The Amyra Records

The other day I was co-facilitating a group and found myself feeling tired.  My tendency, when tired, is to float along with whatever I am doing, resigned to the fact that my energy is low and that there’s nothing to be done until it is over and I can get to a private place to recharge myself.  What that means is that my attention in the interim would be diffused.  This time, however, knowing that it was important for me to stay focused and alert, I took steps to change my state right there and then.  Within a few minutes, I felt clear and refreshed.    

It showed me that (a) we indeed have the power to shift our state (we’re not stuck in it); and (b) it comes down to consciously taking the step to make a choice to change. 

This applies to so many things.  The first step in change is awareness - the kind of awareness that is crystal clear, because we make it so.  Fogginess in our awareness is often a conscious choice - we choose to not be fully clear about something because of some fear we have around it.  We can learn a lot about ourselves by examining our fear but at some point we need to make the choice to shift gears and move away from being trapped by it.  That choice is preceded by a moment of intense clarity about our situation when we’ve made a choice to see it for what it is. 

In my experience above, I chose to:

• 1. Acknowledge that I was tired.
• 2. Accept that I was tired.
• 3. Take steps to change it.

These three steps were executed consciously, deliberately, with full awareness and the intention to change my situation.  A simple example, perhaps, which may not be fairly compared to more complex situations, but the principles at work are the same.  In any situation, we can look at how we’ve failed to bring changes because we have not taken any of those steps above. 

Acknowledging the truth of a situation is the first step to change.  This involves choosing to be aware, which also means choosing to elevate our level of awareness so that we see it clearly.  We may not be able to be clear at first attempt, but a clear intention to have clarity about our situation will push us up a notch in awareness every time we make it.  Once that clarity sets in, we’re able to see the truth of the situation.  Acknowledging it is simply to note to ourselves what we now see clearly. 

But having acknowledged something does not mean that we’ve accepted it.  We note that it is there but we do not accept it.  You may protest at this stage, “Of course I don’t accept it, that’s the whole point of change!”  Bear with me as I expand on it (it’s one of those tricky, paradoxical things but once we’ve grasped the concept it’s a breeze to practise).  Accepting a situation does not mean that we choose to remain in that situation.  Acceptance means to drop deeper into the truth of the situation rather than to fight it by denying that truth.  This brings out the dual qualities of that situation so that we can see possibilities of a better outcome, which is what motivates us to change.  When we fight the truth of something, we block ourselves from seeing our full potential.  All that resistance creates a wall around us, trapping us in a desperate drive to escape from an undesirable situation and into an ego-driven option.  This is why so often we become stuck in an undesirable situation long after we’ve acknowledged it is there.  But when we relax into the truth of it, our world expands and more options are presented to us. 

The third step of change is to take actual steps to move out of our current state.  In my case, after I’d acknowledged being tired and dropped into acceptance of it, I began to examine what I could do to move out of my tired state. 

I like to work with the four levels of our body.  I’ve found that the physical and spiritual bodies are closely linked, as are the emotional and mental bodies.  Our physical body is a vessel that holds and allows our spiritual self to express itself on the physical plane of existence.  Stagnation felt in our physical body (which often manifests as low energy) is rarely due solely to physical causes.  Even when physical causes have a part in it, it is often the energetic element that causes us to feel tired in our body. 

Physically, I grabbed a bottle of water and gulped it down, which immediately made me feel clearer.  This had the effect of pushing out the stagnant energy and increasing energy flow in my body.  Using my mind, I directed the flow of energy along with the imagined flow of water in my system, which gave me a palpable sensation of energy moving rather than stagnant.  On a mental level, I did a quick examination of my thoughts and replaced negative thoughts with positive ones.  This changed my emotional state to being more positive.  As I focused on the positive emotions, they expanded until I was filled with a positive energy, which caused more energy to flow in my body. 

All this happened in a matter of minutes, and I wasn’t tired anymore.  Then I thought to myself, if I could change my state quickly like this, what’s to stop me from staying in a positive state all the time?  I could remain clear, alert, focused and get to achieve more in all my projects. 

If I choose it.  It boils down to whether we want to or not, which dictates whether we choose one way or another.  There’s great comfort in staying in pain (something which I shall write more about later).  Most of the time, we already have the tools to get out of an undesirable situation.  The greatest challenge isn’t about getting the tools but in choosing to apply them to bring changes to our situation.  Our reluctance to make that choice to move towards something more positive often stems from a resistance deep inside us, and that resistance must be addressed.  For now, the point I want to get across is that the actual steps in bringing changes to our situation are usually not difficult to execute once we’ve made the choice to do so.  We may find that every time we practice positive change, the resistance in us weakens until one day we’re able to flow willingly and joyfully towards those things that actually bring us happiness. 

It’s interesting how messages get received, grasped and absorbed over countless times, each time reaching a deeper level of our awareness.  A bit like reading the same book or watching the same movie again - we see something different the second time around.  A sentence or a scene may open a new door by provoking a thought, evoking an emotion or triggering a memory.  All these stimulus may take us to a new realisation, a fresh insight which changes the way we perceive ourselves or our world. 

We may hear a message 10 times before we derive any real meaning from it, even though we can comprehend the message conceptually.  Depending on how open we are, that same message can bring on a major internal shift which bridges us to a point of profound healing and growth. 

Messages can come from spoken words, written words, song lyrics, words whispered by the wind, etc.  I usually recognise a message when it stops me in my tracks.  I’d like to share three messages that have helped me in the past week:  

“You get out of it what you put in.”

One of our clients remarked at the end of a Body Renew class that we do indeed “get out of it what we put in” - referring to how as they got more used to the breathing and movements, they were able to apply more of themselves into the sessions and get increasingly more enjoyment out of them. 

This is an important message for anyone who’s on a journey of healing and growth.  It would be far easier for us to be passive while our issues get fixed for us.  Unfortunately, there is no short-cut in overcoming the emotional or psychological blocks that hinder our expression as self-loving beings.  Nobody can do it for us.  The first step in healing and growth is Responsibility.  What stops us from getting well, ending destructive patterns and becoming happier isn’t the lack of tools but a lack of responsibility, usually triggered by a fear of facing our truth and the ensuing outcomes of doing so.  And so the preferred route is escapism. 

