And yet the internal experience and quality of life and aliveness is very different to what I once experienced at earlier points of this lifetime. Life has dramatically shifted from something to be lived and shaped out there in the experiential or ‘material’ world to something that is wholly internal and energetic. In my experience all of life is ‘internal’ and not reliant on what the mind deems as ‘external’ and all is One, interconnected, interdependent, cocreative.

Even when engaging from the conditioned personality the observer in me knows that I am not just that. Any Identifications with body, personality, and mind have profoundly weakened which allows for a different kind of engagement with life. An engagement liberated from the fetters of attachments to narratives, concepts, opinions, preferences, and what is key: free from enslavement to separation consciousness and duality. Creating a more peaceful flow of experience, and more sustainable presence.

Being less identified with the personality/self liberates me from futile strivings for status, validation, and other vacuous ego fodder. It fades the need to consume, distract, avoid, or assert the will in other ways on external realities that seem unacceptable or inconvenient.
Normalized obsessions with cultural conditioned values (fame, wealth, looks, success, etc.) are transparent in their futility and emptiness while the desires and delights of my soul are illuminated in their value and nourishing quality (community, kindness, cooperation, creative play, love for knowledge and knowing, etc.). Knowing that I am an expression of the Self – unborn, undying, all-encompassing and yet empty – releases any need to prove my/self, be special or different from ‘others’ as they are equally part of the One/Self.

And from these shifts in experience and knowing new questions and quests beg to be explored and lived:

Which role and path is given to this expression of Self?
How do I best balance receptivity with creative participation?
How do I participate in life in a way that turns my knowing and abilities into a service to All That Is?
Which residues of conditioning and misperception are holding me back from harmoniously and joyously flowing with life? And how do I release them?
Which mysteries of existence are waiting to reveal themselves through my experience?

I still experience triggers that regress me into states of forgetfulness and blind identification with the conditioned personality and her narratives about life. Experiencing my/self as struggling to find my way out of these immersive dream states, yet I thankfully remain a lucid dreamer, equanimous in the knowing of the true nature of being and the impermanence of experience.
Years of self work and shifts in consciousness allow for more trust, patience, and compassion in engaging with aspects of trauma and shadow expressing through this body-mind and other body-minds in my experience.

I can see and laugh at the absurdities the conditioned self creates and shadow boxes, while being compassionate and loving of all being and experience. Which in turn cultivates deeper and more encompassing compassion, kindness and understanding for others.

Being a mystic to me means being a student of existence and life, observing the human state with all its psychological dynamics and limitations, living in awe of the mysteries of life, in the joys of moving between consciousness levels, having a playful and creative approach to life, and delighting in the magic unique to embodiment.

Art by Unknown

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For most people the word healing describes a goal-focused process akin to the healing of a cut in our skin: a localized process of hurt, inflammation, scabbing over, creation of new skin and retaining a faint or obvious scar.

Healing to me has a more layered meaning and is absolutely process-oriented not just goal-oriented.

In an interconnected web of existence, a world made up of on quantum particles and their potential for entanglement, as an organism within a complex interdependent ecosystem – healing is not limited to the individual being or organism nor solely dependent upon them. In other words, everything I do to heal myself feeds into the web of our shared existence, our collective consciousness, and affects my relational systems and engagements with All That Is. Equally all that is done by other aspects of the All affects and influences me via the field of consciousness.

Healing in my understanding is a life-long practice – it is not something that can be done in a few months or years (unless you look through a purely reductionist lens at localized physical ailments).

To me it entails being aware of our woundings, early childhood traumas, and what is often overlooked what was missing to support our healthy development. The trauma and developmental impairments afflicted on us through neglect are the hardest to notice and become aware of and yet their are often the most important aspects of our woundings in need of healing.

We need a certain level of psychological knowledge and developmental understanding to attain to our tender and wounded aspects skillfully, while also practicing being gentle, compassionate, and loving with all aspects of self. Gently ending internal wars, divisions, and other self sabotaging or self harming patterns we have learned.

It means questioning all we have learned and belief, researching and learning more about the things we hold strong beliefs on, contemplating and critically reflecting on our life experience and trying to find other ways of perceiving or framing our memories and stories.

In the process of healing we will find aspects, traits, skills, parts of us that we lost along the pathways of trauma, adaptation, and conditioning. We need to recognize, reclaim, nurture, and cultivate these to integrate them into a more whole and integrated version of ourselves.

Our perceptions are changed by this healing process as distortions from trauma lose their hold over our mind, and with new perceptions new layers of reality become visible and call for our awareness in engaging with them. More discernment makes itself available to us. And what once seemed black and white to our conditioned minds and hearts suddenly has multitudes of nuances of grey and colors.

