Stop Seeking - Start Being

Stop Seeking, Start Being!
Table of Contents
Introduction........................................................................1 Chapter One Walking the Path of Spirit..................................................13 Chapter Two Mental Integrity.................................................................42 Chapter Three Emotional Integrity............................................................72 Chapter Four Physical Integrity.............................................................102 Chapter Five...................................................................144 Spiritual Integrity.............................................................144 Chapter 6........................................................................166 Creatively Intending Your Life........................................166 Chapter 7 Mastery............................................................................190
Integrity: 1. An unimpaired condition: soundness 2. Adherence to a code of moral, ethical, artistic, or other values 3. The quality or state of being complete or undivided: completeness

Introduction What Is Spiritual Integrity and How Do I Get Some? Have you ever made a commitment to yourself and not followed through? Do you wish you had more energy and space to create change in your life? Are you often confused about what your purpose really is, or how to manifest it? Are you ready to step into your innate fullness and integrity? Spiritual Integrity is a path to wholeness. When we live from our own Spiritual Integrity we follow through on our commitments without stress, confusion, or fear. We are constantly inspired and energized to respond to change with eyes wide open. We are clear about who we are and where we are going. Our actions are in alignment with our heart. Each day is a playful co-creation with the Divine. Life is good! Many of us learn what integrity is from the outside in. We take on rules and beliefs that are handed down from our parents and grandparents, church, schools, and communities. Often these rules are not in alignment with who we are, or are completely contradictory. And yet we still try and "be good" and follow what the outside world tells us we should be. Or we rebel, throwing our energy in the opposite direction without really knowing what is true for us. Spiritual Integrity teaches us how to reclaim our truth

from the inside out. At our core, we each have a beautiful and unique essence and purpose. But we cover this shining light of clarity and inspiration with layers and layers of other people's opinions, thoughts, and desires. We live not who we are, but who we believe others want us to be. We ignore our own truth with the hopes that we will be accepted and loved if we are "nice." Or we spend all of our precious energy fighting other people's opinions. Spiritual Integrity is about the willingness to go deeper into yourself to find out who you are, beyond the walls of the known. This book will not tell you what your integrity is. There is no handy list of rules in the appendix that we believe you should live your life by. We are not concerned with what your concept of Spirit is, whether you pray to God, Allah, or the wind. Rediscovering your own Spiritual Integrity is a journey inward to align your mental, emotional, and physical being with your own spirit. As you recover your mental, emotional, and physical integrity, your individual spirit will spontaneously align with its Creator. And it is in these moments of aligned grace that the pure potential of humans is revealed. Spiritual Integrity is a re-membering, a weaving of our scattered parts into a solid whole. We step back into our Spiritual Integrity when our thoughts, actions, and emotions stem from our essence, rather than our strategies and old patterns. Each of us has tasted integrity, those moments when we feel open and aligned with our highest selves. These times are the ones we

look back on and say, "Yes, that was my integrity. That was wholeness. That was my essence shining brightly in the world." Our desire is to share experiences and practices to help you completely rewire your system so you are aligned and whole in all areas of your life. We want to support you in not just seeking those fleeting moments of ecstasy, opening or security, but to find your willingness and faith to reclaim your full Divine self; mind, body, emotions, and energy. Mental integrity comes when you release your judge and stop punishing yourself. You view yourself with compassion instead of criticism. You learn from your mistakes gracefully, and can quiet your minds chatter so you consistently hear your own true voice. Emotional integrity allows you to release old hurts and find forgiveness for yourself and others. You are no longer trapped by the past. Anytime you are triggered by outside events and feel emotional pain you do not blame others, but use your tools to clear and open back to emotional fluidity. Physical integrity arises when your actions align with your heart, not your strategies. Each of us takes on a strategy to help us understand the world around us and make us feels safe. When you understand what your primary strategy is and how you physically act it out in the world you come to a place of choice rather than habit. Choice is the foundation of physical integrity.

Spiritual Integrity is a cellular recognition that you are not your mind, emotions, or body, but the light that illuminates from within. As you move more and more into Spiritual Integrity your mind, emotions, and form become sweetly transparent, so the luminous light of your spirit radiates out. Reading this book will give you a clear, simple pathway to own your Spiritual Integrity. It will not be easy. There are many obstacles and fears between where you are now and who you truly are. Our intent is to break down the process in such a way that you know without a doubt, I can do this! We know without a doubt that you can be free from false integrity, and that you can actually enjoy the process! We know because we have walked this path for many years, both together and separately. We have coached many students to not just think about but actually do the work necessary to reclaim their fullest expression. It is simple, but not easy, to step back into your Spiritual Integrity. When you shift from wanting things to be different to doing the actual work to transform yourself, each day will be inspired. Heather Ashs Journey to Integrity When I moved to the United States in 1984 to go to college I was a shy, determined person. My dreams were to become a large animal veterinarian (that lasted until I realized the pre-requisites I would have to take), to go to the Olympics (I

was an avid horse-back rider in Dressage and Jumping), to be a writer (though I didnt know what I wanted to write.) What I really craved was for people to like me and for there to be no conflict in my world. Though I had strong beliefs I was easily swayed by other peoples opinions of me, often confused about what I wanted, and clutched on to my romantic relationships as a way to give my life meaning. Most of my actions came from unconscious beliefs and habits. Life was hard and filled with struggle. Ten years later I was teaching European shamanism and fire walking at UC Davis, studying with don Miguel Ruiz, and part of an amazing spiritual community. I was just beginning to understand the idea of awareness and reclaiming energy. During this time I worked as an office manager for several different companies, went through many growth-filled but difficult relationships, and moved every year or so. I went on every journey and workshop with don Miguel that I could, and was dedicated to running experiments to break any limitations I had, including cutting off all my hair, moving to Hong Kong with my parents for a summer, and working at a financial investment firm; going into silence for 40 days; and (after my hair grew back!) dying my hair blonde and wearing sassy clothes for a year. Life was good and I knew what I wanted, even if I did not have it yet. Ten years later I supported myself by teaching Toltec Shamanism, and I was the Executive Director of The Toltec Center of Creative Intent, a non-profit religious organization which I help start in 2001. I had trained ten teachers who were

sharing my 6-month intensive program, SpiritWeavers,
throughout the United States. This gave me the space to write my first book, The Four Elements of Change. I was in my first solid, loving, and sexually fulfilling relationship ever. I was living with my partner in a beautiful apartment ten blocks from the Toltec Center, and co-teaching journeys to Teotihuacan, Mexico and Peru with my friend and mentor Gini Gentry. Life was great, and I had manifested most of my dreams, and then some. Right around this time came a huge pivot point in my life around my own integrity. Raven and my relationship had evolved over the years from student teacher to teaching peers, to business partners (Raven helped me publish my book and we created Teo Publishing together), to roommates. We were great friends and support for each other, and both of us where in other primary intimate relationships. One day I realized that I really wanted to be in relationship with Raven. Our paths and outlook on life were so compatible, we had the same dreams and visions, and our feelings for each had kept deepening. Yet we were both in other relationships. My getting clear about my integrity started an amazing spiral of events that completely changed my life. I was scared to be in relationship with Raven because of what our community would think, but I finally followed my heart and jumped in feet first. We did a hand fasting (commitment for a year and a day) ceremony in Peru soon after we got together. The result of my getting into integrity in my relationship world, and being with Raven who is an incredible being of intent

and power, was that I started to clearly see where else I was out of integrity. I could hardly look at it, but I could see that my relationship with the Toltec Center was out of whack. Several people in the community were upset that Raven and I got together, and I started feeling that I was bad and should give the leadership role away, and share it with others in the community. I couldnt quite let go, and no one was really ready to step up, so it created a very messy organization! By the time one of Ravens first teachers came to try and help us sort out the tangles, we were one big dysfunctional family. Her recommendation to me was that I should shut the Toltec Center down and start over. I resisted what she saw and struggled to make things work. This was my baby, I could not just walk away! I couldnt let the teachers and community down! I had to make it work! And I tried. Lots of meetings, lots of emotional processing, lots of tears. I wanted to control what the outcome would be, that somehow we would pull out of this and all become a big happy family again. I learned that I had a hard time being confronted or challenged, and began to see that my stress level around wanting things to be perfect had hugely affected the organization. One day I had enough distance to look at the Toltec Center and see that this incarnation of it did need to die. I met with the Board of Directors and we realized that we would be bankrupt in two months if we didnt shut down the office and release all of our staff. The dissolution of the Toltec Center of Creative Intent in Berkeley was a hard blow for me. And it gave me the freedom to

re-invent myself from the inside out, not based on a role I was playing in community. Raven and I lived in New Mexico for a year, and then we went on the road in our RV for a year, teaching across the United States. During this time I hardly wrote, and kept allowing the old Heather Ash to die. At times it was really challenging to not try and control how others perceived me or know what was next. I learned to trust. I learned to surrender, and to not need to be known or important or special, or to expect people to like me. I learned to simply be. During this time anything that was not completely in alignment with my integrity fell away. I lost some dear friends, hurt some people, and came out the other side much wiser and more centered. For me, the result of letting go of control allowed me to drop beneath my fears to recapture my own integrity. My life looked great from the outside, but on the inside I was driven by a need to be perceived as a good girl, and in anxiety and fear around making the Toltec Center survive financially. As messy and difficult as it was at times, I am so grateful to this time of my life when everything broke open and I took the space to get to know Heather Ash. Life is amazing! Understanding and validating the truth of your own spiritual connection is what walking a path of integrity is about. Spiritual Integrity is about both knowing what your best is and doing it, while understanding that in a world of change and impermanence your best will not always resolve the issue at

hand or count for much at all. But you do it anyway, because it is your joy to do your best. Spiritual Integrity is being present for life in all its manifestations, fully engaged, yet totally un-attached to the outcome of what you are doing. Spiritual Integrity invites you to quit trying to understand what is happening to you and start living what is happening to you. Spiritual Integrity is about fully living life with delight, paying attention to your experiences with curiosity, and engaging with your being from compassion and detachment. When you are in your Spiritual Integrity you move beyond worrying about what others are thinking or if you are good enough into being in connection with the divine at all times. There is no compromise when you are in your integrity. Why would you compromise your connection to Spirit? What would be more important than your connection to God/dess? When you are in Spiritual Integrity the answer is NOTHING! Nothing is more important than maintaining your sacred connection to Spirit. Anytime you put something between your own spirit and the Divine, it is a sin against God/dess. When your connection to the Divine is more important to you than anything else, you are free. Life is simple. Decisions all revolve around whether this thing or that thing will serve you closer to God/dess or will pull your attention away from her. Evaluating everything from this standpoint it is easy to make decisions. It only gets complicated when we start doing

things for others when we know that is not what we need or want to be doing. So, if everyone started living from their integrity and not from outside rules, would society break down and there be chaos? The answer is an emphatic No! A spiritual being in integritys openness and compassion knows no bounds, because true integrity stems from the essence of who you are. Spiritual Integrity is the art of letting go of reward and punishment and experiencing the Divine by BEING the Divine as fully as possible in each moment. When you stop worrying about the past or future and bring all of your energy present now, you can ecstatically walk the path you have chosen to embody God/dess. Yes! When you begin the divine dance towards your own Spiritual Integrity you will find your self-respect and self-love, and it will bubble over towards others. Life will keep getting yummier and yummier! Spiritual Integrity is a path to wholeness. To move into integrity you must first honor where you have created separation internally, and find your willingness to do something different. Then you can discover and reclaim all aspects of your integrity: mental, emotional, physical, energetic, and spiritual. Spiritual Integrity doesnt come from dogma, or rationalization. It comes from practice, from actually walking the path you talk about when you get together with other spiritual folk. The concept of walking the path is not the walking of the path. They are different things. One of them leads to a life of
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purpose and inspiration, and the other is just another clever way to suffer. To walk any path certain things are necessary. Primarily, you have to be aware of your circumstance and willing to tell yourself the truth about them. Living out a fantasy life will not set you free no matter what path you walk. Once you understand your circumstance you have to be willing to put as much energy into changing it as you put into creating it in the first place. This means you have to be willing to take action. Finally, you have to have faith. You have to have trust and be willing to surrender your will up to something greater than your small self. Otherwise you will always make decisions based on your ego-personality, whose view is so filled with limitation it will always lead you into suffering. You would think we would figure that out fairly quickly, but amazingly most people live out their whole lives listening to the chaotic voices in their head and making decisions from there even though it causes them pain and separation from life over and over again! Lets look at the obstacles along your path, and how to cultivate the awareness and willingness to gracefully and lovingly discover your truth. This will form the foundation for reclaiming your mental, emotional, physical, emotional, and spiritual integrity. You can do it!
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Chapter One Walking the Path of Spirit Obstacles, Strategies, and Willingness There are usually only two reasons someone steps onto a spiritual path. The first is a search for meaning, a quest for something more to life than the day-to-day grind our lives put us through. When we realize that the drudgery of living the way we have been taught to live causes us incredible suffering, we begin to listen to our deep sense that there must be something more. The second reason someone steps on to a spiritual path is when an event (usually something pretty dramatic) occurs that shows us something that is so far out of our normal reality that it forces us to question our assumptions about what life is all about. When nothing we have been taught can account for what we have experienced, we seek answers beyond our knowing. It is important to recognize the impetus driving you to look for something different in your life. To really change, you must be clear that it is more important for you to find out the meaning of life than it is to live in your safe and comfortable world. This drive must be very strong, or the obstacles you face ahead will inevitably overwhelm you. The truth is, your life may take a strong turn for the worse if you step on the path to awakening and do not follow through with it to the end. The reason for this is awareness. When you are fast asleep in the dream your socialization has created for you, even though things are not great you are
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only dimly aware of your discomfort. The wool that has been pulled over your eyes by the agreement of everyone around you as to what life is about is a powerful sedative that keeps you from realizing you are suffering. When you step onto a spiritual path the first thing that will happen is you will become aware of all the ways things are not so great. You will see all the ways you are torturing yourself into believing you are a limited being in a limited world just slogging one step at a time through an endless morass of judgment, victimization, boredom, drama, and pain. To arrive at your own inner integrity, you must be willing to see the depth of the pain you are creating for yourself before you have any chance of changing it. This is a fact that we would all like to avoid, and the avoidance of it is how we got ourselves into this predicament to begin with. There is light at the end of the tunnel. You created this reality you find yourself in and you have the power to change it into something beautiful and fulfilling, but you have to want it, you have to REALLY want it. You have spent years creating this lie of your limitations. Your old structure has a lot of energy in it, and it will take a lot of energy to change it. First you need to become aware of the predicament you are in, mapping it very carefully, and then rounding up your energy to undo the limitations you have created. Then you must create a new intent, a new dream of how you want to be in relationship to yourself and the world around you.
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Understanding the ways you constricted your reality will help you to cultivate the awareness, willingness, and yippee! necessary to break out of your structure. So here we go Reality as you experience it is controlled by your perception. Your perception is controlled by your belief system how you were taught the world is supposed to be. This belief system filters almost all of your experiences by filing, interpreting, and limiting your perception to what is previously known about the world. Your belief system is based on your personal history. It holds your perception hostage, and keeps your energy locked up in structures it has created to define and limit your view of reality to what is known and safe. What you learned to believe in the past becomes the filter of the present, narrowing your window of perception by discarding the unknown or distorting it to fit into your comfort zone of the familiar world. How we Create Beliefs Beliefs are created by assigning meaning to events of the past and projecting them onto the present. For a myriad of reasons you assign meaning to events to help you understand the world around you rather that just allowing an event to happen without judging or trying to explain it. You are forced into this pattern of assigning meaning by the nature of your socialization into a society/family/peer group. These different types of socialization groups generally operate on a system of
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punishment and reward (in one form or another) that makes you feel unsafe in your environment. You interpret the information that caused the punishment to occur as bad i.e. unsafe, and come up with strategies to keep from being punished again. You also interpret information that caused you to be rewarded and create strategies to get those cookies again. One of my first memories of being punished (Heather Ash) was when I little girl in school. We were coloring, and the crayons I was using had become blunt. I started to tear the paper so more crayon would be exposed. I remember feeling happy and eager to do my drawing, and mesmerized by the different colors of crayons. Suddenly someone came up (a teacher or assistant), slapped my hand, and yelled at me for ruining the crayons. I was devastated, and felt like my world had just been shattered. I stopped what I was doing, found a crayon that was sharp, and pretended to draw. What came out of this experience was a feeling that if I did something others perceived as wrong, I would get punished. I knew that tearing the paper on the crayons was not wrong. But obviously that did not matter! All that mattered was what others perceived as wrong. So I began to watch very closely to see if I could figure out what other people were thinking of what I was doing. This was one of the early seeds of my pleaser strategy. A child could also take the idea that all that matters is what others peoples perceptions are and take on a controller strategy by holding the belief I always have to be right in everyones eyes. This would snowball into making everyone
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else wrong, or an elaborate system of internal control in order to be right. Another child may have taken this incident and decided adults are unpredictable and cannot be trusted. From this seed thought a whole strategy of isolating would grow. I am only okay when no one notices me. They would become quiet and invisible so they would not get in trouble in the future. Or a child could take this same experience and decide, I really do not want to be here, and I do not want to be feeling this fear and confusion and start to daydream of a better place. When they came back into the room, they might feel, well, I did not like crayons anyway and go take someone elses markers as a way to stay away from the feelings of fear that arose. These strategies become your perceptions framework, and you empower them with the ability to keep you safe. Soon they take on a life of their own, jealously guarding their narrow window of perception and striving to keep you from looking beyond it for fear of being punished or made wrong again. Each person is socialized slightly differently. We all have a different set of life experiences that influences our belief structure, and that structure is what controls our perception. In other words, what we consciously and unconsciously believe about the world is what we experience. We filter out anything that does not fit our belief structure, making our "reality" a selffulfilling pattern that repeats itself regardless of the differences in external stimuli. Let us look at the following example of four friends to explain this further.
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Suppose Cindy grows up in an environment where her father expresses a lot of anger at the family, yells at them and beats them all regularly. Cindy eventually responds by standing up to her father and as a result gets thrown out of the house. Anytime she senses someone being emotional she is highly critical. Joan grows up in a family environment where it is never ok to express any anger, and anyone in the family who does is shamed and told they are being immature and inconsiderate of others. She spends most of her time reading books or going for long walks with her dog, Max. Sherry, on the other hand, was brought up in a family that supported healthy expressions of anger. She was taught that it was okay to express her feelings, and her mother and father modeled this by expressing their irritation without blaming others. Sherry feels okay when her parents are upset with each other, but when they are upset with her she gets scared. Vanessa lived with four different foster families by the time she was fifteen. She spent much of her days fantasizing about finding her real parents. Anytime anyone in her world became angry she would think, My real parents would never be angry at me. These four women are walking down the street together one night and the couple walking in front of them suddenly starts arguing and yelling at one another. All four have a totally different experience of the event. Cindy gets very angry and tries to jump into the couples argument, vehemently defending the
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woman. Joan turns her head away, feels embarrassed and tries to sneak away from the scene. Sherry doesn't understand what the big deal is, they are just arguing, what is everyone else getting so upset about? But when Cindy starts yelling at her, she feels guilty and tries to make everyone feel better. Vanessa doesnt even notice the chaos, because she is dreaming about her parents and thinking about getting her haircut. When she does realize what is going on it startles her, but then she immediately starts wondering where the woman of the couple got her dress. Each woman has a completely different experience of the same event. Different emotions move through them, and they visually and auditorally filter the information presented to them in the form of this couple, to the point that if you listened to their descriptions of the event you wouldn't have any idea they saw the same thing. Cindy, Joan, Sherry, and Vanessa each take their past experiences and project them onto present situations. This forms a personal filter through which they witness any event whose stimulus is a display of anger in any form. Making Sense of Strategies These women are not just reacting to their experience around anger. This story is a snap shot of how we each filter information through our beliefs. We react to situations not from our integrity, but from strategies that we took on as young children to make sense of the world and know how to react to it.