In our rehab centre, I see evidence of this often.  People finding all sorts of excuses to not participate or not look at all their issues, failing to see that they are all and the same issues that had driven them to addictions and to the brink of destruction.  It’s the same theme - escapism - whether it is escaping by drugs, alchohol, or choosing to avoid dealing with the pains behind their issues.  These different manifestations of escapism must be looked at and dealt with responsibly if addictive tendencies are to be healed.       

Nothing works without our putting in the work.  We can be given tools, but tools are just that - we need to use the tools to make them work for us.  Three basic elements that help determine the success of a programme:  

• a) Commitment gets you to approach something with discipline - e.g. turning up to a scheduled session and sticking to a programme until you reach your goal. Your vision of your final destination must be strong enough for you to stay motivated.
• b) Presence of mind, heart and spirit determines how much you’ll get out of a session you participate in. How present are you in the session? If you are only participating with your physical body but your mind and everything else are floating off elsewhere, you will gain little benefit.
• c) Openness of your heart and mind is important while you are participating on every level of your being. This allows you to relax your defences so that real healing and re-learning can take place.

 “You do the right thing, the right thing will come to you.”

My colleague and head therapist at the centre Steve Wyer said he often told his clients this during his many years of working with hardcore criminal and drug abuse cases (by the way, Steve’s personal story of healing and redemption is very inspiring and I hope to share some aspects of his voyage in later posts). 

This message struck me as a simple and effective way to approach a dilemma, conundrum or any conflicting situation. 

First of all, I believe there isn’t such a thing as “the right thing” as such.  The “right thing” here simply means what we know to be our deepest truth in that situation - doing the right thing means acting in response to that truth.  It’s a matter of Intention.  In other words, “doing the right thing” means “having a positive intention” behind your action.  The same action can be inspired by two different intentions - one can set us back in our spiritual growth while the other can elevate us to a more evolved state. 

Making a choice based on a positive intention is important because it recognises the imperfection of being human: that we cannot know everything on a conscious level.  But that imperfection is balanced by the perfection of everything being in flow to a natural order kept by a force that governs all life. 

In other words, when you do the right thing, you can relax into the knowledge that what is coming back to you will be the best for you, no matter what form it manifests.  That trust and acceptance can be very healing in that it allows you to move from a situation in which you’ve been stuck and set forth in a new direction.    

“Always onward, going forward without a regret.”

A very close friend who is writing an autobiography described his block to me recently: 

“It is a block in myself that prevents me from writing, lack of commitment which slows my words to a trickle and makes me study them carefully, over and over, until it renders me voiceless.”

I can relate to this well.  This kind of mental self-abuse - the constant, obsessive worrying and judgement of what we’ve done and the output we’ve expressed - is often what cripples us, stops our progress and hinders our self-expression. 

If we weren’t so judgemental about ourselves, we’d be less bothered by what we’ve said or done; and if we were able to accept and let go of our past actions, we’d be less judgemental about ourselves.  Constantly analysing and judging our actions is a form of self-punishment.  It may be worthwhile to ask, “What am I punishing myself for?  What am I judging myself for?”  Stopping for a moment of self-inquiry can transform an automatic, unconscious response into a well-considered action that moves us forward from stagnation to greater happiness. 

My friend went on to say:    

“I’m tackling this now by not allowing myself to look back, always onward with the narrative going forward without a regret.” 

Sometimes we need to take a deliberate step to drive a stake through our fear to free up our resistance to moving forward.  A mustering of guts, will power and determination without too much thinking can quickly build up internal fuel and allow us to release a concentrated burst of energy to break out of stagnation.  If we allow ourselves to think too much, we’d find every reason to stop ourselves and stay in stagnation.  A lot of our thinking is irrational, fear-based, and holds little truth.  Such thinking can be seen in its true light once we’ve pushed ourselves out of a state in which it imprisons us.

One of the sources of this type of thinking is what we perceive to be our mistakes - having done something that’s caused ourselves and/or other people unhappiness.  But making mistakes is one way of growing as it provides us with a reference of how to do things differently.  Yet we can only grow out of a mistake if we look forward from that mistake, only looking back to reinforce our lesson and focusing on being healed and renewed as a result of it. 

Last night, I watched a film in the centre’s movie room.  As I settled on the couch, I proceeded to eat a Mars Bar and buttered popcorn.  Halfway through the movie, I was struck by how relaxed and free I am about my eating now.  It’s been years since I’d thought anything about it, since I’d obsessed about everything I ate. 

Eating a Mars Bar without calculating the kind of ‘damage’ it could have on my body is so liberating.  I have been on countless diets in the past, obsessively counting calories, carb portions, fat grams, weighing myself, measuring myself, scaring myself with the imagined effects food could have on my body shape - wrecking my sense of self-worth with massive guilt and self-beating, and then neutralising the effects with diet pills, stimulants and appetite suppresants. 

I now allow myself to eat whatever I want, and have found great freedom.  When I was trying to control what and how much I ate, I became out-of-control.  Now I have the most liberating relationship with food where I am able to enjoy the pleasures of eating without feeling guilty or getting out-of-control.  My weight is healthy and stable, and I am totally rid of all stresses around food and eating. 

I call the way I now eat “intuitive eating”.  It requires one to develop the practice of being fully present in the body.  When we’re present in our body, we would intuitively know what our body wants.  The body has an intelligence, and it is giving us information about ourselves all the time.  If we were to tune in to what it is saying to us, we would gain a lot of self-awareness. 

To get to the point of intuitive eating, however, we need to first address the issues that drive us to have an unhealthy relationship with food (see below).  Throughout my struggles with eating disorders, I’d measured my entire self-worth by how I looked.  Since my image of my body was so bad, my self-worth was virtually zero.    

