “Siddhi” or Divine Power of the Archetype.

“Transfiguration” is what happens when the collective wounds stored in your genetic lineage are all allowed to be “seen” and thereby transformed.  Your “junk DNA” is cleansed and the human body can mutate into something entirely new that can transform light into matter rather than eating other forms.

The Siddhi is obviously “in the future”, yet from the point of view of awareness, it has already happened because there is really only one “now”. So we can call upon the power of ‘Transfiguration” and every other Siddhi “now”, to help us raise our vibrational tone out of fear.

Hexagram (Gene Key) 24 “Return”

“Addiction”.  When we are unwilling and unable to witness our own trauma or our portion of the collective traumas, we try the same old strategies over and over again to drown out the pain, only to have it return redoubled.  We become addicted to the drama of shutting ourselves down and then feeling victimized by a world that “just won’t let us be ourselves.”

I see this as a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from the center top of our skull.

“Invention” is a witnessing posture that arises when we are willing to pause and actually feel what we are feeling: where it is in our body, what it does to our breathing, what emotions arise when we feel the trauma.  When we pause, an entirely new response can arise to any feeling or situation that comes up.

“Silence” is the clear spaciousness of the mind that has realized that at its’ purest, it is just witnessing.  Any thoughts and commentary are just temporary sounds in the true silence of the witness.

Hexagram (Gene Key) 4 “Youthful Folly”

“Intolerance”. When none of our strategies to avoid our own pain work anymore, we assign the blame to people or groups outside of ourselves and become intolerant of anyone’s opinions that don’t match up to our own favorite collections of “facts”. Ironically, this only reinforces our fears because we have shut down our own scientific inquiry, leaving us feeling victimized and living in a very small box created by our own need to control our environment.

I see this as a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from the upper Left side of the skull.

“Understanding” arises when we are able to cultivate a witnessing posture that can “see all sides of an argument” without the need to shut down either your own or the other points of view.  It creates room to come up with collective solutions to issues that embrace common values instead of focusing on differences. It also allows you to witness your own unseen points of view you have that you censored out of fear.

“Forgiveness” is one of the 7 great superpowers of Grace that heals all wounds, right back to the original traumas of the human race.  It erases the need to have “power over” anyone or anything since it reveals that all life is actually one awareness that runs through all existence, so any trauma inflicted on anything is trauma inflicted on yourself, thus all forgiveness is self-forgiveness.

Hexagram (Gene Key) 11 “Peace”

“Obscuration” is what we experience when we suppress the experience of our desires.  Any thought, feeling or desire which we avoid facing, creates an accumulative shadow that blocks our highest aspirations from ourselves and others.  It is the repressed, yet untamable desires that hide our greatest creativity.  We relegate our desires to the darkness of the closet for fear that we are unacceptable if we allow them into our awareness at all. When we do this we cloak ourselves in obscurity and live as a victim without access to the juice that really powers our dreams.

I see this as a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from the lower left corner of the skull.

“Idealism” is a witnessing posture that can see that all desires arise from the desire to be free of the suffering caused by needing to maintain any identity; good, bad or indifferent. Interestingly, releasing the need to be acceptable to either yourself or anyone else allows for uniquely creative perspectives to arise through you that enrich everyone and would not be available through any other source.

“Light” is the pure quality of the mind that exists free of identification with form or emptiness.  It is the realization that all beings are simply the passage through which matter is endlessly converted into energy.

Hexagram (Gene Key) 43 “Breakthrough”

“Deafness” is the victim state that occurs when we feel that “everyone else’s fears and needs are preventing me from hearing my own inner truth”.  We become so focused on worrying about feeling unfulfilled or “knowing that I am doing something unique to me”, that we completely ignore that our periodic states of “depression” can actually silence our minds enough that we can hear the voice of our true creativity.

I see this as a a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from underneath the skull, deep in the back of your throat.

“Insight” is the witness state that allows you to hear your own inner voice.  It is “Clairaudience”: the ability to trust your own inner knowing that floods out of your unique community of cells. You still hear all the noise generated by collective fears, but you don’t let it influence you.  Instead, you wait for your knowing to arise, whole and intact, from the empty space created by your waiting instead of your doing.

“Epiphany” is another of the 7 great superpowers of Grace that arises when you surrender so completely into not-knowing and deep listening that you have the sudden experience of Self as the awareness that permeates all your cells and all beings and all of existence and emptiness in the multi-verse.  It permanently opens your heart and reveals that “there are no others”, even though the way you arrive at this conclusion will be utterly unique to you.

Hexagram (Gene Key) 17 “Following”

“Opinion” Is the need to assemble the available “facts” of a situation in a way that makes you feel more secure, and then defend your point of view.  It literally shuts down your ability to see beyond your own version of reality.  It’s the proverbial “closed mind” and it’s the victim state that either buys into the collective version of the truth at the expense of any sense of self-knowledge or tries to oppose every opinion other than your own.

I see this as a screw that tightens down and compresses the view of the Third Eye Chakra from the lower right corner of the skull.

“Far-Sightedness” is the gift state of the pure witness that sees every point of view at the same time without having to resolve the oppositions and paradoxes. It shines through all self-serving Dogmas.  It is the capacity of “Clairvoyance” which is truly open-hearted and open-minded seeing.  It has the capacity to witness spherically, in every direction at once and throughout all time.  It is the opened “third eye” that sees through the unity-knowingness of the solar plexus and then organizes the logical mind’s ability to recognize patterns that predict the way the future will unfold.

“Omniscience” is the stable, pure witness state of the mind when it is freed from the need to defend its’ separate existence.  It is one of the great healing superpowers of Grace that descends into human beings to heal denial. When you can see throughout time, you can see in great detail that everything that has ever happened and is ever going to happen is all a part of the divine plan that leads to perfection, so you have no need to defend any “truth” you may believe in, nor do you have any need to deny anyone else their “truth”. 

I think you can see how these fears in particular are extremely activated by the current crisis and how trapped you can feel if you believe the fears are real.  To receive the procedure to “loosen the screws” please contact me or attend a free class.