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When you are in Spiritual Integrity you align with your truth and act with love from your own moral code. The moral code you soaked up (actively or passively) from your parents, society, friends, and religious community is often contradictory, outdated, and no longer in your integrity (if it ever was!) Returning to your integrity is a process of clearing out your old agreements of who or how you should be and learning who you want to be. To be truly free you must deconstruct all the false beliefs you are holding and rediscover your truth at this time of your life. Many of us believe that we are in our integrity when, in fact, we are not in alignment with our essence, but with a strategy. Strategies are fixed patterns of energy that we adopt at an early age. Often our strategies become the basis for our sense of security. But this is a false foundation, a place where integrity is confused with feeling safe. As a child, you took on a core strategy because it helped you make sense of the world, and because it worked! As you matured, these strategies become more and more habitual. There are gifts in every strategy, nuggets of wisdom, however; strategies limit our energetic capacity and keep us from growing and maturing into our Spiritual Integrity. They sap our inspiration and lock us in a shell of behaviors that are comfortable and predictable, but are between us and our authenticity. And they are not much fun either! From studying our students and our own lives we have found four main categories of strategies: controllers, pleasers,
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isolators, and distracters. Each of us uses all of them sometimes, and has one which we use as our core strategy that is activated when we are uncomfortable or insecure. The purpose of our core strategy is to keep the world manageable and to create a sense of safety and stability. CONTROLLERS feel safe when they are in control of the world around them or their own internal world. Controllers can be great leaders and visionaries, but often their gift is used to squash uncomfortable situations, to force people to do what they want them to do, and to limit expression. Controllers manage their own and others' emotions through subtle or blatant domination or manipulation. DISTRACTORS keep themselves safe by staying busy and checked out. Instead of feeling their feelings or facing discomfort, distracters spend hours at video games, doing projects/hobbies, talking to friends, anything that can be a distraction! Distracters have a great gift at multi-tasking and are often mentally nimble, but their energy is easily scattered, and they have a very difficult time focusing and creating what they want in the world. ISOLATORS habitually hide when they are scared or near an uncomfortable situation. This hiding may be a physical or emotional retreat. When triggered (or before there can be any trigger), isolators head for the safety of the hills. Isolators often have a very strong connection to spirit and an excellent sense of
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self, but they are split between a yearning to be deeply seen and understood and a desire to be invisible. They habitually constrict their energy and their life force. PLEASERS believe they will only be accepted and safe if they are helping others. Pleasers constantly scan other people's reactions, wanting to make sure that everyone is happy. Their gifts are sensitivity and an aptitude for sacred service, but when they are in their strategy they become hyper-vigilant and outerfocused. The result is they often feel victimized and resentful. Pleasers feel lost when they are not caretaking or acting to satisfy the perceived needs of others. Can you tell which strategy the women used in response to the couple arguing? Cindy wanted to control the situation. She jumped in, defending the woman. This made her feel safe by giving her the illusion that she could resolve the situation. Her father was a controller, and so in order to feel empowered in her difficult situation she became a controller as well. She tried to control her fathers mood and defend her family from him, and went on to try and control everyone elses emotions. When there is any hint of emotional tension or confusion in her world, Cindy feels unsafe. She creates a sense of safety by squashing her own emotions and being highly critical of herself and others. Joan learned that any expression of emotion is not okay, and she interpreted this to mean that expressing yourself in any
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way in the world was dangerous. Her chosen strategy is isolating. When things get difficult in her world she retreats either physically or emotionally. She feels safest when she is alone. She sometimes would like to connect with other people, but she feels awkward and insecure without really knowing why. Sherry is a pleaser. When anyone close to her is upset she feels personally responsible for his or her well-being. Her pleaser strategy actually underlies all of her actions, because she is constantly scanning those around her to make sure they are happy. She would rather change who she is than upset the ones she loves. Vanessas constantly shifting childhood caused her to become a distracter in order to avoid feeling her own helplessness. Her structure causes her to rarely be in the present moment, but to constantly be jumping from task to task or thought to thought. Anytime she feels uncomfortable she avoids her own feelings by looking outside for stimulation. How do you react to stressful situations? Do you take control, suddenly find something else is more important, care take and please others, or isolate yourself? Look for your core strategy, the one you default to when you are surprised or overwhelmed. If you are not sure which is your core strategy, try asking your friends or partner. Often the main people we interact with can easily name our core strategy. These strategies are often blind spots to us, but obvious to the people around us. Again, we each use all of these strategies at different times in our life, but
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there will be one main strategy that maintains a false sense of integrity/self-identification. Strategy Quiz-o-Rama Now is the time for real honesty. The more honest you can be with this exercise the easier it will be for you to start undoing the unconscious actions you take from your strategies. You will be taking this quiz for yourself, but to get the most out of it, pretend that the person you are responding about is a good friend of yours. Find your witness/objectivity and review your life through your best friends eyes. Get as quiet and neutral as you can and then put a number next to the statements. Place a 0 next to the ones that the person never does and a 5 next to the ones they always do, and a number between 1 and 4 for actions they take varying amounts of the time. Section 1: They do things for other people even when their schedule is full and they dont have any time for themselves. ___ They talk about other peoples process and lives all the time. _____ They get resentful when other people do not appreciate what they have done for them. _____
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They get upset with people being selfish. ___ They at least say a partial yes to even the most outrageous requests of other people make of them. ____ The significant people in their lives are very controlling and/or demanding. ____ They always ask what everyone else wants to do when you go out to dinner, movies, or other social activities. ____ Section 2: Their work and/or home environment is very neat and organized. ______ They always have an opinion about almost any topic. _____ They get upset when their preferences are not met. ______ They are always organizing groups, meetings, and other events. _____ People often get irritated with their bossiness. ____ They appear to be very disciplined, and always have a lot of things going on. ______
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They spend a lot of time convincing people to do things their way. _____ Section 3: Their work and/or home environment is messy and disorganized. ____ They are constantly multi-tasking. ____ They start many projects, but finish very few of them. ____ They are always reading books, going to movies, watching TV or going shopping. _____ They are usually living beyond their means. ______ They are very funny and relieve tense situations with humor. ____ Their thoughts jump from topic to topic, and they have a hard time staying focused on anything for long. _____ Section 4: They are often shy around meeting new people. ____
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In social situations they often pull books off of shelves and read them, look out the window, play with dogs or children, or drink a lot and leave early. ______ They love doing things by themselves. Most of the things they would consider relaxing involve getting away from people. ______ They are often grumpy, and they walk around with a frown on their face even when they are not grumpy. ____ They feel superior to others, and often feel misunderstood. _____ They love animals, plants, and nature, often more than they like other people. ______ They usually take off or disappear if other people are displaying a lot of emotion. _______ Add up your scores in each section. The one with the highest amount is your core strategy. Section one is pleaser, section two is controller, section three is a distracter and section four is an isolator. Work with this strategy in all the coming sections. Of course, you will have elements of each in your makeup, but the
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core strategy is the first and most important to unravel! If you have any doubt ask a good friend or family member which one you are, most of the time we can easily identify which strategy someone we are close to is. (Much to our chagrin its pretty transparent to everyone around us what motivates us in the world <grin> It is only our fear that makes us believe we are actually succeeding in hiding it from everyone.) Or just pick one and work with it! Getting Bigger Our unconscious strategies crimp us into a role. It is like wearing clothes and shoes that we outgrew long ago. The shirt binds us under our armpits, the tight pants make it hard to move, and the shoes are killing our feet and making us unsteady. But we pretend we are not suffering. We are determined to make this outfit work, damnit! Yes, taking those old clothes off can feel frightening after years of adaptation! You have learned how to make the best of them. But they are crippling you! Hello! Gary was a classic isolator. He lived by himself and rarely interacted with the outside world. He was quiet, shy, and timid in social situations. When he did stretch himself and try new adventurous things he opened up beautifully, but would often then feel scared and vulnerable afterwards, since he was breaking his structure by being intimate with others. Since he did not see the pattern that having an opening experience was
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followed by vulnerability, he would get overwhelmed and shut himself down again by drinking heavily. When he came out of the binge, he would feel guilty and so isolate even more. While he was a wonderful artist he kept his work to himself, secretly dreaming of bringing his work to the public but not taking any action. Through our advanced apprenticeship program, Gary began to understand the underlying causes of his isolating. He saw that while isolating was familiar, he was cutting off his passion and hiding his true self. We invited him to assist us at a class series, and while he was terrified, he agreed. While he still wanted to stay hidden, he trusted our guidance and went where it was uncomfortable over and over again. Over two years we kept encouraging him to get in front of people and teach as a way to break his fears and smallness. And he started getting inspired about his own artwork. All his time being alone had actually created a strong connection to his own source and a big vision, he had just been afraid to access the power to make himself known in the world. A new idea started percolating: what if he took the studio he had built as his private place to shoot photographs and created a public salon for artwork? And he could then have the first public showing! Over three months he probably tried to pull out of his show three times, and each time we reminded him it did not have to be perfect, it was about getting out into the world, and even if he only had four pieces and only a handful of people showed up, it would be a huge success.
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And it was! Garys first show in ten years opened with eighteen brilliant photographs printed on canvas, about fifty people, and four pieces sold in two hours! He went on to sell several more pieces and bring his photographs to a larger studio. He now plans to expand his work in the United States and internationally over the next four years. He also continued teaching and is now one of our top teachers and coaches. He remarked to me recently, I used to say I hated community, and now I am so thrilled to have people around my house and be part of so many peoples lives. I am definitely not an isolator anymore! His movement from unconscious strategy to conscious purpose came from dedication, faith, and willingness over and over again to be in uncomfortable situations. You can do the same! Beyond Strategies: Discovering Your Purpose In order to return to your Spiritual Integrity, you must move beyond your core strategy. Yet your core strategy is so woven into the fabric of your being that it will take focused action to untangle what is your true integrity and what is a strategy. Often when you begin to unravel your strategy the response is... but how else could I act? What should I do? Instead of living unconsciously from strategies masking as our integrity you can consciously align to a key factor of integrity: A clearly defined purpose.
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Usually there are only two reasons we do not already know our purpose. The first is we have never looked, and the second is that we do not want to know because then we would be responsible for it. We would often rather stay with the discomfort of being afraid, apathetic, and blaming than take responsibility for the discomfort of knowing we are not living our highest path. We are always at choice you see, no one will force you to live out your Purpose, you have to actively choose it before it will be your experience of life. There is no more important task than finding your purpose. Purpose gives your life context. It allows you to see your unconscious beliefs reflected in actions that are clearly not toward your purpose, but away from it or distractions from it. Purpose inspires us to be more than our story, to strive toward giving it all up to God/dess, to make every action a sacred one that brings us more in touch with our divinity. We have to be able to face the truth to live our purpose. The first thing we find (of course) is that for the most part we are not living our purpose, we are living out some story based drama that doesnt serve us, our highest purpose or anything else except the maintaining of the drama. Your purpose is not a trap. The words you use to describe it might change over time, but the feeling of living your life as fully as you can, in alignment with your deepest integrity does not. The description of that feeling might be different every five minutes, but the feeling of being in alignment has a surety of
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knowing that does not waver. You are the gift being given as fully as possible. You yearn to give all of yourself to your purpose, it is agony when you cannot. That agony is the suffering all traditions talk about. It is the uncomfortable knowing that you are out of alignment with your essence. That there must be something more to this than the meaningless high drama you find yourself wrapped up in. There is! Deep down you know this; you know you were meant to live a Divine life full of meaning, peace, and joy. A great step in moving toward that is to find your purpose and devote your life to living it. After all, what else is there to do? Are all the ways you are wasting your time right now really that important? Important enough that when you die you will be happy with how you spent your time? Knowing your purpose is the anchor that keeps you on the path of living the divine more fully in each moment. Purpose gives your energy a focus, it gives you inspiration, and it pulls you forward when things get difficult. The art of believing in something without attachment gives form to energy, and allows your creations to move you more toward who you want to be in each moment, rather that creating things that move you deeper and deeper into the suffering of believing in your limitations. Purpose helps you move from unwillingness to Willingness, from despair to Joy, from senseless activity to Sacred Action. By bringing your purpose to bear on all the decisions you make in your life things become uncomplicated. It
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either serves your purpose or it does not. When you believe in your purpose there is no confusion about what to do next. You just focus on your Purpose and let the next action arise from that. Purpose is another way of saying faith. It is having faith that indeed this life does have meaning. Your purpose will never be what you think it is, it will always be what you feel it is. Purpose is not a detailed plan taking you from point A to B. It is a feeling state that brings you fulfillment and directs your actions toward your highest expression in each moment. Living your purpose is being your purpose in each moment. The goal is the continual manifestation of more of you in each moment. Come out and play! We want to see more of your true self, more of your incredible gift. Why not? Purpose is giving your gift as fully as you can in each moment. It is giving your presence in service to the Divine. It is being conscious and aware of the god force flowing through and around you in every moment. Knowing thyself, knowing yourself as Spirit incarnate, as the One, whole and complete in each moment. Purpose is the understanding that while we will never intellectually grasp the fullness of this life we can be it by living our highest ideal in each moment. Purpose is the deep knowing that life is a mysterious and magical pathway back to our essence. Giving our fullest gifts is the outward reflection of that inner essence we find at the core of our being, beneath the personality and mind play of the illusion we have created.
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Dedication to purpose is the warriors pledge to themselves that they will strive to honor their own integrity by being impeccable with their words, thoughts, and actions. Cultivating Your Willingness With purpose comes willingness. Willingness to deal with the discomfort of life, understanding that discomfort is just that, it doesnt mean you are doing anything wrong, it is simply what is happening now (or not), as you live your purpose. We are so narrowed by our core strategy that we often see no other options. And as we start to challenge the strategy, we feel insecure and out of control. This is where willingness comes in. Instead of becoming overwhelmed and confused, you can learn to consciously cultivate your desire to live your Spiritual Integrity, beyond strategies. Your willingness will be the fuel as you untangle your strategies and learn new channels of behavior. By cultivating conscious willingness, you will stay steady through the uncomfortable places as you unravel your authentic integrity from your strategies. Willingness does not mean you have it all figured out or you know what comes next. Willingness is a state of opening to anything that arises and staying present with whatever your mind, emotions, and body is doing. Willingness has to begin somewhere, and that somewhere is the truth. Not where you wish you were or think you should be, but the truth of where you are really at in this
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moment. You need to be truly willing to tell yourself the truth about what you want to transform in your life. If you are like most people, there is a part of you that doesnt want to change, that is invested in the strategy you have created, and that believes fully that your strategy will keep you safe. To return to your Spiritual Integrity means you must be willing to be uncomfortable, to step out into unknown territory. The desire to do this cannot be faked. You need to know to the depths of your being that it does not serve you to hold to these limitations, even though you do not yet know how to live without them. Our willingness to change is in direct proportion to our willingness to experience discomfort. It is the search for the illusory state of being comfortable all the time in life that keeps us from truly exposing our unconscious limitations and changing them. Our search for comfort is often completely a lie. We tell ourselves that we feel more comfortable when we act from one of our strategies, but the truth is we are causing ourselves incredible discomfort by being out of integrity from acting from the strategy. The strategies are usually just a deflection into a type of discomfort that we are familiar with, rather than a type of discomfort that is unknown. The discomfort we feel in breaking our unconscious patterns is no greater in any way than the discomfort we experience from playing them our in the world, we have just gotten familiar with the former and placed a matrix of fear around
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the latter. The real difference is that one type of discomfort keeps cycling an endless wheel of suffering and the other type of discomfort breaks the pattern of suffering and opens you up to new possibilities. This creates the space for you to get into your own integrity and not suffer from the actions you are taking. Ravens journey of moving through his pleaser strategy exemplifies working with discomfort. In the beginning when I was enmeshed in the strategy I felt like I had to say yes to anyone who asked me to do something for them. Not only that, I had to figure out what other people needed and if at all possible provide it for them before they even asked for it. What this was like internally was a constant state of low anxiety. My internal dialogue was always talking to me about what I needed to do for other people so they would accept me, love me, give me affection and approval. This low state of anxiety ran inside of me most of my life, causing me incredible discomfort all the time. Much of my internal dialogue revolved around what other people might need of me and how in the world was I going to provide it for them, how was I going to do all of these things that everyone wanted me to do so that I could feel safe, loved, and so people respected and valued me. With this internal dialogue came a constant stream of ideas around not having value, how I needed other people to validate me or I was nothing. I always felt a sense of low self worth unless someone was acknowledging me for something I had done for them.
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Of course, many, many times I would do something for someone and they wouldnt acknowledge it (or it just was not important to them) and I wouldnt get any validation for doing it. And many times I did get validation. But if I didnt get the validation I would tell myself that I just hadnt done a good enough job, that I hadnt answered their problem, or hadnt given them what they needed to a full enough extent, which is why I didnt get the validation. So I would try harder and create more anxiety and worry about what I could do to please people rather than noticing some people validated me whether I pleased them or not, and other people didnt validate me no matter what I did for them. When I began to understand this and began working to break my pattern of saying yes to everyone I took on certain commitments at different times around telling people no. Sometimes I went for weeks at a time without doing anything for anyone else. The discomfort I felt during those times was really high. My judge was constantly telling me you are being self-absorbed, selfish, you are being mean, you arent taking responsibility for things There was a big internal discomfort around breaking the pattern, but looking back I can see that this discomfort was really minor in comparison to the constant state of anxiety I had around pleasing people. When I stayed with the discomfort and held myself through it, I finally broke the habitual pattern inside myself of saying yes no matter what, and came back to a place of being able to say yes and mean it. I shifted into being able to do
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things for people because I truly felt like doing it for. I no longer had any regard for the outcome or a need for them to tell me I had done a good job. What opened up for me was a place of incredible Divine service. When I do have the spaciousness to say yes to people now Im saying that yes from a place of knowing it serves my purpose and my connection to Spirit. Because of this when I go into service I can bring all of myself, all my awareness, presence, and power into what I am doing, because I am not concerned with what their response is going to be. I am not constantly watching the people around me to see if they approve of what I am doing or not. Today I make my decisions from a place of my own integrity, and that is a place of incredible freedom and lightness. It is a place of opening into each action that I do for another person as a service to God/dess. So my yes is an incredible yes that serves me and the other person into God/dess the most that I possibly can in each moment. When I say yes to something I put all of myself behind it, and I feel totally fulfilled by taking the action, regardless of the outcome. This is liberation! What it took to get there was my willingness to go into a lot of discomfort in the form of my internal judgment and holding myself through the disappointment of anyone I had unconsciously set up this care-taker dynamic with. The unconsciousness pattern of saying yes to everything anyone wanted had to be consciously broken. The pattern created anxiety and limitation in my ability to respond to other people,
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caused me incredible suffering, and made me in-effective in the world because my energy was scattered everywhere, to everyone else in my life. The pain I felt for a year of two in completely breaking this pattern was nothing compared to the pain I felt from playing it over and over, year after year, in a spiral of despair and lack of fulfillment from life. So our willingness to step out of the known and into the unknown, to take new actions that we havent taken before often comes from the acknowledgment of the amount of suffering we are causing ourselves by playing these strategies out over and over. It is the coming into awareness of the anxiety that was created inside of me by worrying about whether I was doing enough for others for them to like me that became the stimulus for me to change. Bringing awareness to the places that you feel out of integrity is the greatest motivator for having the willingness to change them. This book will inspire you to become bigger than your strategies. From a place of purpose you will learn to explore your inner structure, understand where you are in your own journey of mental, emotional, and physical integrity, and become fluid in untangling any limitations to letting your Spiritual Integrity shine through. At the end of each chapter we share specific tools and practices. We call these explorations to support you in entering this work with a light heart and a big does of curiosity. You are welcome to read through the entire book first and then look at
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the explorations, or read the explorations and do them one at a time. Make them work for you! INITIAL EXPLORATION Strategies and Willingness Spend the next few days witnessing your strategy. How does it play out in your life? How does it affect you? Play with being inspired by the brilliance of your strategy, not overwhelmed by its strength. Notice how it served you in the past, knowing as you gain awareness of the ins and outs of your strategy, you are gaining power over it. Ask yourself: Are you willing to learn to live beyond your strategy? Are you willing to break a long chain of ancestral patterning? Are you willing to take the risk to do what needs to be done so you can live from your integrity in every aspect of your life? What do you need to do to cultivate more willingness?
Finding Your Purpose Two ways to find your Purpose:
1. Do a writing exercise, asking the question What drives

me, what is my passion? What am I passionate about? After doing the exercise, cross off everything that
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involves getting something from another person. Next cross off anything that is a reflection of what others think about you. What is left will be your purpose. If nothing is left then go back and look at what feeling state inside yourself that you are trying to create with your actions toward others. That will be the lead in to your purpose. This might be a word, a sentence, or a paragraph that embodies your passion. 2. Do a 3-5 day Vision Quest. No food, out in the wilderness, alone (or in an empty room with no distractions if you cant arrange wilderness). This is the old-school way. Pretty much guaranteed you will know what is important to you and what is garbage by the time you come out. See Tom Browns book below for more information on how to set it up.
Resources for Finding Your Purpose If you need more resources try the methods in Tom Browns Vision Quest, David Deidas Way of the Superior Man, James Redfields Celestine Prophecy or Lance Secretans Inspire.
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Chapter Two Mental Integrity Making Your Mind Your Ally Mental integrity comes when you release your judge and stop punishing yourself. You view yourself with compassion instead of criticism. You learn from your mistakes gracefully, and can quiet your minds chatter so you consistently hear your own true voice. For most of us, the mind is not a helpful ally on our journey, but more like an obnoxious tyrant that taunts us and constantly tells us where we are falling short. While our minds are designed to help us move through the material world, to figure out how to do things, and to look after the survival of our physical bodies, most of us struggle with various types of mind torture: comparison, judgment, victimization, projection, fear, and disaster thinking. A mind left to its own rule is rarely in the present moment. If you watch your mind for a few hours you will see that your thoughts jump from past to future, crazily trying to keep you safe by pointing out all the bad things that have happened, or telling you all the bad things that could happen in the future. Or you spend your time fantasizing about how it was or how it might be, without opening your eyes to what is in the now!
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Your mind has taken center stage, telling you that your strategy is your integrity, and that what it perceives day to day is the whole truth. Not so! Our fundamental mistake is that we identify ourselves with the mind, rather with our boundless essence. We have given over the control of our perception of reality to a tool that is only one tool in a vast toolbox of consciousness. We then called this tool me and left behind our vastness. This limits our existence to a narrow band of vision, and buries the light of our essential nature. To access your Mental Integrity, you must completely rewire they way you relate to your mind. The mind out of integrity runs you. The mind in integrity is a tool cradled by the warm hands of your awareness. Mental Integrity means knowing to your core, not just with your mind, but with all aspects of yourself, that you are not what you think you are! Your vastness cannot be contained by thinking. Creating space between your little mind and your spiritual essence is the first step towards reclaiming your integrity. In many traditions this is called cultivating your Witness, finding the still small voice, or detachment. To systematically rewire your mind to support you on your journey to Mental Integrity, it helps to have a model to map where you have been, where you are going, and how to get there.
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The Spiral Path Toltec teacher Gini Gentry first introduced us to the concept of the spiral. She was using the idea of a spiral to talk about how when we are learning to speak our truth we go through different periods where different things are true. For us it became a model for describing all the different aspects of our path toward personal awakening, including our path to mental integrity. The Spiral is the best visual form and concept we have run across as a model for incorporating this idea of constant change into how we conceptualize our spiritual path, our path toward integrity and awakening to our true potential and essence. The Spiral gives us a beginning point and an endpoint. The loops of the spiral help us see that we are involved in a process, and that process has stages (designated by the loops of the spiral) that are both independent and at the same time connected to the overall path. By taking this to heart we can build a roadmap to achieving full inner and outer integrity. This spiral path can also be mapped onto any individual process we are moving through, whether it is our coming into integrity with our mind or emotions, learning to speak our truth, dealing with past trauma, or how we work through our issues around power, money, and control. As with all models it is a picture of the truth, not truth itself. As such it has limitations. A model cannot describe every
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individual situation, or take into account crossovers between different issues. It can give us a powerful place to start, and a way to place what others have learned into an easy to understand format to use as a guide for our own development. Walking the Spiral The fundamental nature of this place we find ourselves in, this world of form and spirit, is one of change. Change is the one constant we can point to. Everything is in flux and change all the time throughout our lives. Much of the fearful illusion we lead our lives in is based on the unfortunate idea that we can somehow find a place of stasis in our lives where nothing is changing, everything is stable and secure and safe. Such a place does not exist! The function of this reality is change, it is simply not part of its design to stay motionless and static. It is a dynamic, mysterious, and wonderful place, and it is ALWAYS changing. Once we grasp the nature of change the next thing we need to understand about the spiral is that different things are true at different points along it. Our point of perception changes as we move along the spiral, thus our whole frame of reference changes as well, making things true that before were false and vice versus. Truth is a verb! It is completely based on your frame of reference as to whether things are true or not true. Lets look at perception in terms of color for a moment. If each loop is a different color then the world is totally flavored by that color while you are in that part of the loop.
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So when you are in red the whole world is red. The world is not green or blue, because the framework of green is not available yet, so you cant take it into account in your perceptions. Thus the actions to move through the red part of the spiral are different actions than you will need to move through the green part of the spiral. The tools you will use and the actual things you will need to do to continue your growth will change over time. You must have the fluidity to change with the situation or you will inevitably get stuck in dogma and tradition for the sake of tradition instead of as an honoring of what was done in the past. Working within this spiral model fosters internal flexibility and compassion towards others and self. No one is better or worse, we are all simply at different parts of the spiral of change and transformation. are on the spiral. The spiral of the mind starts with complete unconscious identification with the mind and our strategies, and moves through three loops: honesty, acceptance, and clarity, before we wake up as pure presence, a state of no-mind, where our mind dissolves into the ocean of pure awareness. Mental integrity is not about being at the end the spiral, but honoring where we are in the spiral and doing our work to continue to move more and more towards pure presence. When we show up with ourselves where we are at in our process, and Another gift of the spiral is increased knowing about where to apply your energy, based on where you
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can witness with love the various stages of our own evolution, we are in our integrity.
The Spiral of the Mind At the beginning point of the spiral of the mind we believe everything our mind tells us. We unconsciously live out our strategies and beliefs, and do not realize that we are filtering everything we perceive. We absolutely believe we are our mind. So how exactly does the mind run this show, anyway? A part of your mind is memory, a part is awareness of your body, a part runs the body, one half creates things, and the other half catalogues things There is all this stuff going on, yet there is something we identify with as me, as this is who I am. That part of your mind is what the Toltec call the internal dialogue. Psychology calls it your ego, yogis call it your little self, we call it your Center of Rational Attachment Problem (CRAP for short). Just kidding! Lets settle on internal dialogue, as this describes in a real sense what exactly is going on. This internal dialogue maintains your sense of I or self. It is you constantly talking to yourself, telling yourself who you are (stupid, fat, not enough, too muchthats just brilliant isnt it?), what is happening (as if you didnt already know!), and what might happen (most of which it is wrong about). In short, it is a non-stop, mostly cyclic loop of thoughts that you decided you
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needed to do at some point to fit in with all of these lunatics you were surrounded by. We create our strategies early on by watching and responding to the people around us. The problem is our mind cleverly starts repeating all the things we need to remember to do in order to be okay. I need to be perfect. I should be quiet. I must stay busy. I have to fight to be safe. Over time we start thinking that the repetitive thoughts are who we really are, not just a momentary strategy. We became attached to what it is saying, forgetting that the mind is just a memory device, not something that could actually perceive the world directly. Thats right, most people have deluded themselves into thinking they are actually a bunch of post-it notes! What we miss is that our internal dialogue is always filtering everything through our strategies. Because of this, it is not only several steps behind what is happening in this moment, it is seldom accurate! Most people do not realize that when spiritual teachers talk about staying present, being in the now, enjoying this moment, they are not talking about your mind doing that. Your mind cant be in this moment completely, because that is not part of its function! The minds function is to interpret data that has come in from your senses and present it to you in packets of information, packets that have been separated out from the whole, packets that it has deemed worthy of your attention. By the time the data has come in it has been sorted, rewritten to be something
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presentable as language, then spoken back to you as what is happening, the event your mind is yakking to you about has long since passed. It is now a memory, not what is happening in this new moment! The best the mind can hope to do is to record something where you were actually present to play back to you later. This is a very important thing to understand, because your mind only has a concept of the endpoint of the spiral, it has no direct experience of it. Since the mind works to create separation, it cannot grasp the wholeness of your being, it cannot directly experience Spirit. Mental Awareness The first loop of the spiral of the mind moves us into the realm of awareness. Instead of believing our thoughts and strategies, we begin to question them. This questioning allows us to begin telling ourselves the truth. In this part of the process we begin to realize that we are not in control of our thoughts. This dawning of awareness is the key to mental integrity. With awareness you will learn to become conscious of what is happening within and around you. You will feel your body, be aware of your environment and what is happening in it, and be paying close attention to what your mind is trying to get you to do.