Food was a scapegoat.  If I didn’t have food to focus on and blame for all my insecurities, I’d have to turn my attention onto myself and examine what exactly was going on in me.  That is why attempting to change our habits around food without examining our deeper issues rarely works in the long run. 

My way of intuitive eating extends to the rest of my life.  When we are present and attuned to the needs of our body, that strong connection to ourselves enables us to be guided by our own innate wisdom - through our bodily responses, emotions, inspired thoughts, knowingness, premonitions, visions and spiritual insights.  By relaxing into and trusting the wisdom of our body, life becomes a joyful experience where we are simultaneously in control and in surrender to a greater intelligence.    

An excerpt from my book which examines the psychological motivations behind eating disorders: 

Food is sustenance and nurturance.  As babies, we could not feed ourselves and depended on our parents to feed us.  Feeding times were the times when our parents held us close to their bodies and showed us affection, so we learned to associate food with love.  If by the time we were able to feed ourselves our parents neglected us, we would feel deprived of love and turn to food to evoke feelings of being loved by our parents.  Food has becomes a source of comfort. 

 

Sometimes, as we grew up, our parents continued to use food to express their love.  In some cases, food is used as a substitute for love, especially when the parents have problems expressing their love.  If food is a central theme in the household, it would be assumed that everyone understood that love is being shown when food is shared.  This is fine if it is balanced by some expression of love and affection.  But when the parents show no love and keep shoving food at us, we can develop an unbalanced view of food.   

 

Those who grew up in poor families may end up seeing food as a scarce commodity, and end up either having an inflated value for food or a resentful attitude to food.  If they have an inflated value for food, they may later use food as a substitute for love or eat excessively to make up for not having enough in the past.  If they have a resentful attitude to food, they may later ‘take revenge’ on food by being extremely choosy about the kind of food they would eat, or reject food by undereating, or use food to punish another. 

 

All these dynamics can give rise to eating disorders.  For those who suffer from eating disorders, food is often a shameful subject.  They know they have an abusive relationship with food and feel ashamed of themselves around food.  To begin healing the eating disorders, their relationship with food needs to be explored deeper. 

 

Awareness

 

1.      Begin by asking yourself, what’s your truth?  This is your truth on a conscious level.  What are your eating habits?  

 

Examples: 

My truth is, I don’t want to be overweight anymore.  I love to eat fatty foods and then I neutralise it with stimulants and laxatives. 

Or

I want to be able to enjoy food more.  I cannot seem to put on any weight and I feel sick when I think of food.    

 

2.  Explore the belief you have behind your habits.  Your habits are either to avoid something or to gain something.  Is there anything you are running away from that your habits help to mask?  What do you think you’ll gain from it? 

 

Examples:

Why do I eat foods that make me fat, and why do I tend not to be able to stop eating?  I’m afraid it will run out, so I’m taking in as much as possible while it’s still there. 

Or

Deep down, I feel bad for eating.  If I eat, I’d deprive my siblings of their share. 

 

3.  What does food mean to you?  What does it represent? 

 

Examples:

Abundance, comfort.  As I eat, I’m hating myself, and feeling lonelier and lonelier. 

Or

Food to me is a source of unhappiness.  I hate it. 

 

4.  What thoughts go through your mind as you’re eating?  What emotions go along with those thoughts?

 

Examples:

Inadequacies.  As I’m eating, I’m replaying scenes from the past where I’d been rejected, judged, looked down upon, etc.  Feelings of being unloved and low self-esteem.  These feelings drive me to eat more, and the more I eat the worse I feel. 

Or

Guilt, bitterness.  I’m judging myself angrily as I’m eating.  I feel I shouldn’t need to eat and feel angry that I am eating. 

 

5.  Sum up your relationship with food. 

 

Examples:

I eat to get love.  Food is a substitute for love.

Or

I equate eating with putting unhappiness inside me.    

 

Overeating, Bingeing

 

When we eat more than our body needs to function healthily, we are overeating.  When we overeat excessively and obssessively, we are bingeing on food.  In these cases, food is being used to numb our pain like a drug, or to counter an emptiness inside. 

 

If deep down we feel deprived of love, we may eat as if this is the last time we get to eat, to try to take in as much as we can this time because we hold a belief that there is not enough food, or love, to go around.  We become greedy around food, hoarding food in our body.  Except our body can take only a certain amount of food before we feel uncomfortable or get sick.  If we do this repeatedly, we will likely manifest a variety of symptoms in our body, such as obesity and heart problems. 

 

No matter how much we eat, it won’t leave us satiated.  Our appetite is for something less tangible.  What is it that you need?  When you can see that food is a substitute for something else and understand the irrationality of stuffing yourself with food, you can begin to reverse your habits. 

 

What is the emptiness inside?  What are you deprived of?  People often stuff themselves to fill an emptiness inside – a feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness that creates a vacuum inside.  Food is solid and grounding; it gives us an immediate sensation of being full and the flavours of food stimulate our senses so that we feel more connected to ourselves.  But it cannot fill the emptiness inside, and so we eat more and more.  The more we eat, the more we feel the emptiness, which drives us to eat even more.  This vicious cycle spins with increasing intensity and we become out of control, until our body cannot take any more food. 

 

At the end of a bingeing session, we are often left feeling guilty and shameful.  In an attempt to neutralise the effects of our bingeing, we may make ours throw up or take laxatives to purge what we’ve taken in.  We may isolate ourselves in shame or engage in destructive activities to distract ourselves from our guilt. 

 

Overeating can be a form of self-abuse.  We may know the negative effects overeating can have on our body and somehow want to bring those effects onto ourselves.  Was food used as a punishment in your household when you were growing up?  When food was used as punishment and the person has also been conditioned to feel shameful about himself, it is likely that he will develop the habit of abusing himself with food.  In such cases, we stuff ourselves to get to the pain of having eaten too much, believing that we deserve to have pain inflicted upon us. 