Healing reclaims feeling. We feel more, we learn to engage with our emotions wisely, never suppressing them, nor fueling those which may burn or harm us. Learning about the pitfalls of being identified or lost in our emotions, to respect their power and bring in consciousness and intuition to help us channel and utilize their energy in service of our path and life as a whole.

We become appreciative observers of life within as without as life now reveals more and more of its subtle magic, humor and playfulness to us. Fear loses its grip over our thinking and feeling to regain its function as a navigational signal.

Learning to feel and think without identifying ourselves with emotions and thoughts, becoming more detached and yet more engaged. No longer being hijacked by tsunamis of emotions, blinded by limiting beliefs, we can be fully and sustainably present.

Healing is deeply relational. I concur with the notion that many of our woundings have been created in relationships and necessitate corrective or healing relationships to fully heal, as there is only little that can be done in the absence of relating in terms of healing. Being a mystic I would count all kinds of relationships as potential sources of healing, not just relationships with humans. One of my most powerful healing and corrective relationships is the one I have cultivates with Self (or higher self) and which is my most nurturing, loving, and joyful relationship.

Allowing energy to flow through us with less obstructions, having more spaciousness in choosing what to engage with and what to let pass us by in order to protect our wellbeing and expansive trajectory.

Healing is an ongoing process and journey for multidimensional beings, whose every change to one aspect of inner being affects all other parts and thereby calls for recalibration, adaptation of skills and practices, or cultivation of new skills. It is a premise for true growth, expansion, greatness, and change.

Once we have attended to ourselves enough, an inner knowing lets us know that moment, we will not only desire to share our tools, experiences, and knowledge but also be able to do so with the necessary awareness, discernment, and knowing to minimize potential obstruction or harm to others, while remaining open to keep learning and showing up better.

I feel myself transitioning from primary focus on personal healing to making collective healing my focus. Whatever form that may take or which adventures beckon along that new pathway are still unknown to me. But I hear the call clearly and delight in following it as intuition guides me.

Photography by Unknown

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The various concepts and measurements embraced under the term coherence have become central to fields as diverse as quantum physics, cosmology, physiology and brain and consciousness research. Coherence has several related definitions, all of which are applicable to the study of human physiology, social interactions and global affairs. The most common dictionary definition is the quality of being logically integrated, consistent and intelligible, as in a coherent statement. A related meaning is the logical, orderly and aesthetically consistent relationship among parts. Coherence always implies correlations, connectedness, consistency and efficient energy utilization. Thus, coherence refers to wholeness and global order, where the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

In physics, coherence also is used to describe the coupling and degree of synchronization between different oscillating systems. In some cases, when two or more oscillatory systems operate at the same basic frequency, they can become either phase- or frequency-locked, as occurs between the photons in a laser. This type of coherence is called cross- coherence and is the type of coherence that most scientists think of when they use the term. In physiology, cross-coherence occurs when two or more of the body’s oscillatory systems, such as respiration and heart rhythms, become entrained and operate at the same frequency.

Another aspect of coherence relates to the dynamic rhythms produced by a single oscillatory system. The term autocoherence describes coherent activity within a single system. An ideal example is a system that exhibits sine-wavelike oscillations; the more stable the frequency, amplitude and shape, the higher the degree of coherence. When coherence is increased in a system that is coupled to other systems, it can pull the other systems into increased synchronization and more efficient function.

~ Science of the Heart Vol. 2, HeartMath Institute

Cymatics Photography by Synthestruct.com

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To break or decompose into constituent elements, parts, or small particles.                               To undergo a change in composition.

Disintegration is an intrinsic part of our human life and spiritual journey. We experience it not only during the so-called dark night of the soul but also in cycles of purification, purging and at the onset of major new beginnings. 

Most who experiences it for the first time get caught up in the egoic fear of ego death which can be so intense and paralyzing it keeps us stuck in the storm. Yet whenever we manage to sit with our experience, breathe into it and bring awareness to our sensations, feelings and thoughts we can find moments of calm and replenish our energy. When we practice presence and delve deeper into our experience we eventually tap into other layers of feelings like peace, awe (for the mystery of our life and being), joy (of existence), playfulness and excitement. 

May we all learn to step courageously into the genius and potentiality of the chaotic aliveness of disintegration, expanding further into the vastness of existence as we dance a new aligned composite into being!