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The part of you capable of doing all of that
simultaneously is what comes present. it is not your mind, it is the seed of your consciousness, pure awareness. But before we can get there we need to know more about this internal dialogue we have placed between us and the direct experience of reality. We need to understand that even though it is a complete illusion, it is also a powerful force in our lives, for we have given it the power to filter and distort everything we perceive about the nature of our existence. In its natural state the mind really does function like a wave. When it is needed it arises from the ocean, exists for a while as it performs its function, then subsides back into the ocean. Our identification with the mind distorts this function. We artificially try and keep the mind in existence at all times and mistakenly tie our survival to the wave. We feel our existence is threatened any time that identification is challenged, or any time there are gaps in the constant flow of thoughts and identifications we create by associating who we are with the mind. Our beliefs form the foundation for the minds artificial existence. (AE for short) Beliefs are the identification and attachment we have linked to the concept of I as something distinct and separate from the One. The process we are involved in is the removal of the identification with those beliefs, bringing us to a place of simple choice in the moment. From a very young age we are taught the first lie on which all other lies are based: that there is something fundamentally wrong with us that keeps people from accepting
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us fully or loving us completely. We are taught that we must DO something in order to get affection, love, and acceptance from those around us. We are taught that we are not whole inside of ourselves, and that we need to get approval from others to be a complete and whole being. This lie in whatever form it takes for you is the basis for all the subsequent stories we tell ourselves about how we have to be in the world. It is the foundation of all the strategies we come up with to limit ourselves, to conform to what other people think and feel about us, and to modify our behavior to be more acceptable to others. The only way to change these behaviors and stop punishing ourselves is to become aware of what we are actually saying to ourselves internally. There is no way you can change a limiting behavior if you cant see that you are doing it. There is no way to change the stories you are telling yourself without first really listening to the stories. You cant get out of hell unless you realize that you are burning and it is painful. Otherwise you dont have any motivation to get out. You stay unconscious of the pain and suffering and just plod along until everything suddenly ends with your death, then you look back and think what the hell was I thinking? Why did I do that to myself when I could have been living in Joy and Presence with all the incredible gifts this life had to offer? The blessing is that we all have the opportunity to wake up before our death. It is never too late; all we need is the desire
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to really see the truth, and we are on our way to creating change and transformation. This loop of the spiral is challenging, because it asks us to face the suffering our mind is causing us with its judgments and fear. We often spend our lives pretending that we are loving, kind, and happy to the outside world, while we are hateful, mean, and depressed on the inside. We must be willing to really listen and observe what we have created in our internal world. It takes great strength and determination to admit to what we have created. Without this first step, nothing else is really possible. Sometimes it takes glimpsing ourselves through the eyes of another to be willing to be honest with ourselves. We may return from this glimpse unsure about what to do next, but the peek beneath our mental chaos becomes our inspiration. Raven and the Experience Unconditional Love When I (Raven) met my first teacher I was incredibly aloof and cynical about life. I had sunk to the depths of hell internally, bored and disillusioned with life, everything seemed empty to me and I equated that feeling with my self worth. I had none as far as I was concerned and I hated the feeling of that. In the world I would never admit any of this. I was cheerful and easy going unless challenged by something. Then I worked to force people to acknowledge what I had done for them, yet when they did in the next breath I would negate that it
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was any big deal or that what I had done had any value. I hunted for approval from others so I could feel some sense of worth, yet I unconsciously chose to hang out with people who almost never approved of me. After a very few encounters my teacher had a conversation with me that changed my life forever. After walking me through what I described above he said, Raven, I know you think you dont have any self worth. I want you to know that I do, that I believe 100% in your intrinsic value, in who you really are, and I want you to trust in my belief when those voices in your head are telling you that you are worthless. He said it all with such tenderness, with so much openness and at the same time such a fierceness of energy and intent it truly blew me away. For a moment I experienced myself as he was experiencing me in that moment, and I saw the illusion of who I thought I was so clearly. I was not the limitation of the form I had created. I was the pure consciousness he talked about as the endpoint. And that consciousness had infinite value and that value had nothing to do with anything I had ever done or thought or would ever do or think. It was eternally, infinitely whole and would never be affected by what I thought of myself. The experience was both incredibly humbling and loving at the same time. I knew I mattered to my teacher and to consciousness in an indescribable and paradoxical way that my mind would never understand. This was my first glimpse at what unconditional love might be like. Love not as an attachment of the mind, love not as
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an attachment to an emotion, but love as pure being, as divinity, with no distinction between the lover and the beloved. From this opening, I was inspired and supported to continue to be honest with my teacher about what my mind was actually saying, instead of pretending everything was okay. This cleared the way for the next two loops in the spiral, acceptance and clarity. Acceptance of Mind The second loop on the spiral of the mind revolves around acceptance. We have to re-train ourselves to stop judging our mind, but to accept the ebb and flow of thinking. We begin to shift our attention away from the thoughts themselves, and into witnessing what arises without attachment. We have to approach telling ourselves the truth from a place of accepting what is without judgment. This takes practice! The initial tendency is always to start seeing what we have done and go Yuck, this is so disgusting, how could I have done this or Oh my god, there are so many places Im out of integrity, how will I ever clean this up? or I cant believe how screwed up this society is/my parents are/ my teachers were. Reigning in this kind of judgment is fundamental to being able to continue with the process. Acceptance allows us to find the place inside of ourselves that can forgive what we have done and what has been done to us. The truth is that we had little or no chance of
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not creating these limiting structures, since they are part of our earliest socialization. We didnt have the strength as children to resist them, and before now we never had the awareness to even notice they had been created. If we start down the road of using our truth telling to punish ourselves we immediately fall back into the trap of the limiting beliefs again. The judgment/punishment is built in to the structure of those lies-- it is designed to keep you from challenging them, and it is the first thing that will arise when you start telling yourself the truth. Start by being kind to yourself, accepting where you are with no blame or need to punish. This will move you into the second loop of the spiral of the mind. There is often a lot of confusion around the concept of acceptance. Acceptance is not a passive state of hopelessness about your situation. It is not a place of giving up on yourself. It is also not some la-de-da state of everything is light and love and great just the way it is. Acceptance is an active state of honestly looking at what is going on, taking responsibility for it without judgment, and working to find a place of openness and inspiration to explore something different than what you have created in the past. A great experience about acceptance happened to me (Raven) at a circle of Fire celebration in 2001. Toward the end of this weeklong event with Don Miguel Ruiz we did a beautiful ceremony, a spiral dance orchestrated by Heather Ash. During this ceremony I came face to face with everyone there (some
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200 people) after having just had an incredible heart opening experience during the earlier part of the ceremony. For the first ten minutes of the dance I was in a wonderful, joyous state. My mind was very quiet and my heart was wide open. I was so present that I very clearly heard the words my mind said to itself as I passed a woman in the dance. She was dressed in white, had crystal jewelry, and a starry-eyed blissed out expression on her face. RELIGIOUS FANATIC! my mind blurted into the silence and beauty of the moment. It was so loud it actually startled me, as if someone else had said it! Once I realized it was my judge saying its piece, I laughed out loud. It was a moment of great freedom, to witness the mind so clearly, yet totally nonattached to what it was saying. I realized that normally it talked like that all the time, but in the background where it didnt register consciously. Usually I would have unconsciously listened to it and it would have controlled the actions I took next. I would have unconsciously steered clear of the woman, feeling uncomfortable without knowing why. But here it was, right out in the open, and because of that I had choice in how to respond to it! I chose to laugh at it, come back present with the ceremony, and following it I hunted down the woman with crystals and gave her a big, unexplained hug. Someone who was at the beginning point of the spiral of mind would have completely believed the thought religious fanatic and probably lost all sense of happiness. Perhaps they would have begun to build on this small voice and go into fear
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about being part of a cult or being viewed negatively by others. A sweet connecting experience would become a blur of judgment and need to escape! There core strategy would then dictate what they did next: isolate, distract, control, or try to please and pretend like everything was okay, when inside they felt terror or revulsion. As we continue to move on the spiral, we learn to become aware of what the mind is telling us. In the early stages of awareness we see the thought religious fanatic and often we have an emotional response to it; feeling frustrated, why wont my mind just shut up, cant it see that we are in the middle of a beautiful ceremony? or guilty I cant believe I was thinking that! Everyone else is having a great time and I am thinking! And so we invalidate the beauty of our experience because we give the judging thoughts so much attention. As we move through the second loop toward acceptance, we are aware of what the mind is saying and we are able to witness it from a curious or neutral space. And just as Raven did, we then can begin to choose how we want to act in the next moment of our awareness. As awareness and acceptance build, clarity is the natural progression of the mind. Mental Clarity In the third loop we build on our newfound acceptance and begin touching our own clarity. When we accept the busyness and chatter of the mind with love, we create space.
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From this spaciousness naturally arises a greater vision of our selves and our world. On the other side of telling the truth and total acceptance is clarity. Clarity is the ability to watch what is going through your mind without attaching any meaning to it. It is seeing clearly the thoughts and emotions that arise within you and realizing that they are not who you really are. Who you really are is the one watching the thoughts and emotions arise. This place of impartially observing or witnessing what is happening internally and externally is the goal of many spiritual traditions. It is sometimes called detachment or being the Witness. What is important to understand is that once again this is not a passive state. Many people fear clarity because they believe that if they were to detach completely from their life it would be boring and without meaning. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Clarity is not some flat disassociated state, it is a state of completely engaging in the world. You are not attached to anything and this frees you to be completely in the NOW, enjoying life in all its richness to fullest extent a human can realize! Clarity is not necessarily a state of having no thoughts. The thoughts still arise, and you acknowledge them fully, but you do not attend to them. By acknowledging their existence with acceptance you keep them from running off in the background and subsequently controlling your behaviors. When you are clear, these thoughts are up in the foreground where you can look at them and make a conscious decision about whether or
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not to believe them/act on them. What you are learning to control is your unconscious attendance to your thoughts. When you attend to a thought you are investing energy in it and allowing it to hook your attention. As a result you energize it and start living unconsciously from what it is saying, whether it is true or not. Imagine that you have an old friend that you have quit associating with because they are constantly negative about life and it drains your energy to associate with them. The feeling of clarity is like seeing that old friend passing by you on the street, you wave and say hello to them, but you dont invite them over for tea! You acknowledge their existence in a friendly sort of way, but you dont engage them in long conversations about how they are doing because you know that it will drain you and leave you feeling negative about life in general. This is how you can treat the old patterns of thought that are limiting you. This attitude will allow you to continue to gather important data about what your mind is saying. You need that data so you can develop a strategy to counter what your mind is saying, so you can create an action plan that will support you in being able to make a conscious choice about how to live your life (More on that in the next section on physical integrity) When you live from clarity you always have choice. You are free to respond to every situation from your center and integrity. You are no longer obligated to play out some rote behavior that limits the full expression of the brilliance, light and beauty that is YOU! And you can laugh at your mind, or pet it like a small dog and comfort it, or simply stop attending to it. From
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choice we are able to step into the present moment fully, beyond thoughts. One of our apprentices, who was trained by her family and in her profession to highly value her intellect, is recently learning the incredible power of moving beyond thinking to clarity. This shift happened as a result of Linda listening to a new part of her being. Instead taking the job that made rational sense, she decided to pull her attention away from her logical thinking (all the reasons why she should settle and take the job and how dumb she was being for not) and follow her intuition. She waited, and a month later found the perfect job, much better suited to her needs. Then, despite a lot of chaos happening in her life, Linda followed through on a big commitment to herself, instead of listening to her pleaser voice tell her she should be taking care of other people and not do anything for her. As a result of her telling herself the truth: My mind wants me to please everyone else right now, but I need to take care of myself. That is the voice of my strategy, not my integrity, and accepting the fear and doubt of her mind, she started to drop to a new level of mental integrity. By bringing her attention to presence and breathing through her minds chatter, her being started to trust her in a new way. And for the first time a deeper voice of her soul started to speak to her early in the mornings. I feel like a wise part of myself has come forward, a part of me that sees everything so clearly. There is no background noise or
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doubt, simply a quiet voice that calmly shares insights and actions to take. Through her practice of telling herself the truth and accepting herself completely, Linda is now tapping into her own clarity. Now, if Linda tries to clench around this clarity, it is likely she will end up back at the first loop of the spiral of the mind, needing to tell herself the truth that she is attached to a particular state and needs to move towards acceptance. If she stays open to the ebb and flow of her thoughts and fears, the clarity will continue to visit. Over time we practice witnessing our minds without attachment or need for it to be any different, as we stop feeding it with our impatience or comparison or judgment or victimization, clarity will stabilize in our beings for longer and longer periods. We will become more and more present with What Is. And we pave the way for tapping into our God/dess-mind. Pure Experience The endpoint of the spiral of the mind is a place of pure experience. Here the mind dissolves to experience (not think about!) the Now, unfiltered and connected to all life. The mind is absorbed in pure presence, and then arises when it is needed for a specific task, before dissolving once again into presence, or experiencing everything exactly as it is with all of your being.
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When we drop our mind and open to being present, all of our senses and aspects align. Being present is the single most important factor in leading a life of joy, peace and fulfillment. Without presence the experience is lost, and only the recording of the experience remains. Presence has nothing to do with the words, thoughts, and concepts used to describe what is happening. It IS what is happening, without filters or interpretations. Every thought you have ever had, every word you have ever spoken to yourself or another is a description of something, not the thing itself. When we regain our choice, we have the fluidity to respond to the life force moving around us, without attaching meaning assignments to the movement. We stop taking anything personally, and stay present with the flow of energy moving through and around us at all times. This is the state of true joy. It is neutral in the sense that there is no investment in anything. Yet this joy is also awesome as we stand fully present in the magnificence of the infinite. It is the birthright of who we are in our natural state, as opposed to the distortion we live from our programming. If you stop for a moment and take a breath, a real breath, one where you let everything go and just sink all of your awareness into the feeling of the air entering your body, of your ribs expanding with the breath, of the connection between you and the air entering your body there, did you feel it? That is presence.
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Presence is not the words you see on the page, but the feelings those words create inside of you. And not even just the feelings, the awareness of the feelings arising, existing, and falling away. That is presence, happening now, in this moment. The interpretation of the words, the interpretation and labeling of the feelings, the judgments and cyclic thought patterns you have about the feelings None of that is happening in the moment the feeling is happening. Only the feeling is happening, and the part of you that is aware of that feeling happening is God. Your divinity is only a step away; the recognition that you are that awareness of what is happening in this moment. When you sink all of your sense of self into that awareness instead of investing it in the thoughts, you become God. You become Goddess, you become One with the moment, no separation, no dualism, no story about it, just IT, pure being. Always there, never changing, infinite, undivided, unchanging. It is important to be able to let go and come fully present no matter what emotion or state is arising. This is true whether the emotion is a state you really dont want to be in, or a state you really want to be in. Positive or negative the attachment or aversion to ANY state keeps you out of the present, keeps you out of a full connection to the Divine.
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Easter and the Bliss Bunny At an Easter Celebration with don Miguel Ruiz I (Raven) had a big experience with this. Miguel brought someone up to the front of the room and gave her a microphone. He then began talking her through opening up to the divine, opening up to the divine within her. As he did this I knew we were all connected to what was happening to her awareness. As don Miguel continued to coax this woman into deeper and deeper states of consciousness and opening, we all went deeper and deeper with her. At one point she started talking about the space between the stars, and an amazing event occurred. For me everything expanded outward becoming completely one, completely nothing, just an endless and timeless moment of perfection in which everything just WAS, there was Spirit without distinction or descriptions. On the other side of this event the woman and everyone in the room went into a state of emotional bliss. Feelings of incredible emotion, love, joy, lots of energy, lots of intensity. It was really wonderful, very heart warming, just lovely. Normally that would have been that, but for whatever reason I had really noticed the distinction between that state of Oneness and the emotional state of bliss. I started walking around asking people about their experiences afterward. What was amazing was while if pushed they all remembered that moment of complete dissolution into everything, all they talked about or thought worth anything was
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the emotional bliss that followed! Everyones attention was hooked by the experience of the emotion, in short their desire and attachment to that emotional state filtered their experience of BEING down into an emotional high they could understand and pine after. Because, of course, that emotional state is not there all the time. All emotions arise, exist, and fall away, and none of them touch THAT thing which had happened to everyone in the room. Our desire to be the one experiencing something instead of just being what is happening keeps our attention fixated and limits our ability to perceive ourselves as the divine. We wind up seeking after mental and emotional states, preferences for one state over another, instead of just experiencing it all as divine. It also clouds our thinking about what is the divine. The divine is not a limited emotional state of bliss, or any other state! It is everything and nothing. All that IS exists in this moment and you can be it at any time, but your mind will never experience it. It can only limit and filter your perception of what is, and if you identify it as yourself then you identify as limitation and separation and that is what you experience as reality. Sound paradoxical? Sound impossible? Thats because it is! Its a mystery, the ultimate mystery. How can THAT be happening in each moment? When all we see is change, when everything about our experience of reality screams CHANGE in each moment, how can it also be completely still, infinitely changeless in its perfection?
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Stop Trying to Understand! The only problem is what is trying to understand it. Your rational thinking mind cannot directly experience reality, remember? So here it is trying to make rational sense of something that is not within its ability to comprehend. Poor thing, give it a pat on the head, its trying so hard! Look at it, working itself into a sweat about something, being infinitely changeless, yet changing in each moment. Just give it a cookie and send it off to play in the corner, and lets get back to breathing and experiencing God in this moment! Life is happening all around and through you in each moment. Be present for it. Feel its mysterious texture and currents, its joys and sorrows, its pleasures and pains. Most people you see are missing their lives. They spend all of their time judging and reliving things that have happened to them in the past, instead of being present with the wonder that is happening RIGHT NOW. The party is here folks, everything is happening now. If you are waiting for something then your life will be the experience of waiting, not the experience of BEING, being the divine right now. When you are able to step into presence and experience the oneness of totality, enjoy it! When your attention gets hooked from everything to something, dont grasp onto the old state, simply open to witness what is arising. Ah, and now my mind is
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saying that if I continue to be present I will no longer be responsible. Or now my mind is telling me if I hold this spaciousness no one will love me. Can you simply witness your minds fears and struggle to get your attention? If your mind hooks your attention, consciously move further along the spiral: If you find yourself unable to witness your mind, be curious about what it is saying. Tell yourself the truth of what your mind is doing. Dont struggle to accept it or wish you could witness it. If you cannot, you cannot. If you feel frustrated with it, open to frustration and notice how it feels, what it is saying, what it hopes you will do. If you lose your clarity, can you accept? If you lose your acceptance, can you tell yourself the truth? The moment you honor where you are on the spiral, you get back into integrity and can begin to reclaim choice. Choice may not mean you can get back to pure presence, but you can choose to accept what is happening in your mind. You can choose to witness rather than judge. You can choose to practice opening back up to presence, even if it is a struggle. Do not become fixated on where you should be on the spiral of the mind. This fluidity will bring freedom and movement where there was rebellion or stagnation. Be open to your little mind getting hooked by all sorts of little things! And keep investigating: where are you on the spiral now? What is the next loop to work towards?
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Below are some practices to support you in moving along the spiral of the mind. Feel free to do them systematically, or to pick the one that calls to you the most now. MENTAL EXPLORATION Mind Dump 1. Get a pad of paper and a pen and sit somewhere comfortable 2. Take a minute to get grounded and centered in your body 3. Set an alarm to go off in 5 minutes 4. Now start writing down the MOST negative thoughts you can ever remember having, the things you wouldnt want anyone to ever know that you were thinking. 5. Write continuously for the whole five minutes, never stop, even if you have to just write the last word you wrote over and over. Stop when the alarm goes off. What did you notice? A little resistance perhaps? Did your mind try and sweeten things as you wrote? Did it sensor or edit what you were really thinking? Did you go blank? Did you go into judgment? These are all the obstacles we face when we start the process. These obstacles are why moving beyond our old limiting structure is such hard work, and also why its so worth doing: these same obstacles keep you from living in your truth and integrity and feeling good about your life every day.
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Revealing the Voice of your Judge Go experience your judge. This exercise requires either a hand-held voice recorder (ideal because you can capture the inflections and nuances of your judging voices) or a notebook and pen (less ideal, but if you pay close attention to not editing it will work) Go to a big public space where you can sit to the side, more or less unnoticed and watch people pass by. Airports, malls, Downtown areas, busy coffee shops, etc. all work well. Get comfortable, take some deep full breaths and spend 5-10 minutes getting your mind as quiet as you can. Now turn your tape recorder on and start looking at the people passing by. Speak any thoughts that arise into the recorder, work to not censor, just speak them exactly as you here them in your head. Do it for a half an hour or so and then pack up and go home. At home get somewhere quiet and undisturbed and listen to the tape. Listen to it over and over until you feel no reaction to the voice on the tape. Listen to it until you can listen to it compassionately, without judgment or feeling victimized by it. Cultivate an attitude as if it was a good friend having a very hard time and you wanted to be present with them without getting hooked into their story of blame and victimization. Once you can do this go back to the public place and again let the judge out around the people that pass by, but this time just witness it with that same attitude of being attentive to what it is
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saying, but not buying into any of it. When you can do this and talk to someone at the same time you will be begin to have more choice around your actions and reactions to peoples stories and your own judgment. Acceptance Practice As you move from the first loop of truth telling to the second loop of acceptance, it is very useful to include a daily prayer/meditation around forgiveness to keep you focused on what you are trying to accomplish. Below is a suggestion. We encourage you to put it in your own words and spend some time each day repeating it to yourself and setting your intent to let all your work around creating more awareness stem from this place: Great Mystery of Creation help me find the strength to live from my integrity I forgive myself for all the pain I have caused myself from living from my unconscious beliefs. I forgive all those who taught me I was not enough, that I was not acceptable as I am. I love myself completely, I accept myself completely exactly as I am in this moment.
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I honor my process, I know I will make mistakes and that is ok. I know that I am suffering and I take responsibility for transforming my life into a place of joy and fulfillment in each moment As I grow I understand that the obstacles to my growth will show up as part of the process. I accept that and will stay present with myself and comfort myself through every challenge that arises. I have the deepest gratitude for this life and this opportunity to live it fully. I recognize that each moment is a chance to change everything and live in the wholeness and beauty that is my birthright With all my heart I pray, so may it be!