 

In all the cases mentioned, the relationship with food needs to be changed; our attitude towards food and our beliefs around food need to change.  There is nothing wrong with seeing food as love, but not as a substitute for love.  As food is sustenance, when we give sustenance to someone it is an act of love.  So when we feed ourselves, we are loving ourselves.  But when we are operating from a scarce mentality, we may see the value of food in general but unable to appreciate its true value.  Hence, we stuff ourselves with huge amounts of food without deriving its true value.  This is one reason why we are unable to feel truly satiated no matter how much we eat. 

 

The key to changing our attitude to food is to apply the concept of full immersion to eating.  Slow down and appreciate every morsel you take in with more depth.  Instead of putting huge amounts of food quickly into your mouth (stretching across on a two-dimensional platform), increase the depth of the experience by opening up to the depth of the taste and flavours of the food. 

 

Every morsel of food can sustain and nourish us more than we’ve allowed ourselves to recognise.  Reflect on the true value of every morsel - the sensory stimulation from the flavours, its nutritional value and spiritual nourishment.  This way, you can train yourself to derive more out of smaller amounts of food, and eventually cut down the amount of food it takes to satiate you.  Stretch the process of eating by slowing down the time between picking up the food and putting it into your mouth, and between chewing and swallowing. 

 

When you eat mindfully this way, you become more grounded in your body and have body awareness.  With body awareness, you’ll begin to hear what your body is telling you and eat according to what your body needs.  Tune in by noticing the energy of the food in your body as you eat.  This way, you’ll cultivate a habit of listening to your body and knowing intuitively what to feed it.  You’ll begin to choose healthier foods that nourish your body and a balance of various foods that feed your soul.     

 

Undereating, Anorexia, Bullimia

 

People who tend to eat less than their body needs to be strong and healthy do so due to a variety of reasons.  In one of the examples in the awareness exercise above, food was associated with pain.  It triggered unhappy feelings for the person and was therefore a source of pain for her.  She might’ve had been abused around food as a child and developed shame, guilt or anger around food.  On the other hand, a person who associates food with love might be rejecting love by rejecting food.  The underlying issue is a strong belief that he is unworthy and undeserving of love. 

 

Another issue behind undereating is fear of losing control.  Firstly, if you tend to over-eat, you may go to the other extreme in an attempt to control your over-eating: you believe that if you allowed yourself to eat, you would lose control and eat too much; and you end up starving yourself.  Usually, this fear of control goes beyond eating and is prevalent in the person’s life in general.  Not eating, therefore, is a way of gaining control.  This is especially prevalent in those whose childhood environment was chaotic and unpredictable, and the person had no sense of control over his environment.  To counter the fear of losing control, they control the only thing they feel they can, which is eating. 

 

Children who under-eat may do so to manipulate their parents.  They may want attention from their parents, if they’d felt neglected.  It is common for children to ‘act up’ and do things that anger their parents because they don’t feel safe to tell their parents what they really need, which is their love.  They expect that if they caught their parents’ attention, they’d automatically be shown love.  Children may also rebel against eating to get back at their parents.  As kids, we had few options for punishing our parents.  Intuitively though, we knew that our not eating would have an effect.  A lot of our unbringing is centered around being fed and given food – we were constantly reminded to “eat this” or “finish your food’, so much so that we knew how much it mattered to our parents that we ate. 

 

Sometimes, a person avoids eating to avoid facing the feelings she has.  Eating immediately grounds us in our body and make us aware in our body (before we start bingeing, in which case we become numb to our feelings).  The person may have stored a lot of pain inside which she is afraid to face.  She may feel that putting food inside her would rock the boat of ignorance and open a pandora’s box of horrible feelings she would then have to deal with.  At times, a person is simply terrified of gaining weight due to issues with body image. 

 

When undereating is taken to the extreme, a person may develop anorexia, a condition which is also a body image disorder.  People with anorexia see themselves as overweight even when they are obviously underweight.  Somewhere along the process of undereating, we might have developed a distorted image of our bodies – we fear eating so much that we’ve convinced our minds that we don’t need to eat by believing that we are fat.  We wanted to believe this so much that we’ve created a distortion so that we won’t ever see it any other way. 

 

Another form of eating disorder is bullimia, in which a person forces himself to regurgitate the food he had just eaten.  Superficially, it is done to avoid putting on weight, but it has deeper psychological motivations.  It is often preceded by bingeing, which suggests that a bullimic person may be driven by two opposing sets of fears – for example, a desperation for love as well as unworthiness.  Control is a common issue behind bullimia – a person who fears losing control manifests that fear through eating uncontrollably and then ‘proving’ to herself that she can control matters by making herself throw up.  

 

Doing the exercise of applying the concept of full immersion to eating as described in the previous section would change your attitude towards food and help heal your relationship with food.  By recognising the true value of food, you learn to see food as sustenance, nurturance, nourishment and love.  The act of eating mindfully and lovingly would begin to heal feelings of unworthiness that caused you to reject food.  As you heal yourself, you’ll begin to eat more healthfully and adequately. 

For the past ten years or so, on most nights, whenever I shut my eyes to go to sleep, I would get a vision of plants - a forest, a tree or a potted plant.  I would get a zoom-in as the leaves come into sharp focus, before the whole vision fades out, leaving me as perplexed and as clueless about its significance as the night before. 

I’d never really thought of myself as the ‘environmental type’, yet the nightly visions pointed to a certain role I am to play in the environment.  I’m still unsure as to what that is but since moving my base to a natural setting I feel more and more connected to the elemental spirits. 

Now that I think about it, as a child I loved being in nature.  My favourite pastimes were activities that immersed me in the world of nature.  I loved going deep into bougainvillae shrubs and feeling right at home in a world painted by the colours, lights, textures and scents of nature.  I loved dragonflies, they seemed to be gentle mythical creatures that graced our garden with their ethereal presence.  I found great joy in collecting plant specimens from the garden and then pretending to make potions out of them.  I remember using a small blade and slicing up tiny roots - an activity I performed with great focus and mindfulness - and scattering petals onto the fish pond.  Such simple pleasures which put me in a carefree, serene space. 