Photography: Unknown

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“According to the tenets of Easter Occultism, DARKNESS is the one true actuality, the basis and root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and DARKNESS pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Maya.”
~ Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine

There is a bias in the spiritual communities towards the light born out of a rejection and fear-laced perception of darkness while professing to believe in the oneness of all. Something I have fallen into as well for a while as nagging thoughts and sensations pointed to the logical contradiction and incompleteness of this attitude, inciting me to keep researching and meditating on it. In time it was easy to perceive the avoidance and subconscious patterns of victim mindsets and fear programming at play in this as well as the dualistic and oversimplified christian narratives.

I realized that our understanding of darkness affects our capacity and effectivity in our shadow work. Therefore it was not much of a surprise to me how lacking the shadow work of those who hold on to the above mentioned light bias mostly is. How can you own your shadow aspects when you demonize darkness while aggrandizing light? Who will bear the pain or shame of facing that they are holding aspects of what they reject and deny?

To see darkness through the eyes of the eastern masters is to dive into the mystery and truth of the inter-oneness of Yin & Yang. To know the inherent oneness of light and darkness, to learn to recognize it in all that surrounds us and is within us. 

The nature of existence opens up to the observer who can let go of his attachments to dual perceptions of right/wrong, male/female, etc. Duality, though being a fundamental principle of our Universe, eventually merges into the oneness of consciousness on a higher or existential dimension. The inquiry into and contemplation of oneness are pathways of decolonizing and deconditioning ourselves in order to experience and know reality as it is and not through inherited and distorted filters.

Seeing darkness as a mother principle that birthed our universe of light and matter takes us closer to the creative potentiality of the void and allows us to meet our shadow aspects without fear and find healing through our curiosity, compassion and love for them as we do our self work.

Darkness is another expression of the One, nothing to fear, recoil from or oppose. What sense does opposing make in a universe where resistance creates persistence by feeding our energy to that which we fight?

We can calmly face it, shine our light of awareness on it and pierce through its Maya (illusion) to perceive deeper truths and principles at play in our moment and experience. We might even glimpse the “light of darkness” — its elegance and beauty in the universal play of consciousness as we perceive from higher mind and consciousness.

Artist: Unknown

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One of the oldest offshoots of Hinduism in the world, tantra has seen a renaissance in the last 40 years.

The ironic thing is although tantra has gotten a lot more attention recently, it’s also been greatly misunderstood; many people think tantra is either a sex practice or black magic.

The Meaning

The word tantra comes from the combination of two words: “tattva” and “mantra”.

Tattva is the science of cosmic principles, while mantra is the science of mystic sounds and vibrations.

This means that tantra is the application of cosmic science with the determination to attain a deeper spiritual connection.

The Big Misunderstanding

Unlike many other traditional religious perspectives, tantra takes the entire person into account- their worries, fears, and worldly desires.

Most teachings believe that the pursuit of material pleasures and spiritual aspirations are mutually exclusive; that is, they are in direct opposition to one another.

This gives rise to an inner struggle that can lead to lots of inner turmoil.

In tantra, instead of drawing a line between these two seemingly different impulses, it’s taught that a practitioner should embrace both.

Since tantra means “to weave”, many tantra masters teach life can only provide fulfillment when we follow the pattern designed by nature.

Anger, fear, attachment, and negative emotions tear the threads and causing the fabric to rip.

Tantra seeks to repair that fabric.

To the tantra practitioner, worldly experiences are the same as spiritual experiences- there is no difference.

This simple philosophy has led many to conclude that tantra encourages people to be indiscriminate in their worldly pursuits.

But in reality it’s a philosophy that encourages seeing the divine in everything, no matter how dark or materialistic.

They’re all the same.

Weaving the Fabric

Tantra isn’t a naive philosophy or world view in anyway.

It encompasses everything.

Even in the hardest of situations, there’s still room to notice the deeper meaning.

And ultimately, this leaves lots of room for a person to grow into their own understanding and how they fit into the world.

Tantra is an ancient Sanskrit word, meaning “to weave or to expand.” In tantric sex, we weave and expand our energy with our love partner, for the purpose of opening up to the entire universe. Shaped variously by Hindu and Buddhist traditions, sometimes constricted by Confucianism, Tantra in its widest meaning describes an approach to living that links the physical universe to the cosmic whole.

Sexuality, the most physical and intimate of human interactions, is thus seen a sacred activity, continuously reenacting the original creation of the universe. The First One, separating from Itself to know Itself, embracing Itself to experience Itself.

Tantra proposes that each one of us must undergo within ourselves this total union, a joining of the female and male within us. And when love partners dance the path of Tantra together, the relationship is transformed into a sacred journey to Oneness.

Tantra describes a movement of energy, a welling up within us, of joyous excitation. Unlike forms of meditation that cause us to withdraw from the world of senses, Tantra encourages us to start with the senses, building on their ability to focus us in the present moment.