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Chapter Three Emotional Integrity Finding Flow and Holding Yourself Steady Bringing our emotions into alignment with our spiritual path is an incredibly important endeavor. Emotions are pure energy in motion moving through our bodies. Without emotion our experience of our spiritual path (and our life in general) is flat and devoid of life and passion. Yet our society, our parents, and sometimes even our spiritual tradition train us that emotions are mostly bad. As a result we learn to either repress our emotional responses or distort them into a response that gets approval from the world around us. To sort through our confusion around emotions it is useful to have a model of the process. We offer two models that work beautifully together: the Emotional Spiral and building a strong container to hold yourself through your emotions. The Spiral of Emotional Process While your emotional state is always changing, we tend to operate under a belief system that says once an emotion has arisen it will never go away. Before children have been socialized their emotions flow freely through them without interruption. The average length of a childs emotional response is seven seconds. Seven seconds! Think about that. They bang
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their knee and cry and then its over. They do not get what they want, they yell in anger, and it is over. Their toy gets taken away and they cry with loss, and then it is over. Emotions are just energy for children, arising, existing for a moment, and then falling away. As we get older, we begin to stuff our emotions. Instead of being fluid with our emotions and expressing them as they arise, we begin to store them. It is as if we each have a big storage tank into which we stuff all the things we do not want to feel or are overwhelming to us. Anytime you do not feel something fully by stopping the emotion, diverting the emotion, or leaving your body, the energy gets stuck in your being. Since our mental, emotional and physical bodies are very tied together, this energy then gets trapped as a mental agreement and/or locked someplace in the physical form. To make it simple, visualize that all of your unexpressed emotion piles on top of each other in a big vat that you each carry with you. Eventually the vat gets full and you have to relieve the pressure, so you have a blow up to release the tension. You may justify the intensity of your emotion or be horrified by it, but all the expression of the emotion did was give you some breathing space, not clear out anything from the past! The Spiral allows us to see where we are in our work around coming into emotional integrity, and gives us the framework to clean out the vat from the past, so that our emotions flow from the present. As we get cleaner emotionally our emotional body begins to heal from the heaviness of old
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stagnant emotions and become as fluid as when we were children. From Repression and Rules The beginning of the spiral of emotions reflect how our unconscious beliefs, judgments, and rules about how we express our emotions control how we deal with stimulus out in the world. Here are two examples: Some people in this culture are trained to not express sadness or pain through crying. We are taught to suck it up. and big kids dont cry. This feedback teaches us that sadness is weakness and it is dangerous to express that weakness in any form. So we learn and we train our body and mind. We train the body to contract, clamp down on the energy, so we do not let it be expressed. We hold constant tension in our back, our diaphragm, and our throat to keep the energy from expressing. We train the mind to distract us from our pain through fantasy, controlling other people, and blaming the world angrily for our distress. Others are taught not to express anger, but in many cases it is okay to express grief (at least to some extent). As a result some of us unconsciously learn to channel any emotional response we have of anger into grief. We
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distort our anger into grief, so even though the energy gets to move, the movement creates all kinds of confusion about what we are actually feeling. This usually causes us to cycle the grief over and over, because the underlying feeling is never getting addressed, so the energy is never fully released. What is true at this point in the spiral is that we have no awareness of what our emotions are really about because the whole world of interaction is filtered through old emotions and beliefs that have nothing to do with the present. We believe we are these emotions, and as a result we are bad for having them. There is nothing to do but try and hide them, judge others and ourselves for having them, and try to live with the discomfort that is constantly arising from having to deal with them. This leads to almost constant miscommunication around what we want from other people and why we want it. We want others to either make it all better of leave us alone. We hide what we truly feel because we are afraid of our own judgment around our feelings, and we fear the rejection we project that others will treat us with if we show them what we are feeling. In this phase of the spiral our core strategy is fully at play. We attempt to control, please, distract, or isolate so we can repress, avoid, or direct our own or other peoples emotional reactions. We are in constant reaction, taking other peoples actions personally, and unclear about which emotions belong to us and which belong to others. Our emotional body is either
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completely repressed and we are stagnant, or we live in a cycle of drama and fear that keeps our emotional body out of balance. Any little thought our mind has is immediately translated into a palpable fear that we either believe or expend energy to ignore. It is messy and chaotic! When Samantha first started working with us she was in huge emotional trauma. She had spent most of her life controlling her emotions and being a good girl. She was productive, efficient, and dependable. She rarely got angry or upset. When her partner of five years ended their relationship suddenly, Samantha found herself sinking into a deep depression. She worked hard to maintain her cheerful face at work, and spent a lot of time fantasizing about how to get her partner to come back. As the weeks became months and her partner continued to not speak to her, Samantha began to get upset at her co-workers over little issues. Her need to control her grief and anguish over the breakup and maintain a good face at work started to crack. At home she would spend hours crying, unable to console herself. In the first loop we spend our energy bouncing from emotion to emotion, believing we are in the present when we are often dealing not with current emotion, but a backlog of unexpressed energies. The ending of her relationship was traumatic for Samantha, but the real cause of her emotional pain was much deeper.
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Emotional Awareness The first loop of the spiral is the first glimpse of light. It revolves around awareness. In this part of the process we begin to realize that we are not in control of our emotional responses. We begin to see that as good as our intentions are around not getting angry, sad, feeling hopeless or resentful, these responses are still coming out of us sideways and affecting our experiencing of reality. We realize they are making us suffer, but we do not yet see a way to deal with them that will bring us more clarity and acceptance or our life. To move through this stage we have to absolutely tell ourselves the truth about what we are feeling. We need to take a hard look at our past and where we started lying to ourselves about our feelings so that we could satisfy other peoples needs for feeling safe or in control. We need to look at where we had emotional responses that were shut down, or where we had no models for how to deal with the intensity of our experience of the world. Most importantly we need to validate for ourselves that repressing or distorting our emotional responses is adding to our suffering and round up the willingness and courage to change the situation. As Samantha began to seek her own emotional integrity, she saw how her despair at the ending of her relationship was a much needed catalyst for her to shift her attention to her own inner healing. While her pain around the breakup was very real, it was the death of her mother at an early age that she was actually mourning. Since she was never allowed to show the full
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extent of her grief, she had held it in, and it had never been cleared. She would not have been willing to go into the old emotions previously, since her control of them had worked fairly well, up to now. But as she explored her emotional landscape, she discovered how these old repressed emotions had caused her not only emotional, but also physical and mental pain. This gave her the willingness to move forward on the spiral. Emotional Expression The second loop is for many people the hardest. It revolves around expression. We have to re-train ourselves to express our emotions, to find some way of letting the energy of the emotions move through our body, and we have to commit to expressing the emotions in some form when they arise. We might even need to artificially stimulate the emotions we know we have repressed to get the energy moving so that we can come back to a place of choice around our state of being rather than reacting unconsciously to the stimulus of the world around us. What is true in this part of the process is it is more important than anything else to allow the emotion expression. We have to let go of control and worrying about how it is going to look. We have to find acceptance for our emotional state even though our training tells us we are being bad for expressing. This stage requires consistent and dedicated action that directly contradicts our past judgments of emotions being bad or wrong.
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This also applies to emotions like unrestrained joy, passion, true ecstasy of spiritual connection, as well as the heavier emotions of anger, sadness, jealousy and hopelessness. With strong coaching and support, Samantha began to release the pent up energy from her past experiences. As she opened the door to her emotional body she discovered layers of feelings, ranging from anger at her mother for abandoning her to hopelessness that no one would ever love her. As each emotion arose, Samantha was willing to feel the emotion fully as it moved through her. She learned to not think about the emotion or judge it, but simply express it in a safe environment. * For actions to release emotions see the emotional expression exercises in the Emotional Exploration section Emotional Responsibility In the third loop we begin to come into true integrity by owning our emotional content. The key understanding of this stage is validating for ourselves that we are responsible for our emotions. They are arising, existing and falling away and that process all happens within us, it is not happening outside of us. Yes, there is external stimulus from other people and situations, but the response to that stimulus revolves solely around our own internal dialogue and experiences of the past. Take a moment to contemplate that. Notice how one day the kids screaming or dog barking annoys you and on another
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day you feel spacious and just grin about it. How one day your bosss crankiness makes you feel awful, like you are doing a poor job, another day it makes you angry at the injustice of it, and another day you shrug it off and go back to work. What is changing? The stimulus is the same, but the response is different inside of you. The only variable is YOU, what your internal state is like at the time the stimulus happens and what kind of story you have about that stimulus. What is true at this part of the process is that we begin acting from a place of truly owning and being responsible for our emotions. This does not mean we go back to repressing them when they arise, it means we act from a place of ownership when they do. We stop taking the world personally and start tracking what is triggering us and why. We stop blaming people for our emotions. We say things like Im really angry right now because when you ignored my input it reminded me of the way my dad always ignored me instead of saying things like I cannot believe what a jerk you are for not listening to me. Our internal and external dialogue begins to reflect our deep knowing that we are causing our responses; our stories, our past, our need for appreciation, acceptance, and security are what is actually stimulating these heavy, suffer laden emotions, not the people and situations in our lives. Knowing this we let go of blame and free our attention up to deal with shifting our internal state rather than trying to change the external stimulus. We still let the energy of the
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emotion move through us, but we get very curious as to what we are telling ourselves that is triggering it, and we begin to watch our internal dialogue closely for signs that we are beginning to go into an old story. We must be willing to tell ourselves the truth about what is happening before we actually trigger a heavy emotional response within ourselves. We commit to going back to people and telling them what we discovered about ourselves when we have emotionally dumped on them. We commit to telling them what was really go on for us and own the way we blamed them for our response. As Samantha moved through the second loop in the spiral and towards the third, she had varying degrees of resistance and trepidation about emotional expression. Sometimes she blamed others or projected her own stuff onto someone else, which then needed to be cleaned up. But as she began to empty her emotional vat, she started to feel the rewards of more spaciousness and clarity. When an emotion was triggered inside of her she was able to stay steady and feel the intensity, and then share honestly what she was experiencing. She noticed when she was blaming, and went back to make amends. She took full responsibility for her own inner emotional healing, and for staying present with herself. * One of the best tools for learning to let go of blame and take responsibility for your emotions in backtracking.
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Pure Fluid Presence The endpoint of the spiral of emotions is about staying present with the flow of emotional energy through us. As we continue cleaning out the structures of our past we begin to get in touch with the fact that the flow of our emotions is the flow of our own energy. We intimately feel how our emotions connect us to the Divine mystery moving through us in all its infinite variety and intensity. We see the heavy energies as obstructions and blocks inside us, not as external conditions that need to be changed. We are aware of the constant wave-like flow of energy through and around us. We stop attaching meaning to any particular state of energy as being good or bad. We ride the waves, willing to let go of the peaks and the valleys as the energy moves fluidly through us at all times. Pure Awareness and Choice As we reach the endpoint of the spiral of emotions the distinctions between the emotions begin to slip away. We connect with higher and higher vibrations of light, love, acceptance and compassion, and in the brilliance of this true connection to Source all judgments and distinctions between the different energies fall away into the One field of the Infinite, without separation, without suffering. Joyful detachment and sacred union with everything becomes our way of being and the
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suffering of dividing the world between good and bad feelings becomes a distant dream. From this place our light radiates into the world, modeling and lighting the path for everyone around us to come into integrity with their emotional being. As Samantha moved through the third loop in the spiral she found that her relationship with her emotions had completely shifted. She no longer expected others to fix her or that to be a good girl she had to repress her emotions and stay in control. Through expressing her old emotions and getting into present time, she found herself no longer in internal drama, and that she felt little desire to control situations or people around her. When an emotion came up she opened her being to it and let it move, without attaching any mental chatter to it. Spiral Hopping We each are in different areas of the emotional spiral with different issues in our life. We may be in the second loop around our relationship with our mothers death and need to consciously express our grief and loss, but on the first loop around jealousy issues in relationship, just beginning to recognize that it is not about our partners behavior, but about our own internal agreements and childhood fears. And sometimes we shift between loops with the same emotion or experience. Fernando was catapulted into a huge emotional process when his only brother was murdered. After a period of numbness and shock, the grief started to surface in
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huge waves. It was amazing, he said later, to be a witness to the intensity of the emotion running through me. What Fernando was able to witness was that at times his grief was pure, raw emotion moving through his body. This grief was cleansing and I felt open after it moved through my body. Here was pure presence with emotion moving through. And other times his grief was tied to an old story where he did not have acceptance and felt huge blame. There were times when my grief was wrapped up in a story that it was not fair, and that it was my fault my brother was dead. I felt victimized by his death. It was important for me to move through this part of the emotion as well, but I realized it could go on forever, since I was cycling a story, and not purely expressing the emotion. Fernando learned that when he was feeling the grief and there was blame or non-acceptance, he would look for where he had felt this same feeling in the past. Since the emotion was not moving through cleanly, he accepted that it was not actually about his brothers death, but past events in his life where he felt abandoned. By bringing this into acceptance he was able to use his brothers death to express and release emotions from past events. When we stay flexible with our awareness, we feel the subtleties of our emotional flow and can parse through to know what is what. When we understand where we are on the spiral we then know: Here is an old emotion, and I simply need to get out of the way and release it, or I have a story woven in with this emotion and I am blaming others, I need to take
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responsibility that this is mine, and is not anyone elses fault, or I am resisting feeling anything, how can I bring more acceptance into my emotional body right now? I (Heather Ash) remember clearly the day I first saw the dynamic between my mind wanting a story for everything and my emotional body simply wanting to express old emotions. I was feeling a lot of sadness, and I noticed my mind searching for the reason. But when I felt into my belly, where the sadness was located, I was surprised to feel that there was no story, I simply had sadness stuck in my belly and it wanted to be released. It was strange at first to let emotion flow through me without a reason for it. Ive learned that one of the ways I move energy is to cry, and that I have old stored grief in my body that needs to be expressed every once in a while. I still sometimes resist it, but Raven is great at supporting me in simply emoting! He can look at me across the room and say, come here, and hold me and the tears will start to flow. I didnt even know I was upset! Ill feel immense grief and sob into his shoulder, and then five minutes later I am laughing and joking with him. Sometimes the grief is around my fathers illness or the beauty of life or for no reason at all. I trust, dont question it, and let it move on through. Keep it Moving! How do we move beyond blame to see the beauty of our emotions? How can we safely express old emotions? How do we
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move through numbness or paralyzing terror? How do we not cycle our emotional content, but keep moving fluidly on the spiral? It is helpful to look at how your strategies play a role in your relationship to your emotional integrity. How have you chosen in the past to keep yourself emotionally safe rather than in integrity? Without blame, can you witness where you are on the spiral and find your willingness to move forward? Pleasers go out of their emotional integrity by being focused on what every one else is feeling, and fitting their emotional state to what they perceive is expected of them. A pleasers work to come into emotional integrity is to realize that they are not responsible for any one elses emotional state. Pleasers can move into alignment by re-training themselves to feel their own emotions, rather than everyone elses. Controllers go out of emotional integrity by either fiercely controlling their own emotions, or manipulating situations so they can control others emotional reactions. Controllers use silence, disapproval, anger, and sweetness skillfully to avoid conflict. A controllers work to come into emotional integrity is to realize that they feel exhausted and often hopeless from trying to repress themselves and others. Controllers can move into alignment by re-training themselves to surrender to the messiness of life and learning that they will not perish if things get out of control. Distracters go out of emotional integrity by not allowing themselves or others to feel unwanted emotions. Distracters will use humor, story telling, or activity to divert attention away
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from what they do not want to experience. A distracters work to come into emotional integrity is to realize they are living a shallow, surface life that will not allow any emotional depth or healing. Distracters can move into alignment by re-training themselves to sit still and stay present with different states as they arise. Isolators go out of emotional integrity by withdrawing energetically or physically into a fantasy world. Isolators avoid any uncomfortable emotions by shutting them off in silence, or mentally thinking about them instead of feeling them. An isolators work to come into emotional integrity is to realize they are missing out on true heart connection with themselves and others. Isolators can move into alignment by re-training themselves to be willing to be seen and be emotionally vulnerable with others. Whatever strategy we have used to stay safe, being out of emotional integrity causes a great deal of drama and disconnection in our lives. When we learn to contain our emotions through our strategies we become rigid and fearful. Emotional integrity invites us to begin to contain our emotions not from an old structure, but from our hearts. Emotional integrity is not about where you are on the spiral, but how you are holding yourself. When you believe you should be someplace else on the spiral or are trying to avoid going through the next loop, you are out of integrity. But when you accept all aspects of your emotional body, you begin to create a container for healing.
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Beyond Drama Drama is one of the places where we can get stuck in a loop without coming out the other side. Drama is a messy tangle of emotions and fear, woven from disaster thinking and unconscious reactions. Drama is often perpetuated by gossip and unspoken expectations and attachments. Sometimes it is fun, exhilarating, and creates a (short lived) sense of aliveness. Most of the time it drains your energy and reinforces immature patterns of behavior. How can you avoid drama? If you live in the world and not on a mountaintop, you cannot entirely avoid the dance of emotions and reactions. But you can move beyond constantly tangling up in your own or others drama. With practice, you can learn to pierce through your own drama to heal the core of our suffering. With patience, you can stop taking on others drama as if it was your own. Things to ponder: How you talk about yourself and about others can bring you more into integrity and strengthen your container, or create loops of drama and reaction that shatter your ability to stay conscious.
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Who you choose to call when you are upset and need support can help you strengthen your container, or create more disharmony internally. When you feed high emotions and hurt feelings with thoughts of worst-case scenarios, you are creating drama. When we believe that what other people feeling or doing is your fault, you are creating drama. When you do not take responsibility for your own life, you create drama. And in perpetuating drama, you also drop your container, and your highest focus. You drop yourself anytime you abandon yourself emotionally, energetically, or physically. Some examples of how you might drop yourself emotionally: Judge yourself Compare yourself to others Cycle your emotions Do not feel your emotions Continue to increase your awareness of where you weaken your own emotional container through your word, whether by feeding your own or others drama. Get out some paper, contemplate and write down your answers to the following questions: Where are you reacting rather than choosing? Where are you gossiping about yourself or someone else?
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How does repressing your truth or emotions cause more drama in your life? Also note any places you drop yourself. How are drama and dropping related? How can I reduce the drama in my life? How can I hold myself through this situation? What is the difference between drama and taking responsibility for my life? Is it really my drama if someone does not like my choices? Why would I drop myself to allow someone else to feel more comfortable? Transform Your Judge One of the most rigid, inflexible, and strong characters in your emotional world is your own internal judge. The judge is often loosely modeled after someone past or present in your life. But your judge is a unique creation, far more harsh than anyone outside of you would be! And your judge wreaks havoc on your emotional being! True strength is not about inflexible rigidity, but fluid response to all situations. With the judge in charge, you live in a world of impatience, fear of punishment, and needing to do things right. When you use your judge to tell you how you are doing, your emotional container becomes fragile and brittle behind a veneer of justifications and excuses. You spend energy
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not on aligning to your own emotional healing, but on avoiding discomfort and punishment. And to avoid discomfort you will go against your true desires, be dishonest, and drop yourself again and again. The judge punishes in subtle ways. And it changes the rules constantly. One moment it is yelling at you that if only you had a real job, or a real relationship, or a real spiritual path, you would be okay. Then when you get a real job, relationship, or spiritual path, it whispers that you are not doing enough, or that you really do not deserve it, or that it is not really the right job, or relationship, or spiritual path. All of this noise covers up the deeper emotional wounds and fears. The judge sneaks into our lives early with the pretense of helping us to fit in, or do better. It gains momentum when we compare ourselves to others, or an ideal standard. Soon it asserts the right to hold our container for our own good. It becomes our conscience. And that is a very sad state of affairs, indeed. We hand the curious, excited, open child part of ourselves over into the keeping of a sadistic, frustrated uncle, and say will you help her to grow up and honor her emotions? Now you might think, yeah, but I had a mean sadistic frustrated uncle who raised me (or angry mother or perfectionist father.) That may have been true. But now the truly mean person is living inside of you and ruling your emotional body. What are you going to do about that? Are you willing to take away its keys to your house and send it home?
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Your judge is not helping you grow. It is not protecting you from pain. It is not doing you any favors by guarding you with its book of rules. So, first things first. Punishment is not a great method of motivation. It may work for a while, but it is a short-term solution, and one that creates fear rather than conscious choice. It is a poor way to hold a container for yourself. To transform your judge, be honest about how your judge and punishment make you feel and if they strengthen your container, or weaken it. Stop for a moment and make a list of all the ways your judge punishes you when you stray outside the rules. This list should reflect your own internal dialogue. i.e. What you just said was ridiculous, You suck, Geez, Suzy, get yourself together fer pete's sake, Oh man, they are going to hate you for saying that, When will you learn? you are hopeless, Why cant you just relax, what is your problem? The first step in stopping the judge is being able to clearly hear when it is speaking. Look at your list and give yourself the task of acknowledging that every time you hear these key phrases in your head you will stop and say to yourself that is my judge speaking.
Empowering Your Victim
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When our judge holds the container of our being, we become rigid and protective. The victim huddles inside of us, always fearful of being punished or rejected. The victim has no voice, and the judge feels like it must fiercely guard this vulnerable, helpless part of us. When our victim holds the container of our being, we become scared and overwhelmed. The judge stands nearby, feeding energy and power into the victim's fears. The judge is an inner critical voice, and the victim feels it is doing everything wrong, that it is not supported, that it is broken. From the victim's point of view, our container has been shattered into thousands of pieces, and there is no way to keep other people's energy or emotions out of our field. We feel out of control and constantly in doubt of our actions and other people's motivations. We are not able to receive and hold love, and so feel constantly empty. From this sense of emptiness comes a great sense of neediness. Victims thus clutch at the first grain of love they come across, and then do whatever they must to keep it. Often this means dropping themselves and trying to become who they think others want them to be. When our victim does find a place of love, it is either an illusion or the judge comes in and tells us we are not worth it. Victims tend to gravitate to unhealthy, abusive relationships and work situations. They often stay in these situations long after they know they are not working, for fear of being alone with their shattered container.
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Often when the victim gets too overwhelmed the judge will come forward and take over the container. The judge will then severely punish the victim, and anyone else who has hurt the victim, or anyone who is close to the victim. The judge is not a good discriminator. It will emotionally or physically lash out at any perceived threat, whether that threat is a perpetrator or a loved one. Just to be really, really clear: empowering the victim does not mean giving the victim permission to punish others, or yourself! This is not empowerment, it is emjudgment! Do not give the power to your judge! Keep checking in with yourself: am I empowering my victim, or emjudging my victim? Am I helping my victim get clearer with her needs and filling in the gaps in the container, or is my victim channeling my judge to feel strong and vindicated? Learning to empower your victim starts when you find the willingness to stop giving power to others and to your judge. Willingness is a crucial factor in beginning to mend your container. Your willingness allows a higher part of yourself to come forward, wrap its arms around you, and feed you strength and courage. It will give you the fortitude to learn from your own mistakes and make new actions. Willingness is a powerful force, and the heart of empowering your victim. Stop the Overwhelm/Inaction Dance When your own emotional container is weakened by the judge and victim dance or is untended you cannot live your
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fullest potential. You will struggle to feel whole and complete and be easily shaken by other people's emotions, responses, and opinions. You will rarely have the sense of overflowing fullness and inner peace that a resilient, grounded container holds. A strong container is one that is not compromised by either the victim or the judge. A strong container holds both of these polarities with compassion and firm, loving boundaries. A strong container embraces the entire spiral of emotions with love. This allows you to witness what the judge or victim are up to without giving them the keys to ransack your life. Anytime you get continually overwhelmed by your emotions or emotionally frozen, either your victim or your judge is taking charge. This happens when your container is too shallow and unstable. From a shallow container, you end up connecting to the dramas, insecurities, and busyness of everyday life, rather than to the stable depth of your soul. The suffering you cause yourself when you do not root deep into your core is immense! A fractured container ends up unconsciously connecting you to the instability of other people's opinions, emotions, and beliefs. You will constantly leak energy, and not have the power to find out what you actually want from your life. A strong emotional container is made of self-respect and deepened by self-intimacy. When your emotional container is strong, you have the patience, vision, and courage to face your weaknesses. Each time you do so, you bring more resilience and
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flexibility to your emotional container, which allows you to keep moving on the spiral! This container includes ALL loops of the spiral, from the most unconscious places within us to the most healed and vibrant. None of our emotional aspects can be pushed aside. Full integrity is being honest where we are at in our emotional journey, and finding the willingness to take action again and again to continue to align in this present moment with our emotions. EMOTIONAL EXPLORATION Emotional Fluidity Exercise This exercise is perfect for gaining more flow and less attachment to your emotions. It may feel contrived at first, the work is to do it as a practice until you can consciously and completely bring up each emotion and completely drop it at the end of each section. Set aside at least a half an hour of undisturbed time in a contained environment where you will not be interrupted. Turn off the phone, lock the door, etc. Set up four stations in the same room. At one station put a drum or bell, in another a pile of pillows, in another a heavy blanket and pillow, and in the final corner a small
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mediation area/altar with objects that help you get still and quiet.
Get grounded and centered and say the following prayer: Spirit help me to find fluidity, help me to open to all of who I am in acceptance and love, help me to find the courage to express all of who I am without judgment, I ask for energy and awareness of all my states of being. Ho!