Somehow, that had all been forgotten when I grew up and got caught up in city living.  I now know that what was missing in my spiritual practice is a strong connection to the environment.  The link between spirituality and environmentalism is something which I’m just beginning to understand. 

In recent weeks, I’ve been guided to connect more to the spirits of nature.  Where I am, there’s a powerful spiritual presence among the land on which the centre is built.  The local staff who come from this area have a deep respect and reverence to the spirits who guard and protect this land.  Through a Buddhist monk from the area, we were told that there’s some karmic energies that are being worked off, with the kind of work that we do, which has been recognised by the deities as spiritually meaningful (alleviating suffering for the clients who do the programme with us).  The spirits are reassuring us that we’re doing good and as such we’re being supported. 

Today, we had a Buddhist ceremony at our premise to formally seek the blessings of the spirits for the work that we’re doing in the centre.  It was a beautiful ritual consisting of nine monks chanting and infusing protective powers into an idol of Buddha which now sits in our reception area.  During the ceremony, I was deeply-moved, humbled and in reverence as I was being reminded of my ‘spiritual mandate’.  A great moment of my ego dissolving, leaving me feeling cleansed and pure.  Very powerful. 

I received a strong message that we never really own a piece of land, even if we do so on paper - that we are merely guardians of the land.  This extended to a feeling of deepening into the realms of the elemental energies that form the basic structure of our environment.  In that realm, I felt my consciousness merge with the greater whole and a sense of perfection in all that exists. 

One of the most rewarding things I’d found when I went on my spiritual journey was discovering that I could reach a trance state without the use of drugs.  I am reminded about this while conducting a group class this morning.  As I led the group through a series of meditative movements overlooking a vista of calmly-flowing river, I was aware of my senses becoming more acute and having an expanded sense of myself.  The essence of me, the juice of passion, flowed like warm treacle running through my veins and igniting sparks of inspiration that brought me closer to who I really am.

I became more alive, more lucid and grounded in my physical experience.  This is the essence of a spiritual trance.  Yet the term ‘spiritual trance’ can be misleading.  We tend to think of a spiritual trance as going outside of our physical bodies, but what it is is that our spirit is fully anchored in our body while we’re fully engaging our emotional body to feel the rich array of emotions as our consciousness expands.  The trance is not coloured by illusions, instead we get a greater clarity about our existence. 

Rather than being taken away from ourselves, we are more present in ourselves.   

True joy is when we come more fully into ourselves, to experience more of who we are, rather than being taken away from ourselves, to escape who we are.  A drug-induced trance tends to do the latter; we take illegal substances primarily to escape from ourselves. 

In contrast, a natural trance state takes us closer to ourselves and opens us up to a greater concept of who we are - and we realise that who we are is much bigger and more powerful than we’d ever imagined.  When we truly come into who we are, we can discover that our concept and perception of who we were had been limited, even distorted.  In finding the truth of who we really are, our spirit spreads through our being until we open up, expand and deepen into our experience of life. 

We are more in control in a drug-free trance.  When that small doorway presents itself, we simply walk through it calmly, with a mixture of surrender and intention as to the depth we want to reach.  Once we reach the realm of infinite spiritual space within, our creative power opens up.  A sense of passion rises from our core.  We feel more alive and joyful in a delicious paradox of being wildly stimulated yet profoundly calm. 

I woke up today feeling light, fresh and abundant.  I am no longer in a smog-filled city, but in a beautiful resort which is to be my base from now on.  To think that I’d been mildly resisting moving away from the city to live in the ‘countryside’.  For days I’d had a running commentary at the back of my head: How will a city girl cope with living in the countryside?

On arriving at the resort where I’ve been employed as part of a team helping people with addiction problems, I immediately felt calm and at home.  This place is beautiful - more than the aesthetics, the energy is flowing and welcoming.  The resort sits on the banks of the famous River Kwai, a stunning site that showcases the beauty of the river.  The first thing that grabs you is how alive this place is - the river flows strong and fast, yet is calm, so that it moves like a sheet of fabric on the surface.  The constant movement of the water makes the whole place come spiritually alive.

The air is clean.  I’ve seen more species of butterflies, birds and geckos than I’ve seen in a long time.  The most noticeable noises are birds singing and, at night, the insects play a symphony that can be distracting for ears more used to distant sounds of traffic. 

It brings to mind how we tend to resist moving to better options due to fear of the unknown, even though where we are isn’t that great.  When I look around me, it appears a no-brainer that where I am is superior to where I was: beautiful surroundings and the opportunity to do meaningful work on a daily basis. 

Some may argue that it’s only been 24 hours, but I reckon there is tremendous power in taking that step of moving forward, of courageously taking your entire energy to a new place and committing to giving your consolidated gifts for a meaningful cause, that the future from that point on can only expand you.  If you fully immerse yourself in your new environment and allow it to open you up to something greater. 

Often, we allow our fears to continue stopping us, even after we’ve made a decision and changes have been made.  When you think about it, this is such a foolish thing.  Anything new stores great potential for exciting discoveries.  But we’re so used to staying in the comfort of familiarity that instead of diving into the joys of newness we pull ourselves back and end up depriving ourselves of the gifts. 

By consciously moving through our fears and opening up to what’s around us, something magical happens: we tap into a certain spiritual element that heals us of our latent fears, as if we’ve been cleansed of the blocks that stopped us from actualising our highest potential.    

Full Immersion is a component of the practice of Total Presence.  It means immersing yourself fully into an experience by bringing all your energy back into your body.  When we express ourselves through all our energy, we’re able to scratch the surface of what’s around us and unveil more beauty to ourselves. 

Where are you at this moment?  How much of yourself is here?  Anchor yourself energetically in your body.  Mentally, apply yourself fully to the moment - do not think or wish to be somewhere else.  Your emotions are connected to the present experience, not the past or projected future.  Your spirit is here, not in another place or time.  Energetically, you are here, to fully experience with your whole self. 

When you are here, totally, you are naturally connected to your source of power and can exercise your full potential at this very moment.  That knowingness of your power, the feeling of having your powers at the tips of your fingers, coupled with the richness of acute sensory awareness of your surroundings when every inch of you is filled with your essence, deepens you into a state of being more alive and expansive.   