This energy need not be explicitly sexual; all sensual experience is appreciated as a tool for awakening the energy within us.  In the moment that we shift from overt physical pleasure to an internal joy, to a focus on the internal movement of energy, the subtle nature of our being is exposed and Tantra takes place. Nor does Tantra exclude experiences which are not overtly pleasurable; this same internal shift of focus can take place as we experience outward pain, even death.

Tantra occurs only in the present moment; yesterday’s experience has no relevance.

When I smell a rose, I smell it in this moment, not yesterday or tomorrow, but right now, right here. And if I embrace that moment of smelling the rose as the prelude to a spiritual experience, if I invite the rose-smelling into my total being, aware both of the scent and my total bodily response to the scent, aware of the softness of the petals and the rose energy in my heart, then in that moment I am open to the fullness of who I am. This is Tantra.

And if you and I both smell the rose together, and sharing that experience, dissolve our separateness into an infinite Oneness, then together we experience Tantra.

Tantra brings poetry to lovemaking. When my lover caresses my face and our eyes meet and we breathe together and acknowledge our rising passion, sense our hearts joining and our spirits soaring, the energy rising through the power centers of our bodies, this is Tantra.

Some spiritual paths teach us to deny, to say not this, not that; they teach that who we are is not the body, not the mind, not our actions, not our thoughts. Stripped of what we are not, these paths allow us to see the emergence of who we may be. Tantra takes the seemingly opposite approach and teaches us to say YES! to this, YES! to that. I smell the rose and I am that experience, my lover touches me and I am that experience, there is nothing that I am not, I am everything. All experience can be a doorway to who I am, provided I focus on the experience itself, with the intention of energetic awareness.

To learn and benefit deeply from Tantra, we must practice being still, undistracted. When I am smelling the rose, I smell the rose.

To make love in the Tantra way means to be fully present, to allow each moment to be the entire experience. In Tantric lovemaking, there is no goal, no race toward release or orgasm.  Instead, there is complete attention to each touch, each breath, each movement of energy.

Every moment in our lives can be shaped by Tantra, can be lived in fullness and acceptance.

However, our minds, our thoughts, are constantly darting here and there. We are consumed with busy-ness, at our jobs, at school, taking care of our children, our home, our parents. Birthday parties.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings, funerals. We are bombarded by input from phone, TV, fax, e-mail and junk mail. Bills.

When we finally get away on vacation, often as not we’re busy skiing or snorkeling, eating, shopping, museuming, being transported from place to place.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off! But first, I need a haircut, car wash, new blouse, shoe repair, show to see, and of course, those bills to pay. Our lives are structured around busy-ness, not around living in the moment.

While we are skiing, or snorkeling, or playing tennis, basketball, or golf, the world does disappear, leaving only the action of the sport. This is the attraction of athletics. It is a natural occurrence.

But how do we make time for a momentary tantric relationship with a flower, let alone an hour with our lover? How do we say Yes! to each moment, when the next moment is already here and then gone?

We need to do even more than make time to smell the roses. We need to learn how to let the scent permeate into our belly, deepening our breath and opening our heart to the expansiveness of spiritual experience.

Athletic pursuits require practice and training. They are designed to take place in a zone outside of daily living.  Tantra provides us a way of living daily in that zone.

Tantra is being in the flow. 

Being in the flow of all that is. 

In the present moment. 

Being in the flow,

of all that is in you.

~ Soul8love

Photography: Unknown

The post Tantra appeared first on Venuskind.

I sense for one an undertone of affirming separation (self vs. other) and on the other hand a strong potential to feed the christian martyr programming (selflessness, sacrificing yourself for the other). Both of which to me are unhelpful distortions of this matrix maximizing polarity and duality to the point of losing our inherent oneness out of sight. These undertones might of course be owed to the distortions of my experiences and lifetimes.

I decided to go on differentiating the two approaches to life as Service to Self and Service to SELF.

Whereby “self” stands for the limited, conditioned egoic sense of self and “SELF” represents our eternal undying essence, the divine spark and fractal of the One Source in which we are one with all existence.

This way of differentiating the two paths has more integrity to me as it underscores the Law of One and sidesteps the trap of “othering” and separation or getting lost in the illusion of dualities as contrasts, as well as feeding the unloving conditionings of self abandonment and lack of self love and care.

Furthermore it resonates with a rooting in the foundational principles of Oneness and an understanding that all things having arisen from the One Source and will eventually merge back into the One Source. 