Set a timer to ring every 3-5 minutes. Start in one of the corners and work to totally be in and express that energetic state for the entire 3-5 minutes. When the timer goes off immediately move to the next corner and again work to totally embody and express that state. Work your way all the way around the room, dont start or end with the meditation corner, do it somewhere in the middle of the exercise.
The states/exercises for each corner are as follows: Drum/Bell corner Absolute joy and happiness! Pound the drum, ring the bell, laugh, giggle, jump up and down for joy, shout and have riotous fun! Pile of pillows Anger! Get furious, pound the pillows, yell, swear, move your body a lot.
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Blanket/Pillow Grief! Cry, wail, sob, curl up with the blanket, pull it over your head, be miserable and sad. Meditation/Altar Stillness! Take deep, slow breaths, slow your heart rate, feel your body against the ground, open to your divinity, feel yourself as light and clear as a mountain stream. After you have done all 4 corners, come back to the meditation corner and sit quietly. Journal about what the exercise was like for you. Which states were hard to bring up? Which were easy? Which ones were hard to let go of? Just let the information settle without judgment. Do this exercise a couple of times a month and keep journaling about it. changes over time. Healing the Victim Read the following list, using the eyes of your victim. Answer yes, no, or maybe without thinking, but letting your victim-self speak: I am willing to learn how to hold myself I am willing to not need others approval I am willing to ask for what I want I am willing to make appropriate boundaries for myself I am willing to stop comparing myself to others Notice what
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I am willing to increase my self-worth I am willing to release relationships that no longer serve me I am willing to breathe through discomfort and fear I am willing to learn new behaviors I am willing to move beyond my past I am willing to forgive myself I am willing to forgive others I am willing to open around my fears I am willing to ask for support from appropriate people I am willing to stand on my own I am willing to listen to my own needs I am willing to become more self-intimate I am willing to be completely healed I am willing to not be broken I am willing to say no I am willing to say yes I am willing to let people in my life go there separate ways I am willing to grow up Now write three more I am willing to... and fill in the blank, without thinking. What is your victim willing to do? Now write another list. Each sentence will start with: I am not willing to... Let the victim write this list as well.
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Now, compare the two lists. Where are the places they contradict each other? Notice how there is a part of you that is willing where your victim may not be. Pick one of the willingness statements to work with. It can be one that you and your victim are in alignment with, or one that is in opposition. Write this willingness statement on a piece of paper and put it someplace you will see it regularly. Dream into the statement over the next seven days. What does it really mean to you? What actions might you need to take? How might you need to start perceiving your world differently to create space for this willingness to be true? Which actions are you willing to take? Let yourself feel the strength of your willingness, and your commitment to hold yourself through the places that keep you from living your statement 100 percent. Cease the Overwhelm/Inaction Game! Follow these simple steps to get out of the overwhelm/inaction dance: 1. STOP! Take a breath, slow down, and embrace yourself energetically. Let yourself know you are aware of your container, and are willing to hold yourself steady.
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2. LOOK! Tell your victim or judge to stop talking at you. Deepen your container by reminding yourself of your intent to heal. Move beyond the shallow fears and busyness, into your own stillness. Look for what belief is keeping you from reaching for your depth in this moment. 3. LISTEN! Get clear about what your next possible action step is. Not the next ten things you want to do so you feel overwhelmed or paralyzed, but the next physical thing you can do. No matter how small, taking a next conscious action is movement in the right direction. You will do these three steps over and over and over again! Don't think, oh, I only need to do this once and it will be fixed. You may be stopping, looking, and listening in a new way every few seconds as you gain control of your emotional container.
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Chapter Four Physical Integrity On Action and Loving What Is
Physical Integrity arises when your actions align with your heart, not your strategies. Each of us takes on a strategy to help us understand the world around us and make us feels safe. When you understand what your primary strategy is and how you physically act it out in the world you come to a place of choice rather than habit. Choice is the foundation of physical integrity. Welcome to the world of the physical! Once we have seen where we are on the continuum of healing our mental and emotional we now get to bring it into the physical and take action. Knowledge about ones process is great, awareness is wonderful, but without ACTION none of it means anything! To realize your potential, to transform your life into a place of integrity, you must be willing to take concrete steps directed toward the fruition of your desired change. So much of the time people step onto a spiritual path and start accumulating knowledge about what it is like to be spiritual. They begin to create an idea of what it is like to be spiritual and then try and live from the idea rather than the full realization of what that idea represents. BEING the divine mystery is not a passive state. Standing fully in the magnificence
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of who you really are requires your full, active engagement in the process of change in a physical way. Physical integrity is comprised of two main components. The first is coming into acceptance and right relationship with your human body. The second is taking specific, directed actions in the world to unweave your strategies from your mind, emotions, and physical being. Right Relationship with the Body We often create a lot of suffering over how our bodies look or feel. We wish we were thinner or younger or healthier. Some of these things we can take action to transform, such as eating healthier or starting to work out. Others are simply what is, such as wrinkles as you age or being tall. What is most important in coming into physical integrity with our bodies is our thoughts. If we are looking at our bodies with judgment, disdain or fear we are feeding ourselves toxic thoughts that take us out of integrity. Often the body doesnt have the problem, the mind does! Our mind takes on all sorts of opinions about what our bodies should be like from the culture around us. Usually there is a whole story wrapped in our perception of our bodies: If only I had bigger breasts people would like me more. If I was younger I would have a partner. If I didnt have arthritis I would be happier. But this is simply the mind blabbing! So the issue in this case is not actually physical integrity, but moving into mental integrity and acceptance of what is.
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Another aspect of right relationship to our body is the recognition that our thoughts and strategies have a strong impact on our physical form. Past traumas and unexpressed emotions get trapped in the body, and will remain until we touch them with love and acceptance. You have invested an enormous amount of energy in creating and holding onto your strategies and familiar structure. Each of the agreements and traumas of your life are stored in your physical form, and can be accessed and released most effectively through the physical. Through my yoga practice (Heather Ash) Ive seen the power of working through my body to access healing directly. As I was growing up, my main strategy was to be a pleaser, which played itself out by my taking responsibility for making sure the people around me were not upset. Over time this holding and tension built up in my shoulders and between my shoulder blades. For over 20 years I lived chronic pain in my left shoulder, and a pattern of hunching my shoulders (unconsciously to protect my heart.) After years of stalking my patterns and habits and clearing out a lot of agreements, I felt strongly that I needed to do something to work with my physical body to help me release old emotions and deeper belief patterns. I knew there were some things I could not get to by thinking about them! As I opened to what action to take to get more into physical integrity, I knew I needed to take a yoga teacher training course with my yoga
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instructor, Ana Forrest. It felt like a huge leap: taking almost a month off to do yoga at a level I was not sure my body could do. The fifth day into the training during our two-hour intensive morning session, something inside of me cracked wide open. Years of repressed grief and clenching got touched, and I allowed myself to let it be expressed through my form. Part of me wanted to analyze it, to understand, to control it. And I was guided to trust the process and keep going. And so I wept and wept for the entire two hours, snot and tears running down my face, as I kept doing the yoga practice. I was guided with love by Ana and the assistants to keep breathing and weeping and doing the poses. This combination of movement and emotional expression transformed not only my body, but also my relationship to my mind and emotions. My shoulders relaxed down my back, and I felt a huge softening behind my shoulder blades. My mind became calmer and I was able to access my emotions much more easily. Yoga continues to be an important part of my spiritual practice, as it unwinds the physical tension and patterning from mental and emotional imbalances of the past. Any physical discipline can be an access point for getting at stuck emotions or thoughts that have solidified in the body. Again, when we are out of mental or emotional integrity over time these imbalances will show up in our physical form. Clearing our present day judgments and learning to create emotional flow will help, and
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there will still be places stuck in the body that can only be accessed through physical movement. When we link meaning assignment to our physical state, we are often not actually present with what our body needs, but fixated on what we think it should look or feel like. This causes us to abandon ourselves and not be present with what is actually necessary for our form. We are often very self-punishing in how we interact with our bodies! We create all sorts of nifty agreements: If I am overweight I will be safe, no one will try to hurt me, if I was only a size 6 I would be finally happy, since I am physically compromised I cannot do my spiritual work. And we use food, alcohol, or drugs to change the state of our physical body: to calm us down, to keep our emotions or mind contained, to feel filled. All of these are temporary fixes. Physical Integrity supports us in not using food or drugs as a crutch, but learning to create freedom in our bodies and minds by attending to what our body and/or spirit is actually craving. One of my students (Heather Ash) whom we will call Rachel talked to me about her hatred of her body. I helped her track this feeling to the fact that due to a new job she was spending all her time behind a desk, and her body really wanted to be doing something physical each day. Because of her huge workload, she was also eating less than optimal foods for her body and drinking most nights after work to relax her. I invited her to notice when she last felt in alignment with her form. I felt
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happy and healthy when I was working out and doing martial arts. Now I cant stand to look at myself in the mirror, she said. For Rachel, there were two places to attend to in relationship with her body. The first was a mental piece. Her work was to go back to the spiral of the mind and take action to come into acceptance of her form. The second was simple: Her body needed more attention and care. It was feeling neglected and toxic due to lack of exercise, heavy foods and alcohol. Physical Integrity invites us to go deeper in our listening. On the surface the body will say I want to avoid discomfort. We then take physical actions to make us feel safe and/or nourished in the moment, such as overeating or criticizing our appearance or watching television instead of exercising, because these actions are familiar. Sometimes old patterns are also a buffer against feeling vulnerable or out of control. When we separate the minds opinions from the bodys needs, we come into the present moment. And from this moment the bodys innate wisdom will shine through and tell you what it needs. Tapping the Bodys Innate Brilliance Oh, the body is smart! Physical Integrity taps into this intelligence. Instead of eating that second slice of pie we listen deeper and the body whispers: You are feeling anger, go express it! We notice that we are rushing through our day with a sense of panic, and we consciously slow down and listen. :Oh! My body is feeling fragile and on the edge of getting sick. I need
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to sit quietly with a blanket wrapped around me and reassure myself by giving myself hugs. We wake up with our back in pain. Instead of repeating a story about how awful it is that my body is broken and no one is every going to love me, we listen deeper. Our back speaks to us of needing to stop taking other peoples drama personally. We are conditioned to either not listen to the bodies needs at all, or to be fearful anytime there is an unexplained change in our physical state. Physical Integrity means going deeper, beneath any discomfort, beyond our habits. Sometimes the patterning we have taken on is so strong it is very difficult to listen to the truth of our bodies. We hear the surface and ignore the reality. I like eating lots of dairy, I feel nourished by it (even though it causes us to feel sluggish and hurts our stomach). I dont want to go work out today, I am tired (I am always tired after work because Ive been sitting all day and my body shuts down.) I dont like being sexual anymore (when the truth is you are afraid of being hurt or sharing what you really want with your partner.) For these places we need honesty and a strong structure to help us get back to integrity with our bodies. This is also true for our mental and emotional beings. We have a tendency to create excuses about why we are not releasing old repressed emotions or why we so fiercely believe our minds drama.
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It Is All Sacred Our physical body is sacred, and is the current vessel for our evolving soul. As you align more with your physical integrity, the light of your soul will shine through your body. Age, physical ability, and health are not barriers to the souls brilliance. If we have heavy opinions about our age or mobility, or if we attach stories to physical pain, we create denseness in our physical form. If we honor where are body is, without meaning assignments or comparison, we create transparency in our physical form, allowing more light of our soul to permeate. Ram Dass talks about this beautifully in his book, Still Here. After his stroke he was forced to allow others to take care of him. As he surrendered to his new state, he found deep joy and sweetness. If he had followed his mind in any thoughts of, it is not fair, I cant be helpless, I cant teach now this would have created more heaviness to his condition. But he was able to take what was: a stroke that left him less physically able. His acceptance allowed him to slow down to let spirit in. Due to this deeper embodiment of spirit in Ram Dasss being, his teaching presence since his stroke is profound. Remember, it will take an equal amount of energy to dismantle the structure you have created, to change your perception of the world around you, and to open to the fullness of the possibilities available to you in this life as it took to create
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your limitations. The way to integrity is through conscious action to interrupt and unweave your old structure. It takes courage to take action. Action is the statement of your commitment to Life. In the world, concrete actions will bring you into integrity not only with your physical form, but also with your mental and emotional being. Directed Action There are many areas in our life that we know exactly what we need to do to create change. (If I want to get into Physical Integrity with myself, I need to have a stable living situation. To quiet my mind, I want to meditate more.) In other areas, we know what we want to accomplish, but have no idea how to make it happen. (I want to stop working a 9 to 5 job and start living my passion, but I dont see a way to make this happen. I need to release the old emotional trauma from when my brother died, but I am scared to go back into the feelings.) When you know what actions you want to take in your life, but you find that you are not following through with them, we recommend creating an action plan. An action plan is a very specific list of what you are going to do next, in what timeframe. Raven learned from his first teacher how to make very concrete action plans, and Heather Ash was inspired by Dave Allens excellent book, Getting Things Done.
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Basically, a good action has four components: That it is concrete, has a time frame, that you can track it, and that you set consequences when you do not accomplish it. 1) The action is not a concept of something, but an actual physical action. You need to be able to measure it and know when it is accomplished. I need to meditate is a concept. It is a nice concept, but one that usually remains in our thoughts rather than manifesting in physical reality. The action would be: I will meditate for ten minutes in the mornings before breakfast. I want to open my heart more. So how are you going to accomplish this? What specific steps will you take so you can measure if your action is working or not? An action might be: I will consciously breathe into my heart and look into peoples eyes at least twice a day. I would like to work at a job that is more in alignment with my purpose. Great! What is the next step? Do you know what your purpose is? Do you know what area you want to work in? Your first actionable step might be to spend half a day writing about your purpose. Or looking through the newspaper for what types of jobs are available that interests you. Or mapping out how much money you need to be making each month to maintain your lifestyle. Once you finish one action, it will lead you to the next.
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Make sure that initially you create small actions that you can succeed at. Many of us start to take actions in our life and totally overwhelm ourselves by taking on too much. Start small and let yourself build up slowly. This is your gift to yourself. Thought without energy behind it does not affect the world around you. Your desire to change must be backed by your energy for anything new to manifest in your reality. Taking actions in alignment with your desire puts your energy into motion. Aligned action engages your personal power and directs it toward the change you are working to accomplish. It doesnt matter how small of steps you take in the direction of your intent, what matters is that you keep taking steps. This builds momentum that results in more and more energy available for your transformation. Your energy is habituated to moving in the direction of your false beliefs, so to shift the flow takes consistency. A new groove for your energy has to be formed before you can fully shut down the flow of energy into your old patterns. Consistent action is the way to form that new groove. This process is cumulative; it builds momentum as you move along. So each step is important, no matter how small. Every step adds to the flow of energy moving in a new direction toward choice and freedom. 2) The action has a time frame or container associated with it. This allows you to follow through and check in with
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yourself at the end of the period to see how you did, and if you want to shift anything to better serve you. I will meditate for ten minutes in the mornings before breakfast has a specific time frame, you can also add more detail such as, I will meditate for ten minutes in the morning before breakfast, three days a week for the next month. I will consciously breathe into my heart and look into peoples eyes before I speak to them. Now there is a container that will help support actually doing the action. Narrowing down when we do the action gives us a better chance of success at actually doing it steadily. I will spend a half hour each day researching job possibilities on the Internet, and spend Saturday dreaming and doing artwork on my intent for fulfilling employment. 3) You can track the action: Any time you are taking a new action you need to record where you are at the beginning, what happens when you take the new action, and what the result is of taking the action (or not taking it). An important part of your action plan is accumulating data about your behaviors. By doing this you get a clear perception of the situation you find yourself in, you can more easily see the patterns of your habitual behavior, and you get a clear idea of what actions to take next to best serve your goals.
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You can use journaling or charts to map your behavior; the important thing is to get it all down somewhere so you can look at it later and see the patterns. This would mean actually marking when you do meditate for your ten minutes, journaling about what you feel like to be opening your heart before you speak, or noting the time you looked for jobs. 4) You create a consequence if you do not accomplish the action. Part of creating change in our lives is taking absolute responsibility for our actions. We have to hold ourselves accountable for following through with new actions that counter our belief structure. Without this type of commitment we will never take concerted, consistent actions that will bring about the desired change. We hold ourselves accountable by setting consequences for ourselves for not taking the actions we have committed to. Now most people hear the word consequence and immediately change it to punishment for being bad. So let me be very clear: consequences that punish you for being bad never work. They almost always lead you into judgment of yourself, shame, blame, rebellion, or feeling powerless and victimized by your beliefs. All of these reactions are part of the beliefs that you are trying to get rid of, so re-enforcing them with punishment serves nothing.
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So, what kind of consequences serve you? One of the best consequences you can have to not doing an action is to change your commitment to lessen the amount of action you had originally set. If you were suppose to do yoga four times this week and you only did it once, the consequence is to do yoga two times next week. If you cant do it twice the next week then you commit to doing yoga once the following week. Supporting yourself in this way is not a cop out, it is an act of acceptance for where you are coupled with true willingness to make a change. Eventually you will get it down to something you can actually do, and at that point the change has begun! Even the smallest action toward your intent will begin to build momentum that will allow you to take bigger and bigger actions. One of the traps of the ego is to get you to take too big of a step at once, one it knows you wont succeed at. Then it can go into judgment and through that keep you from ever trying to change it again. So start small, with actions you can accomplish and congratulate yourself about! Another good type of consequence is to add to the actions that nourish you if you cant do one of the others (more about nourishing actions below). The more you can change your state toward the feelings you want in your life the more willing you will be to take the harder action steps. So going to our above example if you cant do the yoga, you commit to getting a massage that weekend, treating your body, giving it the same kind of honoring you were trying to accomplish with the yoga, but from a completely different action.
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A third type of consequence is data accumulation. You might journal for an hour about all the events that led up to you not doing the yoga. Write out all of the excuses, the judgments you made of yourself, the unscheduled events that happened, etc. Look through what you wrote and see if there is anything there that might help you complete the commitment next week. Then do a ceremony and burn what you wrote, severing yourself from the past week and beginning fresh with your new commitment to do yoga four times this week. We highly recommend that once you commit to an action that you stick to it whether it feels good or not. Make sure you make your actions when you are in a place of clarity. This is important! Good actions stem from a place of clarity, and committing to them implies you know you will be in a less clear place at some point. That is why you need a commitment, so you have something to lean on when you are less clear! Creating Balanced Action Plans Guided by your purpose, an action plan is a map of what actions you are choosing to take in the world. The best way to create an action plan is to start small, with two or three actions that you work with at a time. When you feel into your being, what area of your life needs the most attention right now? When you look at where you are in the spiral of your mind or your emotions, what actions would best serve you in moving forward? What actions would best serve your physical body? Pick one or two
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areas, and create a plan for Spiritual Integrity based on what area of your being needs support at this time. Using The Four Elements Of Change by Heather Ash as a guide, here are four categories of actions we can take to create change in our lives: Actions that help us get a clear perception of what needs to be done, actions that help us open to new possibilities, actions that clean out our old behaviors, and actions that nourish the new feeling states that we want in our life. Actions to Clear Your Perceptions These types of action are designed to get a clear look at what the issues are, to map out what you are doing to yourself that is making you suffer. They are data accumulation exercises. What is important about these types of actions is that you get all the data down somewhere so that you can sort through it, looking for patterns in your thoughts and behaviors that can be specifically targeted with experiments in the following categories. Journal and chart your responses as you move through each day. For example, if you are working on not taking things personally, journal at the end of each day any places you took something personally. Write down the thoughts you had, the feelings you experienced and any insights you had about why you got down on yourself because of meanings you assigned to something someone said or did.
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An example of charting would be if you were working on a belief like there is never enough money. Every day for a month chart how much money you spend each day, what you spent the money on, and how you felt while you were spending it. What you will find from this at the end of the month is all the patterns you have around money. It will tell you whether you spend money to feel better, whether some types of spending make you anxious while others make you feel satisfied, where you sabotage any feelings of abundance, and the places you are lying to yourself about there not being enough. These types of actions are great to use in conjunction with the other types to help track the results of all your experiments. This allows you to clearly evaluate the data about what is working and what isnt and will help guide the course of future experiments. Actions to Open Design these types of experiments to help you open more fully to who you are right now, bringing that into acceptance, and also to open you to new possibilities in your life. For example, when I discovered (Raven) I had a lot of grief stored in my body that I couldnt get to because I believed those emotions would overwhelm or hurt me, I started experimenting with ways of opening to that grief. I tried several different modalities for releasing emotions in the body: yoga, massage, and Network Spinal Analysis. What worked best for
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me was the Network sessions, so for the next 6 months I did sessions just about every week with the intent of opening to those old emotions so I could clear them from my body. Here is another example: I (Raven) had a belief that I wasnt attractive. Part of the habitual behavior that was created by that belief was that I never approached or talked to women because they wouldnt want anything to do with me or would be scared by me, because I was so unattractive. The actions I designed to deal with this moved from a commitment to approach one woman every day and say hello, to approaching one woman a week and telling them I was attracted to them, and finally to asking one woman a month out on a date. Over the course of about a year these actions totally shattered my belief about being unattractive and removed the mask I held up to keep me safe from interacting with people. Like all such actions, it was very scary at first to actually DO what I said I was going to, and then it was incredibly freeing to break through the limitations this belief imposed on my life. In the beginning I couldnt even do the part of saying hello,I had to cut it back to asking them what time was. From there I eventually go to a place where I could do the full commitment of asking them out on a date. Actions to Clean Cleaning actions are those actions that are usually the most uncomfortable actions you can take. They are actions that
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directly challenge your habitual behaviors, or actions that work directly to reclaim the energy you are losing through your limiting beliefs. They are the actions that require the most courage, patience, and discipline for you to actualize. Just look at the areas you have the most resistance to and those will define your cleaning actions. One of the best cleaning tools is backtracking. Backtracking works great for beliefs that keep you from expressing your truth because you believe you will be punished or rejected for doing so. It is a practice of accepting yourself so fully that it is more important to you to serve your truth than anything else. Backtracking is perfect for practicing not taking things personally. Here is how it works: Anytime you discover that you had an interaction with someone where you said or did something that wasnt in your integrity, you go back to that person and tell them what you actually wanted to say. Examples: You are working on not gossiping with people. At the end of the day you realize you had an hour-long conversation with your sister that was almost purely gossip about your mother and brother. You go back to your sister the next day and say Yesterday I really wanted to talk to you and see how you were doing and tell you about what is
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really going on for me. I got scared you would reject me so I let the conversation degenerate into talking about mom and brother. I really dont want to be doing that anymore and Id like to tell you now how Im really doing. You are working on setting good boundaries and saying no to helping people when you dont have the energy. Today your best friend came over after work and asked you to help them move some furniture on Saturday. Even though this is the toughest work week youve experienced in a long time and you know you will be exhausted this weekend you said yes to them because you felt you should. Realizing this you call them up tonight and say, Jim, I said yes to you because I felt obligated to help you because you are my friend. I realize Im doing both of us a disservice to agree to help you because Im having a tough week. I need to say no to this weekend. You are working on being authentic. Your co-worker dumps on you because they are having a bad day. You just smile at them
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and tell them it will be ok even though you are offended and angry at their behavior. The next day approach them and say Yesterday I got caught in my good girl mask, and I want you to know I wasnt feeling nice, I felt offended and angry with you when you were blaming me for your bad day. The important thing with backtracking is to remember you are not looking for a particular response from the person. You are simply stating your truth for yourself, not to get them to apologize or to process the whole thing out with you, but to clear your own slate, and practice staying in your integrity. Backtracking works so well because our egos hate to admit being wrong. If you can force yourself to admit to being wrong the ego detests it so much it will begin helping you to stay in your integrity from moment to moment, just so it wont have to go back later. It is strange but true: you can co-opt your egos help, even though by helping you it will eventually undo itself. Our old self-identity finds backtracking so distasteful it will help you out if you prove to yourself that you will backtrack no matter what, by doing it faithfully over time. Another great cleaning tool is recapitulation. Recapitulation directly reclaims the energy you have invested in your beliefs. By holding the place of witness to your past, and deliberately pulling back your energy, two things happen. First,
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you clearly see the patterns of your behavior, and what exactly is triggering you to initiate action based on your belief. Second, you gather the energy of the exact vibration and frequency needed to maintain your awareness and make a different choice when a similar situation arises in the future. From your recapitulation you can design experiments that put you into a similar circumstance so you can practice making a new choice. For more information on recapitulation, see the Recapitulation Workbook listed in the reference section. Actions that Nourish Nourishing actions are those actions that support the way you want to be in world. To foster change, you create actions that nourish the new behaviors you want to exhibit that truly support you on your life path. When you wrote out your core beliefs you also wrote out the feeling states that those beliefs generate in you. By looking at the opposite of those states you will probably find the feeling states that you would like to be holding in your life. Nourishing actions are those that support and generate those feeling states that you desire in your life. For instance, if one of your core beliefs makes you feel impatient and anxious, what types of things could you do in your life that would make you feel relaxed and like you have plenty of time? Perhaps committing to taking a hot bath at the end of each day. Or getting up 15 minutes earlier than usual each day to do a grounding or relaxation meditation. Or not eating sugar or
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caffeine after lunch so you can sleep better. Get the idea? Actions that actually create the state you are looking for. These nourish mind, body, emotions, and spirit and inspire you to look for other opportunities to move into that state as you move through your day. Balancing the Actions The best way to approach initiating change is to find a balance between all four different types of actions. For as many difficult actions that you take to clean, do an equal amount to nourish your desired states. For as many actions as you do to clear your perception, do as many actions to open yourself to new possibilities and accept yourself exactly as you are right now. Balancing the actions creates a container for change that keeps things from getting overwhelming, and gives you lots of options each day to create movement away from your limitations and toward your new ways of being in the world.