That energy is forward-moving.  There is no painful letting-go required.  For when we focus on living the present moment to the full, we change the energetic structure of what had been.  Everything begins to shift around to fit into a new structure created by living the present fully.  The future remains a vast space of exciting possibilities as we maintain an openness and relaxed anticipation of being delighted by something we cannot even imagine right now. 

Yesterday, I met up with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for almost three years.  She seemed so different from when I last saw her - her energy is expansive and bright, and she has an aura of peace about her.  The transformation from the last time I’d seen her was stark.  Her depression, the heavy sadness and pain which hung about her three years ago is gone, replaced by a certain presence and relaxed self-assuredness.      

She’s a model of someone who took responsibility to change for the better when confronted by what seemed like bad news.  A year ago, she was diagnosed with cancer.  Refusing invasive treatments, she opted to heal herself through addressing her emotional issues.  She attributed her change to the cancer.  “It’s a blessing,” she said, without a hint of self-pity. 

When she had received the diagnosis, she was not surprised.  She understood that deep, unresolved pains in our hearts can manifest in our bodies as cancer. 

I’ve known of people who opted for alternative healings when faced with cancer.  But opting for alternative healings aren’t always responsible.  If you’re simply buying up ‘miraculous’ herbs and passive treatments, you’re just going the same route as opting for modern invasive techniques - i.e. removing the symptoms without addressing the deeper issues behind it.  What struck me about my friend was that instead of merely buying hope to get well, her focus has been to work through her deep pains. 

Her courage is inspiring.  It isn’t easy to opt for this route.  When your family and friends are pushing you to go for medical treatments, you have to cope with isolating the people who love you at a time when you need their support the most.  It takes a special person to have the utter conviction and steely determination to follow their truth. 

She seems happy.  She wasn’t happy before the cancer.  It shows me that it’s what inside our hearts that matters, regardless of our outer reality.  How we respond to what is happening outside of us, our bodies included, determines our happiness.  She seems more alive, and in touch with a spiritual truth.  All the hard work of addressing her inner conflicts is freeing her, layer by layer, to be her true, magnificent self.  She laughs easily, and she has a sense of fun.  It’s reflected in her body language - open and accepting. 

Acceptance is both the key to healing ourselves and the place to be when we’re healed.  A lot of self-destructive behaviours stem from a reluctance to accept what is.  When our truth stares at us, do we look at it responsibly or run the other way?  Taking stock of what we’ve created in our lives and listening to the truth of our hearts - Is what I’ve created in line with my values or is it making me unhappy? - is the first step in healing, growth and transformation.  If there’s a conflict between what is and what we want deep down, where is the block that has created this conflict? 

Asking ourselves questions like these can begin to put us back into our place of power where we can then take steps to move towards a life of happiness.  Without that acceptance, we would miss being in the right place from where powerful changes can be made. 

Acceptance comes from a willingness to be totally present in our bodies.  When all our essence is contained in our vessel, that vessel becomes a clear funnel through which our higher consciousness can express itself to give us authentic form. 

I am in a shopping mall, browsing the shelves on a vendor stand lined with beauty products.  I’m intrigued and fascinated by some of the products for sale.  Each product I pick up seems to scream its promise at me:

Lighten Your Nipples!

Flatten Your Tummy! 

Curl/Extend Your Eyelashes! 

Enlarge Your Breasts! 

Slim Your Face! 

I note how I am absorbing this with a detachment that eluded me in the past.  As I recall how in the past I would easily fall victim to such beauty standards and be made to feel inferior, I shudder at what this could do to so many other women who are still struggling with a negative body image.  Being reminded that I wasn’t perfect would’ve gotten me into an obsessive loop of buying hope in bottles, tubes and jars while beating myself up for not being good enough. 

My mind wanders to the role of the media in all this ….

The standard of beauty set by the media has brought a lot of harm to women’s sense of self.  That kind of beauty is not only unrealistic to aspire to, it is ridiculous to say that one form of beauty is superior to another.  Take a good look at what is considered to be beautiful today - how long will these remain desirable?  Come next year, they may all be replaced by the opposites of what are considered to be desirable today. 

Remember when rounded, gravity-defying silicon breasts were considered a beauty ideal in the early ‘90s?  Nowadays, women are going for more natural-looking implants that mimic the natural movement of breasts.  ‘Perfectly’ shaped breasts have given way to natural-looking breasts.  Back in the ‘70s, small breasts were considered attractive, and it’s likely we will see that ideal return in the near future. 

Ideals change, and it’s silly to obsess about changing your looks to fit into a current ideal.  It is much better to accept what you’ve got (who knows, you may have everything that fits into next year’s ideals!).  Set your own standards and ideals.  See yourself as already beautiful without waiting for the rest of the world to validate it.  What you have is uniquely your own beauty. 

The media has such a responsibility in shaping women’s image of themselves.  I don’t know if writers, editors and publishers are really aware of this.  It is just as appalling to consider that they aren’t aware as that they are aware but don’t care enough to do something to change their influence. 

I’m sure you have at some point come across an unflattering photo of a female celebrity featured humiliatingly in a magazine.  The more unflattering the photo against the subject’s usual presentation, the more newsworthy it is (newsworthiness is partly dependent on how far a news item strays from what is usually expected).  Now, this is where the media misuse their power. 

Usually, the caption or headline that accompanies the photo plays up the negative aspects and paints an exaggerated picture of the randomly-shot photo.  Remember, the bigger the gap between what is shown and what is usually expected of the person, the bigger the news and the more money they can make.  To blow up that difference, the writer has to step into his or her lowest, most bitchy self and make the person as far from her usual attractive self as possible.  That action may have destroyed one woman’s sense of self and delivered the subliminal message to maybe millions of other women that failing to fit into what we’ve been programmed to believe is beautiful is disdainful and worthy of humiliation. 