When I chose a Service to SELF path I choose to live a life of caring for myself so I can show up everyday to serve all of existence to the best of my abilities and knowledge. To me that is more encompassing and resonant with a higher frequency of love than what the term Service to Other evokes in my mind, body, heart and spirit.

What do you think, sense and feel when reflecting on these terminologies?

What helps you come alive and shine your light brighter?

Whatever you call it I hope you choose a life of service to more than your egoic self, to your own benefit and the benefit of all!

Photograph: Little boy helps one-legged companion across street, Naples/ Italy, August 1944, by Lt. Wayne Miller

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“The shadow goes by many familiar names: the disowned self, the lower self, the dark twin or brother in bible and myth, the double, repressed self, alter ego, id. When we come face-to-face with our darker side, we use metaphors to describe these shadow encounters: meeting our demons, wrestling with the devil, descent to the underworld, dark night of the soul, midlife crisis.” 
~ Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow

Ending denial and avoidance of our shadow enhances our health and releases a vast reservoir of our energy which had been invested in suppressing the shadow and distracting ourselves from its existence. Knowing our shadow furthermore clears our perception from the distortions and delusions that arose from our painstaking avoidance of what we subconsciously denied. Shadow work is an indispensable tool of integration and emotional maturation.

“When I talk or write about shadow work I mean the practice and work of making the shadow conscious, confronting and getting to know what we unconsciously keep hidden from ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung

Photography: Black Fever by Flemming Leitorp

The post Definition of Shadow Work appeared first on Venuskind.

Titration includes two things:

1
Titration is the act of slowing down your response, be it emotional or physiological, to a VERY VERY slow pace. You become the director of the pacing of your processing, making it extremely slow, in effect opening up more space for the settling and integration of numerous activation/arousal responses and all associated information coming at you at once. Titration is the skill set that involves managing the speed of processing.

2
Titration is the act of taking only a tiny piece of your response to deal with – a VERY tiny piece – and leaving the rest for another time. You become the director of how much you process at one time. Titration is, therefore, also the skill set that involves managing the amount of content to be processed.

..

Titration / Slowing and Portioning tells the nervous system: “You now have all the time you need to process what happened.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the innermost deeply held emotions: “You now have the time to come out one at a time rather than all at once. I have slowed down enough now for you to go through your natural processing.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the states of shock and paralysis and helplessness: “I will no longer shock you with introducing anything – be it good or bad – too soon when you are not ready yet. I won’t stack shock onto shock anymore. I am here to allow you to unravel tiny bit by tiny bit. I am protecting you because I am competently managing the speed of integration. I promise not to let anyone or anything override your internally generated and essential process of re-integration.”

Slowing and Portioning tells the mind: “The emotions are important. Stop and listen and wait. Listen longer. Make space, make room, make time for the emotions. The body is important. Stop and listen and wait. Listen longer. Make space, make room, make time for the body.”

~ The Art of Healing Trauma, see the whole post here 

Photography: Black by Kenji Aoki

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The all is mind; the universe is mental.

II. Correspondence

As above so below: as below, so above.

III. Vibration

Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.

IV. Polarity

Everything is dual; Everything has poles; Everything has its pair of opposites; Like and unlike are the same; Opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; Extremes meet; All truths, are but half-truths; All paradoxes may be reconciled.

V. Gender

Gender is in everything; Everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all planes.

VI. Rhythm

Everything flows, out and in; Everything has its tides; All things rise and fall; The pendulum swing manifests in everything; The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; Rhythm compensates.

VII. Cause & Effect

Every cause has its effect; Every effect has its cause; Everything happens according to law’ Chance is but a name for law not recognized’ There are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.

Text: Kybalion, Illustrations: Unknown

The post The Seven Hermetic Principles – Definition appeared first on Venuskind.

More contemporarily, the concept has referred to a psychic manifestation, or thoughtform, occurring when any group shares a common motivation—being made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of the group. The symbiotic relationship between an egregore and its group has been compared to the more recent, non-occult concepts of the corporation (as a juridical person or legal entity) and the meme.”

~Wikipedia

“There is an occult concept of the “egregore”,” a term derived from the Greek word for “watcher.” It is used for an immaterial entity that “watches” or presides over some earthly affair or collectivity. The important point is that an egregore is augmented by human belief, ritual, and especially by sacrifice. If it is sufficiently nourished by such energies, the egregore can take on a life of its own and appear to be an independen, personal divinity, with a limited power on behalf of its devotees and an unlimited appetite for further devotion. It is then believed to be an immortal god or goddess, an angel, or a daimon.”

~Joscelyn Godwin, The Golden Thread

“…the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligenc of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with the material world in which we live.”

~ Mark Stavish, Egregores

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