The Art of Experimentation One of our favorite action tools is experimentation. Experiments are conscious actions directed at either uncovering or breaking limiting patterns and beliefs. They move us out of thinking or despairing about how to create change, to actually unveiling and breaking our structures with our actions.
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Experiments give us focus and purpose, and help us stay on track through the discomfort that can arise as we hit up against our edges. We take actions when we know exactly what we need to help us at a certain part of the spiral of change, or when we get clear inner direction. We run experiments when we want to gather more data or are stuck on what to do next. Experiments can be as simple as committing to go for walks five times a week over the next month to see if it changes your energy level. They can also be as complex as moving to a new city and taking on a job that is completely different from anything you have ever done before to help break your selfidentification. Below we will share some experiments designed to help bring awareness and freedom for each of the pleaser, controller, isolator, and distracter strategies. When you run any type of experiment, it is important to be open about what the outcome will be! If you already believe you know what will be the end result of your experiment, it is not really an experiment, is it? Here is an example of one of Ravens early experiments: When I was going through the process of uncovering these beliefs in myself, one of the beliefs I discovered was that I believed I was very un-attractive. I believed that no one really saw me as a potential partner (sexual or otherwise) because I was ugly and unusual looking, and in short very unappealing to
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people of the opposite sex. One day I ran an experiment to try and break this belief by going out with some aware friends to a bar to try and interact with people I was attracted to. My experience of that evening was that none of the women in the bar looked at me all night. No one noticed me, I couldnt get anyones attention to talk to them, and no one wanted to interact with me. When I was telling my experience to my friends they looked at me with disbelief. Their experience was that many women looked at me all through the evening. Several of them flirted with me and went out of their way to get my attention. From their perspective most of the women at the bar checked me out and liked what they saw and would have interacted with me if I had talked to them, and several actually initiated that contact and I distanced myself from them immediately by looking away, or seeming not to hear that they were addressing me. At first I didnt believe them, of course! However at the time I was doing a lot of awareness practices and had developed a great ability to go back through scenes from the past, recalling detail and tracking my energy, so they suggested I spend some time reviewing the evening at the bar. When I did so I was truly stunned. They were right! I had filtered out anyone who glanced my way, automatically turning my head away so I didnt see them. I had felt embarrassed and therefore ignored anyone who said hi to me, and then immediately blocked the memory of both the embarrassed feeling and the fact that they had approached me at all.
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Not only that, I saw that I had refined all of this down to such a fine art that I was reading the room energetically, so that many times if someone was about to look at me, I would turn my head the other way before they even started to glance my direction. It was truly amazing the way this belief was filtering my reality, completely distorting my perception of other people and the events that were unfolding in my life. I took the data from this initial experiment and went on to create many more experiments to help me break my belief that I was unattractive. Just seeing the data that I might be wrong about what others thought to me was not enough. This was only the start of a several year process of unweaving old agreements that were wrapped up in I am not attractive. What I learned from this experiment was that I could not trust my perceptions, since I was obviously not only filtering, but also created my reality through the filter! Experiments are great at uncovering where we have blind spots, places that we cannot clearly see the truth. We get so habituated to acting from the strategies that support our beliefs that it can be almost impossible to see that we are doing them in the moment. Again we must be willing to be wrong, and to continue to run experiments to not just see, but clear, the old agreements and patterns out.
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Tracking It is vital to do very precise tracking when you are running an experiment. Here is a sample chart of when I (Raven) was working on not being co-dependant with people by care taking them. Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun # of things I did for other people # of things I did for myself Amount of free time I had My emotional state today After charting this over several months I saw how much of my time was spent on other people at the expense of my own well being. It also pointed out how if I over-did helping people over a number of days my ability to stay centered quickly declined. This led me to creating actions that limited how many times a week I could help others out, and actions that enforced me taking time out for myself. Out of running good experiments and tracking the data, you will discover what action steps to take next on your path, or what your next experiments are. We recommend that you always have an action plan to guide you, and that one of the actions on your list be an experiment. Have fun! Be creative! Yes, you can do it! We believe in you
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PHYSICAL EXPLORATION Little Actions for Mind, Energy, Emotions, Body Based on the work of Heather Ashs book, The Four Elements of Change, here are more examples of experiments/actions to support purifying and finding integrity with each aspect of self. Mental Purification Meditate for five to ten minutes each day. Practice clearing your mind of clutter and focusing on your breath. Witness the busyness of your mind. When sitting sometimes your mind will keep chattering the whole time, stay steady. The practice of sitting will bring more calmness into the rest of your life, even when it seems you are doing it wrong! Trust your intent to get quiet. Make a commitment to stop judging yourself. Keep your awareness strong and anytime you notice a judgment, say period! Imagine the judge tracking mud in your temple, and send it outside! Know that you may do this a couple of hundred times a day! Be diligent in not feeding your judge. Start speaking your truth and telling yourself the truth, without punishment. If you notice yourself telling a lie or partial truth, go
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back to the person and clean it up. It can be awkward, but it is a great practice that clears up a lot of confusion and mental shuffling. When we tell ourselves the truth about what we want or do not want in our lives we cut out a lot of chatter. When we are willing to speak our truth to others without rejecting ourselves, our sense of integrity returns. Energetic Purification Do a daily meditation with fire where you ask the flame to help you burn away the old energetic structures that do not serve you. Breath the fire into your being, visualizing it clearing the tangled brush. Use your hands to trace the edge of your energetic field, defining it, and fill yourself up with energy and vibrancy all the way to the edge of your field. Practice shielding. When we are not aware our energy can be affected by other peoples attitudes and opinions. If you are sensitive to other peoples energetic or emotional states, you must learn to shield your energetic field. Energy follows imagination, so your best tool is strong visualization. My favorite is to imagine myself wearing a beautiful cloak that keeps out energy I do not want and lets love in. Cindy taught the Jumpers! To imagine being surrounded by a very, very fine golden mesh. Play with different images until you find one you like. Keep your heart open when you shield it is a bad happen to close or constrict and believe you are shielding you are actually
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armoring, which is different. Shielding allows us to stay soft and present no matter what is happening around us. Once a week go for a walk in nature. Call in the trees and spirits and juiciness of nature around you. When you feel full, pick a flat space and run as fast as you can for a quick burst. Stop. Feel the energy rushing through your system and feed it to every part of you. Get bigger, bigger, bigger! Connect to nature from this bigness. Now walk slowly, calming your breath and letting all of your muscles relax completely. Get soft inside. Get quiet. Bring your energy close inside of you and ground it into the earth. Slowly come to a stop and stand still, finding your internal energetic balance. Reach out and connect to nature from this still center. Repeat three times, practicing energetic fluidity and exploring the polarities of big energy and still energy. Emotional Purification Take five minutes each day, whether you feel like it or not, to pound on pillows and move some energy. You can also do this by dancing vigorously and yelling. Use your voice and make sound; scream, cry, om, growl let your emotions MOVE! To clear old emotions: Find a movie that touches the specific emotion you are working with and will open you. Allow yourself to cry and express (grief, fear, anger, etc.) while you practice being very aware of your thoughts. Go into the emotion fully, but keep
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part of your awareness keen on finding the specific story you are telling yourself. When you finish emoting, notice if you feel lighter or heavier. If heavier, who do you need to forgive? What do you need to release from the past? Watch yourself over the next two days to see if your mind starts to recreate the story. Shift your focus to a mantra or chant or practice opening and breathing fully. Do not let your mind re-stimulate the emotion. And if the emotion does come up, go express it! There is a very strong dysfunctional relationship between the mind and the emotional body that keep emotions trapped in our bodies instead of allowing them to arise and clear. Practice witnessing your emotions not through the filter of the mind, but from a place of curiosity. How does an emotion make your body feel, or your energy? Stop thinking about your emotions and whether they are good or bad, and start perceiving them from an energy point of view, neither good nor bad. How can you express emotions without creating more internal or external drama? Physical Purification Crank up your favorite music and dance naked in front of your altar once a day. Add a mirror, so you can dance in front of the mirror. Ask the Divine to help you release body shame and hatred and reclaim your self-love as you dance.
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Do not use other peoples body size to judge yourself Stop looking at other peoples bodies and do your best to avoid magazines and TV so you stop being inundated with images. Take down all the mirrors in your house, and practice feeling your body rather than looking at it all the time. Ask it: what do you want? And go beneath the habits and quick fixes to listen to your bodys wisdom and depth. Exercise and /or cleanse. Doing some exercise three times a week will make you feel stronger and more in your body. Use the time you exercise to bring acceptance and gratitude to your physical form. Also remove one thing from your diet that is not serving you: it could be the potato chips at lunch time, or sugar, or eating more veggies at home and less McDonalds. Go slow. If you are ready for a big cleanse, see resource below. Actions and Experiments to Unravel Your Strategies Keep breathing as you read and practice the exercises below! You can work with your own strategy, or do all of them. No matter which strategy you work with these targeted exercises will all teach you something about yourself and others.
For controllers One of the best actions I know for controllers to break their fixation on control is to go on an opinion fast. What you do
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on an opinion fast is you go for a set period of time without speaking an opinion about anything. Controllers have opinions about everything (which they may or may not express to the outside world.) They always know the best way to do something. They are always sure and confident that if people would just do things the way they want them to do them everything would turn out right. Because of this they have an ongoing internal dialogue about what the best thing is to do, are constantly evaluating what should be done, and always forming an opinion about the next best action. To go on an opinion fast: Whenever you are involved in any conversation around anything that regards a sharing of opinions, or deciding on a course of action, stay silent. Allow the preferences and opinions of the other people around you to rule the actions that are going to be taken. For most controllers this is an incredibly difficult thing to do because they are so sure that other peoples opinions will cause a course of action that is the wrong one, or that will not meet the desired goal. The truth is some of the time you may be right, but so what? Was it really that important, so important that you expended an enormous amount of energy around being right, when in all likelihood things would have worked out fine anyway? What about all the drama and hard feelings that happened because you got your way? Didnt you have to deal with that too?
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A large portion of the time you are just flat wrong. Other people have better ideas than you, but you rarely listen to these ideas that could actually save you energy because you were so invested in doing it your way. Another portion of the time there are a half a dozen ideas on the table that would all lead to a satisfactory result, why are you spilling your energy out to insure it happens this one way that you came up with? The truth is that reality will continue to exist even if you dont get your way! All of the energy wasted above could be going to your connection with the Divine, to your ability to attend to What Is without limitations, to focusing on your own inner peace. The lie controllers tell themselves is that if things arent done the way they want them done nothing will happen, nothing will be accomplished, which stimulates enormous fear in them because they place their own value on the outcome of the actions they are involved in. An opinion fast will quickly show you all the ways you are leaking energy into this fear matrix and give you the motivation to choose your actions from a more conscious and open space. The best way to not act out on your opinions is to not speak them at all. Dont even put them out there on the table and you will remove a lot of the internal pressure you are feeling to make things happen the right way. The work for controllers is to practice surrender by taking actions that are not being dictated by fear-based internal opinions. Another great experiment for controllers is to take actions that have no meaning whatsoever and do things just for the hell of it, without any attachment to the outcome. Initially for a
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controller this seems ludicrous, why would I take an action if there is no desired outcome? This is the voice of the controller! From the perspective of Spirit, every act we take in this lifetime is small and insignificant. Each movement is happening in the context of something so vast and so incredible that the actions that you take really have no bearing on Spirit at all. It continues to exist undivided and unchanged no matter what you do. It is your self-importance that makes your acts so meaningful. It is your attachment to control that keeps you from feeling the perfection flowing around you all the time. The resistance that a controller feels around this concept is that then everything is hopeless, why take any action at all if nothing has any meaning? The answer is that you take action because it is your joy to act, it is your joy to engage with life no matter what is happening without attachment, without a fixation on the outcome that limits your ability to enjoy the action itself. Doing something just for the hell of it gives you the opportunity to act just from joy, just from openness, just from spaciousness. When you act from this place your life is full regardless of the outcome of events. You have brought everything that you are into each action, so you are not constantly worried about whether everything will be ok, whether the desired result will happen, and whether its the most efficient thing to do. Letting go of control frees you to truly be present in each moment instead of having your attention on worrying about the right thing to do.
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For pleasers One of the best actions for a pleaser to take to break their habitual behaviors is to just say NO. Go for one week out of a month, or one day out of a week and simply say no to anyone who asks you to do something for them. This can be incredibly uncomfortable for a pleaser! Their whole identification is built on doing things for other people, built on caretaking people and making sure they are ok, even projecting into the future what people might need and trying to make it happen. Since the unconscious habit is to say yes no matter what, the practice for undoing it is to go for a specific period of time and consciously say no to everyone. Then watch and notice what goes on in your internal dialogue when you do that. Notice all the places you weigh your worth solely based on other peoples responses to you, based on how much validation you are getting for doing things for others. Saying no is an incredible practice of awareness. One of the people I gave this exercise to said no to everyone for an entire week. She did it impeccably, she was very clear when she said no to everyone who asked her to do something. Then the following week came around and she went back and contacted every one of those people she had said no to and said yes to them! She was totally unconscious that she had done so until we pointed it out to her. What this showed her was the way saying "yes" was ingrained inside her. She could will herself to say no, but the truth was her internal dialogue was kicking her ass the
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whole time and she didnt catch it. As she stopped the experiment that behind the scenes judgment made her go and take back every no so that her judge would quit whaling on her in the background about what a selfish/self-absorbed person she was for taking time for herself by saying no to other people. This doesnt mean the experiment failed, far from it. It simply pointed out how entrenched her desire to say yes was. By going back and running that experiment again and again you can come to a place of equanimity with other peoples responses to you, a place of neutrality and choice. The other thing you find when you say no to people is that many people dont care! The pleaser strategy is telling us this lie that if we say no, no one will like us, and then they wont give us affection or value us at all. Many times what you will find is that when you say no people go oh, ok and they will go look for help from someone else, or just do the activity themselves. There will also be times when you say no to someone that you have developed a co-dependant relationship with and they will be disappointed or upset. However, if you watch what happens much of the time they will take care of it or drop it, and most of the time they will come back to you later and wont even remember that you had told them no. It is your pleaser that makes communication such a black and white proposition that you have to say yes all the time or you will be abandoned in some way. And yes, occasionally someone might not like you if you dont say yes to their every whim and desire. Then the question to ask yourself is
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why are you associating with this person? Why would you spend your time with someone who only values you if you are doing things for them, and there is no other basis for the relationship? Why would you put yourself through that? This experiment can give you all kinds of data about yourself and your relationships and bring you to a new place of clarity and choice. As one of our mentors Gini Gentry once said to Raven if you cant say no, then your yes isnt worth a damn! This is because when you say a pleaser yes you dont mean it. You are not doing it because you truly want to from a place of service and respect, you are doing it because you want something back from the other person. So quit lying to yourself about your motivations and make conscious choices about your actions that are in your integrity! Another fantastic exercise for a pleaser to break their fixation is to not justify anything. Set a period of time where you take actions that you want to take and dont explain why you are taking them to anyone. There are two ways of accomplishing this: The first is to just take actions that you want to and if anyone asks you why you are doing it your response is because I want to. Period. You do not explain it beyond this. Pleasers often feel an incredible need to justify when they take an action that supports them instead of someone else. They do this because they feel bad about doing things for themselves when they could be using the time to do something for someone else, so they have to build up a lot of justification so that their judge
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doesnt take them out for being selfish or self centered or By not justifying you will bring all of that up to the surface, and you will see the ways you abuse yourself whenever you take an action that really serves you instead of doing things for others. The other way to break the pleaser grip is to take absurd actions and then not explain why you are doing them. By taking an action that makes little sense to you or others you start to move away from needing to justify your actions or evaluate yourself based on what the outcome is for other people (or yourself). You begin to remove the attachment to getting approval from other people (or your own judge) for the actions you are taking. An example of this would be to wear the same outrageous polka dotted shirt every day for a week, and not tell people why you are doing it. Or take a completely random action in public, and when people ask you about it you just smile and say, because I wanted to. Do not give any explanation or justification for it, and just sit with whatever internal dialogue and discomfort that arises. The breaking of the habit of justification works for all the strategies. When we do something outside the bounds of what the strategy considers acceptable behavior we always want to explain and justify it away so that our own judge does not punish us. Deliberately breaking the rules begins to bring us into a place of being able to consciously make choices about what actions we want to take from our integrity. Obviously if you played this out indefinitely you would just be creating a new strategy of rebellion, but initially these types of actions will free
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up the energy locked in the fixation we have on our beliefs, shaking up the structure enough that we can begin working toward true choice. For isolators One of the actions we love to give isolators at workshops and public events is go and give at least ten people a hug. A great way for an isolator to break their pattern is to consciously go and make connections with as many people as they can as they move through their day. Taking on a commitment like hugging ten people a day, or starting conversations with three new people each day, are ways of breaking the unconscious pattern of always withdrawing from social situations and pulling away from people because you are afraid of what their responses will be. Other good actions are: When you are in a situation where people are expressing a lot of emotion, do not leave. Stay there, and practice being present and not taking their emotions personally. Keep breathing and work to stay centered regardless of the emotions other people are having. Notice what your internal dialogue says. Another action is to go out in public like a mall or downtown shopping area and sit in public view of everyone in a crowded area. Now, look around! Do not look down at the table or read a book. Consciously look around and make solid eye contact with as many people as you can. For most isolators making eye contact with strangers in terrifying because it creates
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a sense of connection and now they feel like there is something they will have to do and they dont know what it is. And they worry about what others will do What if they, they might think Listen to the huge deal your mind makes of just making eye contact! Look away and take some deep breaths each time, then look up again and make eye contact with a new person. Record the thoughts that arise, this is your prison! These are the constant limitations you place on yourself from fear that keep you from making deep connections with people. Making eye contact will start to break the fixation on thinking people are constantly going to hurt you, abandon you, or not like you, or whatever it is that you are telling yourself. It brings that dialogue to the forefront where you can look at it, which will eventually allow you to do something about it! You will see very quickly why you have an isolation strategy, what your judge is telling you about yourself when you go to connect to other people. For distracters For distracters the types of actions you need to take to break the fixation on distraction are actions that create a conscious structure that you cant get out of. Distracters are constantly bouncing from thing to thing to thing with no structure. They always have an excuse or reason for dodging out of what they are currently doing and going off to do something else. They are constantly re-prioritizing one thing above the other so that they never stay focused on anything. A great thing to take on is something like a martial art, or a yoga class, any practice where
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there are other people around that will support you in staying focused on a particular activity for a set period of time. Most distracters are not capable in the beginning of staying focused by themselves, so activities that you do by yourself really do not work very well. It is much better to take a class doing something physical several times a week. It is best to pick things in the beginning that really help you stay focused on your body, as most distracters are very disconnected from their body and as a result have a hard time focusing on anything for long. They are constantly taking themselves out of the present, so anything that has a structured way of keeping you in this moment, with the support of other people doing the same thing all around you works the best. Another exercise for distracters is to buy a watch that really works! Make sure it has an alarm that you can set to go off every few minutes. Each time it does let it remind you to take a breath, to come back into awareness of your body and your surroundings, to re-focus on what you are doing right now. For myself, when I was working through distraction I would set my computer to ring a bell every 20 minutes. When it went off I had to stand up, stretch a little, look away from the screen, remember I had a body, then go back to what I was doing. Having alarms, watches, friends who remind you, anything that helps you maintain structure and presence will help you break this strategy.
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Chapter Five Spiritual Integrity Surrender and Holding Hands with Death
Spiritual Integrity is a cellular recognition that you are not your mind, emotions, or body, but the light that illuminates from within. As you move more and more into Spiritual Integrity your mind, emotions, and form become sweetly transparent, so the luminous light of your spirit radiates out. Knowing your purpose, making action plans, and running experiments are all steps towards regaining your integrity, piece by piece. When you honestly look at your mind, emotions, and body and are willing to take action or run experiments to create more spaciousness in your being, you are beckoning your own Spiritual Integrity. The truth is that the core of us resides in Spiritual Integrity. The light that we are is not confused or dimmed by our human struggles. The issue is our continuing identification with our mind, emotions, and body rather than our essence. If you could fully stand in your own radiance, the illusion of yourself as a separate mind, your attachment to certain emotional states and repulsion of others, and your identification with your physical form would fall away like discarded clothing. We have each had these moments of touching Spirit and
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remember our Oneness. And yet, over and over again we forget the big picture and worry about the little things. The game is two-fold! To cultivate the experience our true nature of Spiritual Integrity as often as possible, and to untangle, strand by strand, the beliefs that hook our attention away from this truth. To support this process we invite you to nourish two states of being as you take all of your actions: surrender and using death as an ally. Surrendering the Outcome of Your Actions Whenever we become attached to the outcome of our actions we limit the universes ability to respond to our intent, while at the same time causing ourselves pain and suffering. When we attach to an outcome, we begin to form a new limited belief about this is the way it is suppose to be and we once again make ourselves suffer. (Having fun yet?) We judge ourselves (or others) for every little detail that didnt come out the way we thought it should. We feel victimized by life for not giving us what we want. All the while, we miss the fact that the universe in fact provided us exactly what we asked for, but it came in a form that we didnt recognize, or we didnt realize what we were really asking for in the first place. Often people hear the word surrender and think, stop trying or Ive lost. When surrendering to the Divine, neither
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could be farther from the truth. Surrender is a verb! It means there is an action to be taken to make it real. What is being surrendered is the attachment, the part of you that feels pain when things do not manifest like you thought they would. Is that really something you are not willing to give up? If you stop and look at this construct your mind has created about manifesting things in the world it gets pretty humorous. What you will see is things actually NEVER turn out the way your mind pictured them! The mind has no idea what is going to happen in the future, just a bunch of recollections of what happened in the past. It is constantly wrong about what manifests. Of course it glosses over this all the time, not paying attention to the fact that: 1) 2) 3) It got what it wanted, but all of the details of how it happened were not what it expected or It got what it wanted, but then decided it was all wrong and that it really wanted something else, or It didnt get what it wanted but the reason was because it got fixated on something that was between it and what it wanted, or 4) It said it wanted something, but then never put another lick of energy or attention on that other than to complain that it didnt have it. If you were Spirit (which of course you are, but thats another story) would you grant a wish to a whiner who wasnt willing to put any energy toward what they want?