Sure, on the surface, some of us may feel better knowing that the most beautiful celebrities turn out to be just like us after all - but that acknowledgment only anchors our belief that fitting into what is considered to be beautiful by the media’s standard is so important.  In celebrating the humiliating news, we are being taught to judge a woman harshly for failing to fit into the ideals set by the media.  A complimentary caption that celebrates unusual beauty would have a more positive effect on women’s psyche about their bodies. 

Writers, editors, publishers: if a photo of a woman with unplucked eyebrows is published, do you write a complimentary or derogatory caption?  Not only do you have the power to determine what will be considered to be beautiful tomorrow, you have the power to heal the collective females’ perception of themselves.  Imagine that.  Beyond the immediate bottom-line sales of your publication, can you find that place in you where your heart connects to your conscience and make your choice from there.    

The more I think about it, the more incensed I feel about how we’ve allowed the media to dictate what is supposed to be beautiful and what is not.  It triggers a sense of rebelliousness in me to break through the mass programming. 

So I’m walking around with new eyes today, asking myself what is beautiful, really. 

Then something strange happens: I begin to see beauty in those who are considered by society to be unattractive.  The woman with a slightly bulging tummy, the schoolgirl with unplucked eyebrows and flat eye-lashes, the skinny lady with flat chests and bottom, various faces with broad noses, squinty eyes, jutty chins and toothy smiles.  As I see these features as possible beauty ideals, something shifts in me.  I had only judged them to be unattractive because an institution had said so.  It is not the truth! 

By now, I am moving through the shopping mall feeling slightly dazed yet clear and present, as if time has slowed somewhat and I’m able to perceive certain things that I wasn’t able to before. 

A young woman who looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover walks past me.  Instead of feeling intimidated or inferior, I see a certain cakiness about her looks, as if she’s trying too hard to fit into a set of ideals that have been imposed upon all of us and she does so with great competitiveness which unfortunately is taking a toll on her.  It’s as if the glue under her mask has peeled off, raising the mask several inches above her skin.  That illusion - the illusion of beauty embodied by this walking covergirl - is starting to crack.

I am struck by a realisation that my previous sense of what’s beautiful and what’s not - the way it’s all been programmed into us to judge beauty in a woman - had been so limited and even distorted.  For a moment, I am unable to keep walking.  The profoundness of it washes over me.  I have broken through the mass programming that permeates our society, and I can perceive people without the lens constructed by the media.  My vision, free from this programming, is more far-reaching, and as I see more possibilities for beauty, my world becomes filled with more beauty. 

Every now and then, I hear of someone who’s on a diet and refuses to eat out with her friends because she’s afraid of yielding to temptation.  Or the ex-smoker or drinker who no longer socialises with his buddies to stay away from temptation. 

While I agree that the best environment for kicking an addiction is one that is removed from temptation (and probably essential in the early stages), that temptation must eventually be dealt with too, for the addiction to be completely healed.

The objects of addiction - drugs, alchohol, TV, internet, porn, food - will always be around, somewhere in our world.  We can’t control their whereabouts nor wipe out their existence.  If your abstinence is dependent on the absence of these things, then it follows that if they surfaced you would fall back to your addiction. 

We may be able to avoid the addicted object by staying away from certain places and people, but true freedom is when that bottle is three feet away from you and you feel fine with being where you are.  Even if it is causing you some discomfort which challenges your resolve, you are not angry or bitter about it.  You take note of the responses in your body, move through your feelings, and emerge from that ‘contact’ stronger and wiser. 

When I say “dealing with the temptation”, I mean reconciling the energy of tension between you and the addicted object.  If you’ve been abstaining from an addiction, at some point it’d be good to also work on the tension of temptation. 

Most conventional therapies for addiction do not go near the object of addiction and work instead from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach.  I believe that when we put aside our fears and step closer to that energy, a deeper kind of healing can occur - a healing that will leave the person more whole and self-sufficient. 

In psycho-energetic terms, there is a huge amount of energy that is being pulled into existence and built overtime when we play out the internal dynamics of alternately reaching out obsessively for that addiction and resisting it.  This creates a tension, which causes a great deal of discomfort whenever you come close to or think about the addicted object.  This tension is what pulls you to indulge in your addiction.  Without addressing this tension, you may be able to control your addiction to a certain extent by avoiding it but you are more likely to yield to temptation as soon as you are exposed to it again. 

How do you reconcile the energies between you and the addicted object?  Focus on your addiction until you feel the tension.  You can do this by either thinking about it or actually having it within your field of vision.  You can start off by just thinking about it and progress to having it in front of you and then having it closer to you.  The shorter the distance to you, the greater the tension.      

Focus on it until you feel the tension building up.  As the tension increases, you’ll feel more pull towards it.  After some time, it will not be able to hold itself, until it breaks apart.  As the tension breaks, it releases a huge amount of energy; some of it will flow back to the addicted object and some will flow back to you. 

We give out a lot of energy to keep our addictions alive.  This is the energy that is being released as the tension breaks.  When some of this energy flows back to the addicted item, it neutralises the pull from the object, while the rest of the energy that flows back to you will neutralise the force of your yielding to the item.  You can help build the energy faster towards breaking point by intending that outcome. 

As the tension increases, it may draw out symptoms of withdrawal (most symptoms are psychologically induced).  These symptoms are part of the tension - the more intense the symptoms, the greater the tension; the greater the tension, the more potential power it can yield when it breaks.  Keep focusing on it and resist yielding to it until the energies are reconciled. 

I believe that reconciling the energies of temptation is an important component in the process of overcoming addiction holistically.  The other components are:

1. Reconciling the Parts Of You that Are In Conflict. Basically, a part of you wants to stop but can’t, and a part of you doesn’t want to stop but can. The aim is to switch them around so that the part of you that wants to stop can stop.

2. Active Reconciliation. Change the balance between indulging and not indulging in the addiction by increasing your sense of joy during your non-indulgence moments. Replace it with other activities that give you real fulfilment. Deepen into the moment and expand yourself to a state of pure, undiluted joy - hence, changing your associations (i.e. pleasure with indulgence and pain with non-indulgence).