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Yet for all of this data that we immediately find if we look, we go on and on believing the lies the mind is telling us: that it knows what is going on, knows best what needs to happen next, and is capable of creating it in exacting detail regardless of everything else happening in the universe. What, you thought your intent was the only one being set in any given moment? Give Spirit a break here, you try creating something that satisfies everybodys little ego desires in every moment, its tough work! It requires a few compromises! Show a little compassion! Surrender is about letting go of all this crap. Letting go of all the if onlys, ands, buts, and complaints. It is about rounding up all your energy and going for it NOW, instead living your life in regret for what could have been, or longing for what might be. The key concept of surrender is to relax, set your intent, take the actions in alignment with them and then look at what happens. Learn to have faith in the process, and to trust the unfolding of changing your old patterns. Let go of your selfimportant mind that thinks everything revolves around it and every little detail of life is a personal insult against its desires. A great way to practice surrender is to practice gratitude. Take time each day to be thankful for your life and the people and events that are helping you grow. Find a place of thanks for all the wonder and mystery of this life that you have already experienced. No, really! Write it down every day! Every place you had success, every thing in your life you have gratitude for, every gift you received today. This will change your attitude
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about life and the work you are doing quicker than anything we know of.
Working with the Angel of Death How often have you really considered the fact that you are going to die? All spiritual traditions invite us to contemplate our death as part of our path. But how many of us actually have integrated the enormity of the concept of our own death? Everyone has an intellectual understanding that they will die. You cannot refute the evidence of the physical world; nobody who has a body gets out of here alive. But have you really internalized the fact that this is it? That this existence, this being that you think you are, this mind, will at some point cease to exist. Yes, who we really are will continue in some form, but who you think you are, your personality, the I in any statement you make about yourself or your life has a finite existence. Imagine if you really believed that each moment was your last. Your last chance to take an action, to speak your truth, to love yourself, to love somebody, think a thought, to just be with the wonder, mystery, and joy of being alive in a body. Can you imagine the richness that would bring to every minute of your life? Imagine the freedom that would bring you, no time for your normal bullshit, this is the last moment, only the decision of how best to use it would fill your mind. Imagine living from that place in your day today life.
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If you cannot hold this concept moment to moment, then what is in the way? This is the work before us. This is what brings Spiritual Integrity out of a concept and into life. It is about getting all the stuff out of the way that keeps you from enjoying this very moment, because this is it baby, nothing else exists but this moment. Our entire life comes into existence and disappears in each moment; if you are not aware of this moment then what is it you think you are living? It is a dream of the past or a projection into the future - why waste your time with that? The juice is happening right now, the only thing worth our time is this moment. Past and future only exist in this moment. To pretend otherwise is to waste the opportunity of a lifetime, this lifetime, the only one you will ever have as this body, as this personality. The key to living our lives in the present is to bring the proper mood to how we view death. Not the morbid, whining, victimized mood of a society that does not want to think about death because It is not fair, it is so sad or Why would I want to think of death, it is so depressing? Instead we need to bring the mood of a warrior to how we view death. For us this is best exemplified by the following quote of Don Juan talking to Carlos Castaneda in the book Journey to Ixtlan: For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous
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desert, in this marvelous time. I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while; in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it. The first and foremost thing we need to do to assume this mood in our lives is to take responsibility for our actions. Taking responsibility means measuring each act we take against the fact that death is waiting, ready to tap us at any minute. It means doing our best all the time, no vacations. It does not mean going into judgment around the actions we take, or trying to bypass dealing with our stuff so we can pretend to be in the present. It means seriously looking at what is keeping us out of the present moment and committing to doing whatever work is necessary to bring our full awareness and presence into each delicious minute left to us in this Great Mystery of existence. Being willing means you are willing to die. Willing to die to all the concepts you hold to, all the thoughts and story lines that keep you from the infinite Now. Freedom is being able in your next breath to let it all go, all concepts, all ideas, your entire personal history, and any fantasies about the future and just BE. That takes a lot of willingness! It takes the full understanding and personal validation that everything you are thinking about, every belief you are investing yourself in is a lie that if you believe it will pull you out of the present, out of your connection with God and Goddess, and back into the hell of identifying with something that is guaranteed to change momentarily.
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We suffer because we identify with things that are always changing. And make no mistake, in this world of Form EVERYTHING is always changing! Nothing is constant in the illusion. Death is part of creation. Anything that is created must change and die. You may not think it is fair, but it is simply the way it is. That one understanding can make you suffer or free you forever. And, of course, even death is part of the illusion! Resolving our confusion around death can lead us to freedom. Letting go of our fear of death can lead to full presence in each moment. Understanding fully that the existence we find ourselves in is finite, yet the Awareness of this existence is Infinite. In the first stage of dealing with death we have no understanding of it at all. Having no models we feel deranged and out of control just thinking about loss. Consider Ravens perspective as an eighteen-year old when a loved one died: Momentary Destruction of the Ego through Trauma From Ravens journal 1986 It all came down to one night. One nexus of repressed emotion set off by a girlfriend. In the last six months my great grandfather died: (stiff, holding back the tears, the strange blank whitewash of a modern funeral. Guy looks alive, how can he look so alive in a coffin,
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random thoughts of how to honor him, this isnt what he would have wanted, he was a hunter, understood death, I know Ill sacrifice a rabbit on his grave when none of these whacked out, sycophantic, yuppies are around), Parents divorce: (I council them to, hate it that they fight all the time, better if they were apart I tell them. Yet what I never say is better if you dont fight, why cant it be the way it was, why have you both changed, why am I changing, its not fair, I want it back the way it was, I want to leave, I dont know what I want, Fuck, what do I do now?) And I decide I have to leave girlfriend because she is selling cocaine, come back the next night and she is with another guy, making him my favorite dinner. Suddenly everything collapses, everything snaps, all the things I think I am fall apart. Chaos of despair, blame, grieving the loss of all I thought I was. Screaming into the night Who am I? I? I? I? Hearing the echo of the Is in my mind as if it were an endless cave. Total, never ending darkness. Desolation, I hate life, I hate God, its so unfair. How could she throw away all we had? How could he die? How could they stop being together, stop being my family? Christ, this is unreal, I cant believe it, what the hell is this? What is this stupid life? How does it end, what am I doing here.. On and on the mind screeches out its demands that it be fair, that it get what it wants, that things work out happily ever after. Unable to handle the loss of itself it descends into a mad
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whirl of emotion, finally letting go of control into a sobbing release it has needed for months. Then the denial, the re-walling away of the emotion. The armoring of I can handle it re-arises because I do not want to feel the pain. I do not understand it, just want to get away from it as quick as I can. Distract, Isolate, move on. Its all I can do. No models of how to really understand it, how to move through it, how to see it in some sort of context. Just see pain and want to run. This is normally how we handle death. We deny it, we run from the feelings we have around it. We spend enormous energy trying to not feel any sense of loss. To deny the loss we will do anything. We will tell ourselves any lie, just for the illusion of safety. All of this to get away from a quickly changing feeling, that would be gone in nothing flat if we were to just turn and feel it fully. In the next stage of the journey we begin to ask the hard questions. We delve as deeply as we can into our feelings and we work to figure out how our lives fit into the spiritual teachings we have been taught. We are on the spiritual path, we know we have to deal with our death. So at a given moment we start working on it we start trying to figure it out. Here is a piece from Ravens process at this point in the journey: The Illusion Of Sasha From Ravens Journal 2001 (my beautiful dog friend who has now passed away)
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What I am missing are memories of her that no longer exist anyway. The grief is over not being able to have these experiences happen again, when in fact it is already impossible for them to happen again because the Sasha and the Raven that those events happened to no longer exist. So the grief is telling me a lie, it is saying the experiences Ive had in the past can be duplicated, when in fact those experiences are gone forever. At the same time those experiences are happening right now, time isnt linear, it is all one moment, so those experiences are happening with as much validity as what is going on in this moment at all times. When Im asleep time does not exist, therefore it cant be a constant, therefore things are all happening in some other manner than a linear form, it feels like right now that the only other viable option is that it is all happening at once. That being the case, all things are equal and exist in this moment, birth-life-death-all of it. So what is there to grieve about when nothing could ever actually be gone? But doesnt this then mean that everything is an illusion? If the memories arent real then is the present moment any more real? I feel like I exist, but by the time I think and then write that the moment I felt it no longer exists, it is only an intangible memory. What does that mean? Did I actually exist in the moment I thought it, and now that moment has ceased to exist (and thus the me that was there has ceased to exist) or does it still exist and this is just another moment that is itself a complete and eternal existence?
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When I was walking the other day the experience was that each step was a separate and complete existence, yet those moments did flow into one another. Thinking about it now it seems like the moments did really flow onward, the previous instant no longer existing, a completely new reality being created in each new step. Which would mean its not all happening at once, or it is but its also being destroyed in each moment. I can feel my mind almost panicking at these thoughts, it gets tied up in knots trying to understand paradox, which it seems fundamentally unable to do. I can say oh yeah it is a paradox, both points of view are correct very easily, but when I actually try and embody those concepts with my mind it really seems like it cant do it, its only option is to quit thinking which it equates with death so it is very reluctant to do it. So what Im left with is negation. OK, so the thing that is clear is I do not exist in the past. My memories are not alive and are about events that can never be duplicated exactly again, therefore they will never exist again. So what happens when I have a memory in this moment? in this moment having a memory is what is real, it is not the event the memory is referring to that is real, but the playing back of the memory that is real. For the same reason I cannot exist in the future. Me having a fantasy can exist in the moment, but the fantasy itself doesnt exist, it is the movie of it playing that is existing. So how can the device that is storing the memories and generating the fantasies not be real in the
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moment when it is recording and playing them? It would have to be or nothing would be recorded. Of course this would explain why no one ever really has a memory of Consciousness, because the mechanism for recording the memory doesnt exist in the moment the recording needs to take place. If I take that tact I definitely wind up in the place that none of this exists, the only thing that exists is Consciousness and I can never know what that is with my mind because it isnt part of existence. Do I exist in this moment or not? Who is it that exists in this moment? Can everything actually exist and not be in existence at the same time? At this stage we work to find meaning and understanding. Often this understanding stays intellectual. It is difficult to validate because the mind must be shut off to really experience life, death and all that is in between. We have to get still and silent to grasp any real truths, and instead of finding the poetry of our existence in this wildly divine mystery tour of life we get trapped by the paradoxes the mind is loathe to unravel. The desire is there to find the truth, but at this point true willingness is still eluding us because we still want to figure it out instead of surrendering into it. Death becomes a little stale, a little clinical. In the next stage we instead see death as the truly awesome teaching of wonder and joy that it is. This next writing is from Ravens journal of his recent experience skydiving:
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The Eagles View Skydiving through the Infinite From Ravens journal 2006 Breathing. One and a half hours of breathing as we waited for the military to get done with their flights so it would be our turn. Lots of time to contemplate death, lots of time to breathe into it and through it time and again. Breathing. What breath would be good? Jai asked. 5 count I say, heart breath. He nods his head and moves off to talk with someone. Breathing. Creation on the inhalation, Destruction on the exhalation. The whole world breathes with me. Energy patterns shifting and moving. Coming together, moving apart, endless chain of events. ] Stillness. Breathing. Now I can feel through time, I already feel the other side of this event, I notice it, feel myself through time. It has already happened. So has my death. Let it all go. Breath in, breathe out. 5 count. Stillness. Here we go! Mind takes off for a bit. Taciturn instructor! Will this be fun? Harness isnt very comfortable. Is this strap really tight enough? 5 minutes of instruction is it? Breathe, oh yeah, ok. Breathe. 5 count. Feeling everyone in the room. Heart opening, such richness. Out we go, heading toward the plane! I watch the ground pull away as the plane takes off, just another plane ride right? I have been on maybe 30 planes this year, but this is very different, Im going to jump out of this one.. wild!
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About 5 minutes in I pull myself away from the beauty of the world out the window as one of the instructors makes a joke to Jai about feeling like he was forgetting something important. I laugh with them and grin hugely to myself. Here we are joking in the face of death. I like it, that feeling of laughter, of happiness bubbling through my system. I choose it, I choose to feel this way during the last few moments of my life. I would much rather have this feeling of peaceful cheerfulness than of terror and angst against the universe. Who would not, right? Yet how often to people choose fear over love? All the time. It feels nice to be able to make a choice around my state, to have awareness of that choice and know it is conscious. To take responsibility for it and for anything I might start to do to take myself out of it. Choose. Simple. Not easy, but simple. Now looking out the window everything shifts. My perception really begins to expand. I start feeling and seeing life from the standpoint of the Eagle as the plane rises so far above the ground, then above the clouds. Seeing my whole life, everything it took to get me to this point, and everything it would take to bring me back here again if I died in the next few moments. When I was a teen I remember the horror I had of reincarnation, of having to go through all of this again and again. But from where I am now, from the Eagle, it is not a problem, it was all good, it was all ok. From the big picture it wasnt a big deal, there isnt any suffering, it is all just playing out, and whatever happens is what is and since its all one thing its all perfect just the way it is.
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I have this feeling a lot, but it is good to get the validation here. It is nice to feel that center, that deep knowing as I stare out the door of a plane I am about to jump out of. It is different having the stimulus right in front of me, no sitting on a meditation pillow here, there is a lot going on. The body is reacting, pumping adrenaline, there are excited energy fields all around me, life living itself in full gusto! Yet here is my breath as we move toward the door, here is my breath at the door, just as Id promised myself. Here I am in the stillness, breathing as Im suddenly falling toward the earth at 120 miles an hour. Calm, knowing without description, feeling beyond sensation, connection and quiet, movement and excitement, falling and flying. Wow. And then there was the cloud. We passed them on the way up, what a trip, and now here I am falling toward a cloud, racing down onto it from above. Falling toward an infinite field of soft white, a golden halo (the reflection of the sun) growing larger on the surface, shadow of me within it, a brilliant tube of light, Wow, here we go, here is death coming up fast. Then Whoomph!, everything changes, falling through grayness, chaos, dampness, will it end?, then Whoomph! bursting back out into light and color, openness and expansive beauty. Life come around again in all its glory. Of course you know all these words came after! In the stillness of the moment everything was in each instant and no description stood between That and me. There was just wind, light, clouds, humans, parachutes, and earth. All one beautiful
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raging dance of energy and depth of stillness with nothing happening at all. It was grand! Swooshing down under the canopy getting in my body what those birds are always doing when they bank and turn and ride the currents of air. Ill never see them gliding the same way again, I will always feel that acceleration as you make a turn, that broadness of vision, seeing so much of the earth all at once, and that soft whumph as you backwash your wings and come to rest ever so gently on the ground. Elation, euphoria of a good adrenaline rush, and the sure knowledge that time has passed, here I am on the other side of an event once again, and just like this experience ended so to shall all experiences pass. And you know, thats just fine, it truly is all good! What else can I can say but JUMP! The infinite has ways of holding and catching you that you have never imagined! When we learn to embrace the Angel of Death, we understand beyond words that change is essential to growth. Life is not stagnant. It is ever flowing, ever moving, ever being created and ever being destroyed. Change is inevitable and should not be avoided, but embraced. Death is the greatest teacher in this regard. Think of how many times something leaving your life has made room for something more to come forward, to be created. Over time everything you know, everything you are, everything you perceive as reality will change. It will cease to exist as you
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know it now and will be different, completely different. Not one thing that you know now will stay the same over time. In each moment all is created and all is destroyed, and yet the underlying formless consciousness does not. Pure Awareness remains, but can not be known by the part of you that knows things. All else is subject to deaths rules, to deaths flow. The flow of creation and death is ever present in everything you do. Embrace it and it will free you of suffering. Deny it and cling to anything and it will cause you suffering. All comes back to death that is created. Knowing that the seeds of death are in every new beginning brings you to a place of flow, of moving fluidly through life, knowing it will change, yet knowing that is ok. That is the way of this existence, it ebbs and flows, it is a fluid symphony, not a stagnant note. It is a joy and a sorrow and the beauty of god, the one life force, flows through it all. It is foolish to act as if you will never die. Look around. Death claims everyone and everything in your existence. Nothing is beyond it. All rots, decays, transforms, and changes. It is the way of life, part of its process, part of its growth and aliveness. To remove death is to remove life, and to create stagnations and disharmony. Knowledge of death is knowledge of eternity. Through it you can access the infinite. Allow it into your consciousness and you will be free of the limitations that you claim as your own. Give them to death, let go of all you know, all you think you are. It will take it all eventually anyway, why not chose it consciously? By doing so it will lend you the clarity to see beyond your life into
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the infinite expansion and stillness that is your birthright. Let go of the illusion of immortality and you will be at peace with yourself and the world around you. Are you ready? Can you let it all go in this moment? If not, you are suffering and that pain will continue until you surrender your small self up to death. Let go and be free. The flow of pure being awaits your decision to stop attaching yourself to an illusion of past and future. This is Spiritual Integrity. Take the challenge of death and you will find yourself with more willingness, wonder and determination than you have ever experienced. After all, do you really have something better to do with your last moment than your absolute best?
SPIRITUAL EXPLORATION Befriending Death What is your relationship to Death? Do you hate her, want to avoid her at all costs, or honor that she is loaning you all that you see? Talk with a friend or journal about how you view death. Name all of your fears and beliefs around your own death, and the deaths of those close to you. Notice any places you have anger or fear of abandonment or loss of control associated with death. What were you taught about death as a child? How
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much death have you experienced in your life? Get it all out on paper or verbalized to someone close to you. Go for a walk and explore the cycles of life by looking at plants, insects, and animals. Practice seeing the beauty of life in all its phases, from the tiniest sprout to the withered flower. Get intimate with how life feeds on death. The soil that supports us is the result of the death of millions of creatures. Nature as a whole does not fight death, it embraces death as a friend. Look within yourself for any agreements you are holding that humans are not suppose to die (or babies are not suppose to die or my beloveds are not suppose to die) Creating Your Own Funeral Go out into nature and take a long walk. Somewhere along the way find a small rock or another object to represent your physical body. As you walk put all the ideas you have about yourself into the rock. Your ideas about who you are as a body, who you are as a personality, who you are as spirit. Breathe every concept and belief you have about yourself and this lifetime into the rock. Feel every identification, each idea flowing from you into the rock as you continue walking. Next find a beautiful spot where you would want to be buried. Carefully dig a little hole and ceremonially bury the object, symbolically leaving it here in an act of power to consciously surrender your identifications with your form.
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Once you have buried yourself, perform a eulogy to that physical being that you were. Voice your gratitude for the myriad of bodily experiences you had -- the pleasurable and the painful, the ways you related to your emotions and mind, the ways we related to our appearance. Express your gratefulness for all of those experiences. Speak your gratitude for every event, every place you ever visited, every person you ever interacted with physically. Express your gratitude for the entire experience you have had this lifetime. Speak your gratitude with the intent of releasing any attachment that you formed to any of these experiences, to any event that has transpired during this lifetime. Give gratitude and thanks for the experiences that you have had, and let go of the desire for all the experiences you wanted to have but did not. Release the body, surrender the identifications, and liberate your consciousness from the limitations of believing that you are only this limited form. Once you are done stand up and look at the sky. Feel the freshness of everything, the sense of new beginning, a life now consciously chosen, a life to be lived in every moment: Connected, present, and free.
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Chapter 6 Creatively Intending Your Life At our highest potential, human beings are a magical blend of spirit and animal. Half ethereal, half physical, we are the bridge between the realm of no form and the realm of form. Within us we hold the endless space of spirit and the very instinct of the earth. Our essence communes with the Divine mystery, knowing there is no separation between all of life and us. Our physical, animal self experiences the power and play of individuality and choice. When spirit and physical are aligned, we ground the infinite in every cell of our bodies, and bring spirit into form, right here, right now. We embody Spiritual Integrity. We live our lives as a gift of the Divine, knowing that we are endless infinity packaged into portable bundles of flesh and bones. We have each had direct experiences of this state of spiritual embodiment. Whether it happens in deep meditation or from achieving a long-term goal, during a night of wild dancing or holding a newborn child, there is a bright burst of connection from the center of our being to pure, undivided awareness. When we reject our present, instinctual animal self and reach only for the fleeting winds of spiritual bliss, we are avoiding half of our being. When we ignore the wisdom or needs of our bodies, or compare our self to others, or judge where we should
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be rather than honor where we are, we stifle the flow of creative juices necessary for our own inner healing. When we ignore the call of spirit, and focus solely on material comforts and gains, we limit our potential and make a sense of peace impossible. Our attention becomes hooked by the external world and the desire to feel safe and valued. Our sacred individuality as a part of the whole gets warped into selfimportance and separation. Spiritual Integrity is a movement towards wholeness of all our potential: mental, emotional, and physical. We must beware of not splitting our spiritual being from our human being and all its myriad of thoughts, emotions, and needs as we seek integrity. We are out of balance with our spiritual and human being when we: -- Compare ourselves to others -- Judge, criticize, blame, or feel victimized -- Stagnate in or bounce between self-importance or selfrejection -- Value other people's opinions of us above our own self-worth -- Dislike and reject our bodies, minds, emotions, or spiritual connection -- Do not know our purpose or what our unique gifts are -- Hold ourselves as broken or wounded or as victims -- Hold ourselves as more important or less important than others
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-- Live out of fear and a sense of scarcity When our spiritual and human aspects are balanced, we: -- Honor the uniqueness of who we are -- Take full responsibility for our experiences, without outer or inner blame -- Have strong self-awareness and curiosity around our internal state -- Have deep self-respect and respect for all other beings -- Are open and in-tune to all aspects of our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirit -- Know our purpose and overflow our gifts to the world -- Hold ourselves as whole, healing, expansive beings -- Feel no separation from the life force around and in us -- Live from love and a sense of abundant flow The transition from being out of balance with our spiritual-human self to living in integrity with our full potential is a journey of inner alchemy. Alchemy is the art of taking one substance and transforming it into another, more vital substance. Spiritual Integrity is an inner alchemy: the process of guiding our immature, fearful aspects towards the maturity of authentic alignment. Bringing your mental, emotional, and physical being into integrity with your Spirit is a process of alchemy, a magical transformation from one state to another. Alchemy takes one set
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of stable ingredients and, with the help of a catalyst, transmutes it into a more valuable or vibrant set of stable ingredients. Between the before and after lies a vast land of mystery, known variously as instability, uncertainty, and confusion. And here is where even the hardiest of us quiver. We are each our own worst enemy, and our best ally, rolled into one. Which will you choose to be today? Throughout the journey to take new actions and reclaim your Spiritual Integrity, you will meet many challenges. Some of these challenges will be unbidden, and while you may welcome some with open arms, you may cringe from others in fear. Often when you take an action to break an old structure, what arises are the very obstacles that separate you from your goal. These challenges and changes strengthen and temper you to stretch beyond what you know and towards your highest expression and purpose. Obstacles on the horizon can evoke delighted anticipation in one moment, and reluctant avoidance in another. Both types are gifts, stirring you out of habitual behaviors and comfort as reminders of your limitless possibilities. No matter how anticipated or dreaded, change often shakes up your familiar world and ruffles your sense of stability. Even when you consciously initiate moving past your limitations towards your potential, the old ways of being can be very stubborn. How many times have you purposefully started down a path of transformation, only to be thwarted or overwhelmed?
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With hope and determination, you start a new action plan with a strong focus to get into better physical shape, start a spiritual or healing practice, find a job you love, get out of debt, stop a painful addiction, or increase self-esteem only to find yourself stopped by fierce self-judgment, self-doubt, sudden terror, overwhelming exhaustion, or a thousand more-important distractions. For every conscious new action you take in your life, there is a force waiting to turn you away from your goals, using strategies that flatten your enthusiasm, pummel your self-worth, and make you forget what you were doing. That force is you. Whether you are filled with clarity and excitement or illusion and fear as you meet your obstacles is not based on the size of the shift you are facing, on having had a secure childhood, or on a myriad of external factors aligning perfectly. It is rather due to your own attitude and vision. How you face the uncomfortable, murky parts of your journey to wholeness will either stop you in mid-flight, or give you wings to soar beyond your knowing. To stop undermining yourself and truly unfurl your wings means attending to not only the beginning, but also the perhaps uncomfortable middle all the way through the alchemical process of internal transformation.