3. Dealing with Withdrawal Symptoms. Begin by accepting that there may be temporary feelings of discomfort and overcoming your fear of what you expect to be unpleasant. Change your association - instead of seeing the symptoms as bad, see them as positive effects of you winning over your addiction.

4. Cleaning Up Your Beliefs. Examine and challenge the beliefs you’ve created to justify your habit. Look honestly at the price you’re paying for your addiction, the negative consequences. Consider how giving it up will enrich your life. What is your deeper purpose, your true motivation for your addiction?

5. Changing Your Environment. Change your routines and schedules to break the energetic structure that mirrors your previous behaviours, or move to a new environment to displace the negative energies associated with your addiction. Once you’ve successfully ended your addiction, you’ll be able to move in and out of the old environment without it being a big deal. This is the true test of whether you have successfully given up your addiction.

I will expand on these other components in future postings.    

Last night, I had “one of those” dreams.  It wasn’t a recurring dream, but the visual and emotional tones were familiar.  It had an ‘epic’ feel about it - stretched out in time and storyline.  There was a certain greyness about it, something macabre even, a bit reminiscent of the movie The Mist. 

Firstly, there were spiders.  Lots of them.  I am fearful of spiders.  I was standing in a kind of courtyard in a house.  From where I was, I could see the top of the trees in front of the house, beyond the roof.  Somebody was talking to me.  This person was what I call The Wise One in one of these dreams - usually faceless, gender undefinable, a voice of wisdom imparting a deep and often cryptic message.  I am going to refer to a ‘he’.  He said, “Take a close look at the trees,” although I received it as a fully-formed concept, not in words. 

As my vision zoomed into one of the trees, I saw that there were thousands of spiders leaping out of it in all directions.  I shuddered and uttered something like, “Ooooohhhh…..,” feeling a dread growing in me as I understood the path I had to go through.  This was a shamanic initiation dream. 

Many years ago, a psychic psychotherapist (yes, they do exist) told me that dreaming of spiders is a sign of an impending spiritual awakening.  The spider symbolises spiritual power.  They tend to invoke fear and repulse in us because we are ultimately fearful of our own power. 

I’ve had a phobia of spiders for as long as I can remember.  In recent years, I have worked through many aspects of this fear and now the intensity of that fear has lessened a lot, though I’m still more fearful of them than the average person. 

In the dream, my test was to go out the front door and walk (run!) between the trees until I got to a safe ground.  I felt unusually brave and willing in the dream as I did not even argue with The Wise One.  As I stepped out the front door, I manifested a green umbrella for protection.  “No,” he said, and the umbrella disappeared.  I tried again.  Stepping out the door, I manifested a silver raincoat.  “Take it off,” he said, and the coat disappeared.  I wondered how many chances I had left. 

From the side, two sets of hands reached out to me and dragged me out of the house.  Just as I started to panic, I saw that while it was raining big brown spiders all around me, none of them actually touched me.  They seemed to fall onto me and then disappeared at about six inches from contact with me, as if I was wearing an invisible spider-vaporising suit.  

I had never seen or come so close to so many spiders before.  Yet I began to feel less and less fearful.  My gait began to slow to a relaxed stroll.  Raining spiders?  No big deal.  My face relaxed into a smile, and I felt myself expanding.  Eventually, the hands that had been gripping my arms pulled away. 

I turned back to see that the house was now way behind me, with the trees of leaping spiders dotting along the front of it.  From where I stood, the house looked like a prison guarded by the spiders.  I was out of the prison, and a cooling sensation breezed through me, like a sigh of relief. 

The ground seemed softer yet firmer without the harshness on my soles.  My feet sprang from every step, making me feel lighter and more mobile.  It didn’t register in me that I had passed the test until I woke up from the dream. 

After my daily movement and meditation practice, I applied the principle of presence, power and passion to decipher my dream. 

Presence

With my energetic presence firmly anchored in my body, I took stock of what my truth was around the dream. 

The house represented my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies - the place where I resided.  I was trapped in a body programmed with fear - it had become my prison.  I had ventured out of my prison of fear into freedom. 

The trees represented my foundation, which drew sustenance from a centralised source, the earth.  I had failed to spot the spiders at first, suggesting that I was unaware of my true spiritual power. 

The leaping movement of the spiders suggested aliveness, the ripeness for action.  That my foundation was churning out more and more spiders indicated an abundant supply of whatever powers were behind my fears. 

Power

What aspects of my power did I tap into to deal with the task? 

Manifesting a green umbrella.  Putting something green over my head signified an attempt to neutralise my spiritual power - blocking the flow of energy from my crown chakra (spiritual energy center) with a grounding energy (green).  This suggests a strong connection to what grounds me but that I might have been too focused on the physical plane.  A willingness to open up more spiritually seems to be called for. 

Manifesting a silver raincoat.  Attempting to protect myself by putting up a strong auric shield.  This demonstrated that I am skilled at protecting myself psychically from my environment but because I was told that this action was redundant, perhaps I might have been too protective of myself. 

Changing the outcome of an expected fear.  I had expected to be horrified when the spiders hit me but they ‘vaporised’ before touching me.  I was prepared to face my fear full-on when I stepped out the door.  That willingness and trust of the unknown had saved me from a horrifying experience which was no longer necessary in my learning. 

Passion

What movement of energies could I relate to in myself? 

The most active movement was the leaping spiders.  I am fearful of spiders, so there’s a lot of movement in my fear - i.e. my fear is ripe to burst to reveal its power.  When we break down our fears, we can extract from them our power.  My power is waiting to burst forth to be reclaimed.    

As I made my journey from the courtyard to outside the house, my fear transformed into exhiliration.  I held this exhiliration until my being expanded.  This seems to be the great lesson - transforming fear into exhiliration and in the process changing my perception of fear. 

The springiness/bounciness of my steps symbolised mobility.  Movements in my outer reality mirroring movements within me.  I am to reinforce this mirroring of outer-inner movements to create movement in general - the more movements within and without, the more I open up to living with Passion running through me.