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The catalyst for internal alchemy is what I call "creative intent." This is your ability to find innovative ways of moving past obstacles while staying focused on your final goal. Creativity is one polarity of expression, a sense of playful experimentation that stems from dreaming, intuition, and a wide horizon of perception. Creative energy is the flow of art, and it moves as a spontaneous response to stimuli. Intent is another polarity of expression, the movement of focused purpose. It is the determined questing of science, and it moves as a piercing force of transformation. Intent stems from disciplined stalking of the goal and strong action to stay on course. When we have too much intent running, we get narrowminded and dogmatic. There is no room for discovery and learning through our mistakes. When we live solely from our creativity, we become ungrounded and scattered. We have a lot of ideas, but not the force to manifest them in a concrete manner. It is only when we balance play and focus, discipline and experimentation, intent and creativity, that we possess the ingredients to fully catalyze our blossoming. The dance of these two forces is the fuel that drives the whole process of transformation. They can get out of balance, but there is no force greater than our own creative intent when both aspects are blended together. Our intent gives us a direction to move towards, and the ability to follow through. Our creativity gets us outside of the narrowness of our domestication and structure, and brings joy to
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the process of inner alchemy. When we block or judge either energy we cut ourselves off from our full potential. As an alchemist of change, you are the artist-scientist of your own internal world. Your work is to ignite your own creative intent to foster the process of maturation, to keep experimenting through discomfort or confusion, and to become your own best ally instead of your worst enemy. Support Your Internal Creativity Creativity is the juiciness and flow of life. It is often unexpected, unexplainable, and unpredictable. Creativity is our unique expression of life, manifested for pure joy. When we are in the river of creative flow, we do not seek a reward or recognition; we tap into the unknown and for a moment, mystery moves through us into form. Creativity cannot be forced or scheduled, but it can be enticed and opened to. As we make ourselves vessels and clear out our own doubts and shoulds and rules, creativity often comes to fill and soon overflow through us. We see new possibilities, new actions, new ways of being. We are inspired to take the inner images, sensations, and taste of our inner world and make them tangible. This creative expression is not only what artists strive for. Creativity is a vital force in helping us move through our own internal obstacles and fears.
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The places of limitation within us often stem from the creative ways we tried to stay "safe" when we were children. We create fantastic agreements or strategies. "I have to be in a relationship or I am not whole." "If I have a lot of money in the bank, I am safe." "If I make sure everyone likes me, I know I am a good person." All examples of wacky internal creativity! As you set up action plans and run experiments to break habits, obstacles will arise. Our old structure, which we created to make order in an unpredictable world, fights to stay alive. Our habitual response is to follow the old pattern. Our pleaser, controller, isolator, or distracter rears their head. That relationship just ended, so I must quickly find another one, or feel lonely and fragmented until I do. I am feeling insecure, so I am going to go buy something expensive (and later go into fear that I don't have enough money.) My friend is disappointed in me, so I must have done something wrong. When we are willing to risk being creative, there are a million different ways we can respond to stimuli. It is exciting! We pull our heads out of our tiny box of responses and look towards infinity for our answers. We approach our obstacles and fears with a sense of adventure. What will I do today? Who will I be today? What will I learn about myself today? Yeehaaaa! For example: Your relationship ends, and you consciously choose to be creative, so you: Have a divorce celebration with some close friends to support us, where we cut the cords on this and all of our previous relationships; Spend a week in retreat, nourishing ourselves with good food and lots of
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long hikes; Take our new alone time to do something we have always dreamed of trying; Get on the internet and create a personal, and then go on dates with fifteen people in four weeks with the agreement that you will not get into a relationship, but simply explore what you like or who you are around others; Shave your head and dedicate yourself to meditation for a year; Volunteer to help a child in need; Find a good therapist or spiritual guide.... What would be different from your usual pattern? Be creative! The best actions to help us return to integrity come from the wellspring of creativity we all possess. Be playful as you dream up ways to experiment and take action. Tapping into your creativity may feel awkward at first. Remember you are breaking your own box, which can feel frightening or liberating, or both simultaneously. Enjoy and keep breathing through whatever arises. Pay attention to where you want to limit yourself, or where you are uncomfortable stepping out of your own comfort zone. And keep dancing towards the infinite! Honing Your Intent Intent is the clarity in life that keeps us focused on a specific purpose. Intent acts as the guiding force for our actions in the world. It gives us direction and the will to carry on, despite the obstacles that arise. Intent is a combination of determination and dedication. Intent is a science, a practice of getting from
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point A to point B systematically without getting distracted or straying from our course. Intent allows us to see beyond chaos, fear, and temptation. All of our senses align with our goal. All of our energy aligns with our senses. We are a pure point of perception, undaunted by the impossible. We know what we want and are not afraid to go for it. But intent often flows from an unconscious place. When we act from unconscious intent, our integrity and truth of this moment is compromised. Instead, all our actions are colored by our experiences of the past. Old agreements and strategies dictate how we react to life happening around us. Our intent then stays at its default setting, which is usually the setting we agreed to when we were very young. We would never consciously say: "My intent is to sabotage myself and prove that I am not deserving," or "My intent is to never put my full heart and energy into any project, so I do not have to worry about failing," or "My intent is to blame everyone else around me for my inability to take responsibility for my life decisions." But we all hold these types of wacky intents and live our lives from them! There is a great little book that expresses perfectly the sort of intents we carry within us. "Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr" by Ann Thornhill and Sarah Wells is a book of "Affirmations for Cynics," or really, for the unconscious. Some favorite samples are:
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"Today, instead of dealing with situations that upset me, I will create melodramatic diversions" "I have a right to be a victim after all that I have been through." "Because I demand that everything in my life is the best and beautiful, I will disown my body today." "Today I will remind myself that my friends and family are just waiting for me to fail." As you tap into your intent and take action, watch out for these type of old stories arising. Your intent in the present must be as strong or stronger than the intent you set in the past! Remember, you have been repeating some of these stories and dramas to yourself for a long time. Be patient and keep going. Use your intent to keep taking actions even if it feels hopeless or overwhelming. You can do it! If you tap into something greater than yourself, you cannot fail. Creative Action, Inner Focus, and Big Flow Our individual intent is a very powerful force. But compared to the immensity of greater Intent that flows through all things, our own intent is but a teeny, tiny whisper. Many people spend their lives struggling to manifest their little desires and intents with no relation to the larger flow of Intent. This is a lot
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like stubbornly trying to fly a kite using your favorite fan instead of the wind. Self-absorption causes us to narrow down to our immediate needs and desires, and often takes us away from our spiritual path (and highest purpose). We get caught in wanting to create comfort or security or quick fixes for pain, rather than looking up at "what would best for my own highest purpose?" We get fixated on what we want to happen, or the timing we think is best, or how things "should" be happening, and forget that we are part of a much bigger flow of creative intent. In Carlos Castanedas books the Toltec Nagual Don Juan talks about intent as a force that is unknowable and mysterious. We cannot make it bend to our will, but we can learn to coax and seduce it, if we are clever and skillful. If we are self-important, Intent will always remind us that it is bigger than us (often after letting us puff up big, so the fall is noticeable!) If we act from self-rejection, Intent ignores us. Intent is a mystery that can be tapped into, but never understood or controlled. To attract its attention we must make ourselves bigger energetically, beyond self-importance and self-rejection. When we align our little intent with the larger force of Intent, we tap into the highest outcome. To tap into Intent, we must first surrender our desired outcome. We must trust that the creative force of life has a bigger view than we do. To align our own intent with Intent, we must be present, humble, and willing to change at a moment's notice. It is a lot like
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rafting a big river, or surfing. Riding big water, or big energy, takes practice, respect of the element, and courage. Whenever you set your intent and begin to take your creative action steps, know that you are taking the first steps in activating and enticing a much greater source of creative intent. The universe loves to work with us, but we often ignore the flows of energy by getting fixated on a desired outcome. To align yourself with the larger flow of Intent, when you set any intent always ask for the highest outcome. Then double check internally if there are any ways that you think you know what the outcome should be. Also double check internally if you have a desire or image of how the outcome should look. Let go! Trust that by planting the little seed of your intent into the greater soil of Intent you are co-creating with the Universe. Get clear with what you are actually asking for. A simple example I use is around asking for a car. Perhaps you see a red 1966 Mustang and you think: I want that car. But if you stop and listen more deeply, you will feel what you really want: Ah, what I really want is transportation to and from work. Or you might find what you want is to feel excited about your life (as excited as you feel about the red Mustang.) Hone down what your intent actually is for. Now hold that intent in your being. "I want transportation to and from work. May this be for my highest purpose." Imagine connecting your intent with the Universal Intent Life Force GodGoddess Magic Flow of all Things as One, or whatever you want to call it. Plant your seed. Then begin to take the creative actions
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to move towards your intent. Pay attention to both the obstacles that arise, and the gifts from intent. Often we will set our intent and the Universe will receive it and give it back to us almost immediately. But since we are looking for a specific outcome, we ignore the gift. Example: Someone might offer us a bicycle, but we think I don't want a bicycle, I want that red Mustang. If we actually got still for a second and listened, we might find that actually, the bicycle is PERFECT! It fits our original intent, plus some other intents we had set. Not only will we save money riding our new bike to work, we will get exercise, and we will have alone time on our ride. Wow, that is four intents completed with one bicycle! Yahoo! Remember, the universal intent is infinitely creative. The more creative you are in your actions, the more creative energy will flow towards you. Be open to the creativity of the universe by being open to what it brings toward you; both the obstacles and the unexpected surprises! Bringing Yourself Fully into Each Action Most of the people most of the time have about 5% of their energy engaged in doing what they say they want to do. The other 95% of their energy is wrapped up in all the reasons they dont get what they want, all the ways the world is wrong and people are keeping them down, all the ways they wish it were different, and all the things that have happened to them
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before that support them feeling dissatisfied, judgmental, and victimized right now. Whew! No wonder nothing gets done! Integrity is about pulling your energy back from all of those beliefs, judgments, and stories. It is about making each action count, because you are willing to put 100% of yourself behind it. It is about knowing YOU WILL DIE and in that knowing you do not waste time with trivia. We invite you to get down to business, clean up your false beliefs, remove the ways you limit yourself and let your divinity shine out into everything you do! If you truly knew each action you took was God/dess at work, would you scrimp? Would you blow it off, space out, run away in fear? Of course not! If you truly new that acting from your integrity meant more of the God/dess manifesting in the world you would do your best to stay in your integrity. What keeps you from standing in that place is the energy you have invested in the past, in your belief in the stories and descriptions of your life of limitation. By pulling the energy out of the past and standing fresh and excited in the mystery of each moment, you engage with the world in a way that blows away the pale and wan reality most people settle for. Why settle? You are here as God for crying out loud, dont you want to enjoy that? Do you really want to settle for 9 to 5 drudgery until someday you get to retire (read die out in the pasture)? BOOOOOOORING! We will take life as God/dess any day. The reward is NOW the place is HERE, there is nothing else!
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Why not live your life in such a way that your full energy is always present, ready to engage in the next thing that will open you the most? What a fun game! How much Spirit can you be aware of in each moment? Much better than how much suffering and hell can I project from the past onto this moment. Much more FUN! Perhaps you have heard people say Yeah, but if everyone was just present in the moment no one would be doing anything and the world would fall apart. If everyone was just having fun then life would be total chaos These are the flimsy excuses of people too scared to actually live from their integrity! Think about it! What is being said is that if people were in their integrity, living from their Highest Purpose, and therefore by definition leading a life of Joy and Spirit, they would run amok and wantonly destroy the world they live in. If you look around, you will see that is what is happening right now in our world for the exact opposite reason. The conscience you have as a person of integrity is 100 times more powerful than that of the societal boundaries we have placed around ourselves. Why would you waste your energy on something that would cause you suffering and disconnection with Spirit? When you are a living a life of integrity that is the last thing you would do. It just doesnt make sense! Would you say, I spent all this energy freeing myself from suffering and now you think I would like to take a bunch of stupid actions to put myself back in it? Not likely. Call in allies. Find mentors. Take action! May you live each moment from the
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sweetest wisdom of your heart, grounded in your own Spiritual Integrity. CREATIVE INTENT EXPLORATION Creative Action Do at least one physical activity that opens up your creativity this week: Paint a dream, visit a museum and wander through the hallways feeling the art, dance wildly under the moonlight, build a fire and speak to the flames, sing out loud in public. Cultivating Wild Creativity To cultivate your own creativity start by making a list of a problem in your life, and at least ten different ways to work with it. Let some of your ideas be crazy! Stretch your mind. If you cannot think of a problem, take the examples above (money in bank and disappointing a friend) and list ten creative things someone could do. Then do at least one of these creative ideas. Also, pay attention to the ways your mind goes into habit, and constantly be asking yourself: how can I be creative in this situation?
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Unclogging Your Intent Machinery The first step in honing your intent is to clear out the garbage intents that clog up your system. They are heavy energies that weigh down the lightness of pure, conscious intent. For the week play with making up intents for yourself based on your unconscious beliefs. Keep this practice as play, for it will expose more of your unconscious heaviness. Notice where you are sabotaging yourself or acting in ways that go against your heart. Then make a joke of it: "Today, I will wake up depressed and then punish myself all day for it." "Today, I will make a mistake and repeat it in my head over and over again." "Today, I will say I want to write, but I will spend the day cleaning up someone else's mess." As Raven always says, get them out in front of you so you can see them! Now you have the power to make a choice. Is that really the intent you want to hold for your day/week/life? Once you have played with and felt your unconscious intents, rewrite what intent you actually want to be living from. What different action can you take? How can you bring the creative aspect in to this new intent? Write these intents when you are not in the pattern, before you get depressed or confused or anxious or whatever... Action is best planned from a neutral to joyous space. Make three action steps you will take that oppose the old intent, or nourish your new one (preferably one of each.)
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"Today if I wake up depressed, I will not believe the lies my mind tells me. 1) I will call two people and ask them to tell me what they appreciate about me. and/or 2) I will email two people and share what I appreciate about them. and/or 3) I will go out and take a dance class. "Today I will write despite distraction or drama. If I get distracted or caught in drama, I will: 1) Take a deep breath and acknowledge my distraction 2) Get my butt back to the writing chair with minimal judgment or 3) Drink a cup of tea while I read what I wrote before I was distracted, and continue onward and/or 4) Spend a few moments looking at what I felt like before I was distracted... what uncomfortable feeling or thought arose that I can teach myself to sit through? Write out your new intent, and new actions someplace you will have them handy when the situation next arises. Just do your actions when you get off track, not thinking. Notice the results. Enjoy. Balancing Creativity and Intent Journal about which polarity of creativity or intent you tend to lean on. Do you have lots of ideas with very little follow through, or do you start strong but get confused or bull-headed if something shifts mid-stream? Are you more attracted to allowing the flow to happen or following your list of steps? Do you judge people who are more creatively inclined, or do you judge people who are more intent-oriented? What part of
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yourself are you actually judging via others? This will be a clue about where you do not honor your own creativity or intent. Using free-style writing (keep your hand moving, and do not think or edit!) answer the following questions: In what ways am I creative in my life? In what ways do I block my creativity? In what areas of my life is my intent strong? In what areas of my life is my intent weak? How can my creativity better support my intent? How can my intent better support my creativity? After you answer the questions, go for a walk and admire some flowers, drink in the colors of cars, or do cartwheels down the street. Open and stir up your perception in a creative way! Creative Intent in Action Go! Ask yourself or talk to a friend about a recent issue you have been wrestling with. The issue can be anything, from the mundane to the esoteric: From "How do I get my children out of the house in the morning for school?" to "How can I bring more compassion to myself and those around me?" Write this intent down on a piece of paper. Open and connect with the flower or color or energy you touched on your walk in the last exercise. Bring your senses in:
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How did that flower smell? How did the color taste? How did the energy you raised with your cartwheel feel in your body? Now, brainstorming with yourself or with a friend, quickly write down three ways that you can creatively manifest your intent. Make one of these three actions wildly creative. "I can get my children out of bed by hiring a four piece band and having them play under their window each morning." "I can bring more compassion to myself by attaching a big, fuzzy heart to my clothes and carrying around a teddy bear for the next week." Stretch yourself out of the box you usually come up with solutions from. The crazier, the better for one of them. Make the other two do-able (though you may have to stretch for them to!) Write all three creative actions down under your intent. To close the loop, make a note at the bottom of your actions of "What agreements may pop-up as I move towards my intent So your list will look like this: My intent is to teach my children how to get out of bed in the morning with ease. Three ways I can do this: 1. Go shopping with each of them to buy an alarm clock, and teach them how to use it. 2. Hire a marching band to play outside their window. 3. Have their father wake them up for the next week.
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What may come up: My old story around being a failure as a mother. My intent is to bring more compassion into my life. Three ways I can do this: 1. When I get scared or judgmental, I will put my hands on my heart and breathe peace 2. If I make a mistake, I will give myself a hug and ask what did you learn? 3. I will attach a fuzzy heart to my jacket and carry my teddy bear around with me this week Watch for: My judge telling me I am doing it all wrong Put this list up somewhere you will see it... bathroom mirror, near your desk, on the fridge. Look at it each day. Do your two actions, and contemplate or actually do your wild action! This will keep your brain free and fluid to allow more creative ideas to arise. The doing of your actions puts the notice out to the universe that you want to create change. This will tap you into the larger force of Intent, and the creative flow of the universe.
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Big Mystery Connection Pick one intent that is the most important to you. Start by feeling into your intent: is there a deeper longing behind it, or a more specific feeling state you want to manifest? Write this down. And double check: is your intent for yourself, or something you wish for another? Start with intents for yourself. (For example, I just felt into my intent, and it was: for my father who is ill to feel at peace. Yes, I want this, but this is not up to me, it is up to him! So my new first intent is: to feel peace around my father and his choices. I can model peace and support him in moving towards peace, but first I must find that peace within. I surrender my desired outcome and open to finding my own sense of peace.) Take your piece of paper and write down (or review) your creative action steps to manifest your intent. Now holding your paper in your hand, connect with the big mystery, this beautifully wild river of Intent. Feel your own intent, and image linking it to a larger flow of pure Intent. Ask for support in getting past your own limitations and obstacles in a creative and graceful way. Pray with your heart open to your concept of Higher Power God-Goddess-Creative-Intent-InfinitePossibilities-Life-Force-Web. Consciously put your paper someplace sacred, and ask for guidance from a Higher Source, who can see farther and wider and deeper than you. Now let it go! It is in motion. But this does not mean that you stop your actions. Continue to be creative in how you
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manifest your intent. This keeps you linked and interesting to the larger mystery of Intent. Keep your inner focus on your intent, and your creative actions in alignment with that intent. Continue to track yourself and learn from what arises: How do you react to obstacles? Are you able to surrender the outcome? Does your creativity wane when you hit an obstacle over and over again? Do you get overwhelmed with information and shut down your creative flow? Keep track of your strategies, fears, and strengths.
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Chapter 7 Mastery
People who live their lives from a place of Spiritual Integrity do not become spiritual masters. Rather they live a life of mastery in their connection to Spirit in each moment. You never see them retiring from anything because there is nothing to retire from when you are living your purpose and joy in life. People in spiritual integrity do not have jobs, they dont have static titles, they are not a somebody. They are the embodiment of their purpose, no matter if they are working 9 to 5 or meditating in the woods. They have a clear way of being in the world, regardless of what they are doing. When you are in spiritual integrity you come from a place of choice. You have stripped away all of your unconscious limitations and come back to a place where you can consciously choose how you want to be in each moment. Every day is a journey into more presence, a journey into more and more choice as to how you live our life. Spiritual Integrity is about living that choice. We are here, we are in these bodies, living this lifetime, now. And a person in spiritual integrity recognizes that they are here for a reason, that their life has meaning, and that meaning is based on their connection to this moment, not on any beliefs, ideas or concepts about who they should be.
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When we choose consciously to experience fully the world opens up around us. We feel our joy, we feel our connection, we feel our passion for life. We know that even though everything is changing all the time, who we really are is a constant that is not based upon the world around us. We put our attention on opening into the Divine every day and making the connection every day to who we really are, to the awareness and Divinity that flows through us. This opens up an incredible realm of exploration about being in this form, in this body, in this life. Mastery is about doing ones best, knowing that your best is going to change over time, even over the course of a day. It is about working all the time to become more and more present, more and more connected. Mastery is life living itself fully. It is pure awareness flowing effortlessly, gracefully, without struggle through life, because the connection, the context that life is happening in is clear. When we remove all the unconscious limitations we have placed on ourselves we come back to a place of freedom. Why would we choose struggle? Why would we choose limitation? Why would we choose to suffer as we move through life when we know deeply that we are limitless beings capable of being anything, capable of perceiving the world in any way we want to perceive it? Every event, everything that happens to us in life, our entire reality is based on our perception of it, and when you are in integrity your perception is connected to your Spirit. The beauty of everything you see around you, the incredible dynamic
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of life living itself becomes your context. And knowing that this life will end, knowing that this life will come to a place of completion at some point, we live our lives totally engaged, totally in love, totally in connection with everything around us because we choose to. That choice becomes the focus of our mastery; that moment to moment decision to be here now in this moment, open as wide as we can possibly be, engaged in this life fully from all of our senses, from all of our being. Seeing the beauty, the wonder, the mystery that surrounds us even in the most mundane situations, we feel the magic of life, we feel the magic of being here in this incredible exploration of being a human. That is Mastery! The spiritual path is a path, a course of action, a journey that we live every day. There is no endpoint to a spiritual path, there is simply the living of it as fully and completely as we can. When we are in spiritual integrity, nothing is more important than that integrity. We sacrifice nothing that will take us out of our integrity. We know this moment may be the last one, this choice may be the last choice we ever make, and we consciously choose to be in our integrity, we consciously choose to be in our connection with Spirit no matter what. No matter the limitations of those around us, no matter their reactions, no matter what is happening in the world. No matter how heavy the energies of the world are, no matter how many wars are being fought, no matter how many people have been killed, how much suffering there is in the world, we hold our integrity and truth.
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We do not allow anything to affect our connection to Spirit because we know deeply that the only way to alleviate the heaviness and suffering of the world is to come at it from a place of integrity. If we allow ourselves to identify with the suffering then we cannot stay in touch with our integrity. This does not mean ignoring suffering or closing to pain. This deep integrity is about opening to everything without attaching to anything and radiating our fierce love out. It is the shining of our light, the shining of our connection with Spirit that creates the most impact and change in the world, so we stay focused on that above all else. We know that to take any action that is not from our integrity is to take an action that is weak. Actions out of integrity have little impact other than to create more confusion and suffering in the world. They create more illusion and identification with the problems of the world, rather than the solutions to the problems! When I lived in Asia growing up (Heather Ash) I saw tremendous poverty. I remember walking through a slum outside of Bangkok where cardboard and tin shacks perched on top of rickety walkways that stretched over open sewers. While living conditions were horrible by my standards, what I saw in the people amazed me. There was a presence, dignity and sense of community I rarely see in America. These people were not victims, they were making life work. And their spiritual connection was palpable. I saw the same fortitude when I spent time in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco talking to homeless people.
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Many of the people I talked to were Vietnam veterans. One person I spoke with stands out. He was lucid, gentle, and simply told me that he could no longer fit in with his family when he returned home, and so he chose to live on the streets with other men who had similar experiences and understanding. He was more at peace with himself than many of the people I know. I am not wanting to romanticize poverty or homelessness, but simply point out that integrity is not about how many resources you have or the right job or relationship. Your Spiritual Integrity is internal. It is in spite of your circumstances, not because of them. The solution for our suffering as humans is not more material gain, but for each person to come back into a connection with spirit in every moment, no matter what! When you live your own connection, this ripples out and touches everyone around you. When you reclaim your Spiritual Integrity you will find that you have truly done your part in changing the world. Blessings on your path! MASTERY EXPLORATION Creating Your Own Moral Code Heather Ash and my moral code is based on our individual relationship with Spirit, not necessarily our relationship with society. So we may not agree with society all of the time.
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However, that does not mean we lead a life of chaos and destruction, far from it. We live a relatively disciplined life of staying quiet, eating well, creating abundance for ourselves, and spreading the reach of the true experience of connection with the Creator as far and wide as we can. If you were to look at most people who are in integrity with their spiritual path, their lives would have a similar flavor, though the specifics would all look completely different. The whole reason we have all of these laws and social morals is that almost everyone is out of integrity! If everyone was in integrity it would not look homogenous, and it would also not be a group of people suffering because of one another. Choosing to reclaim your own Spiritual Integrity means the difference between a life lived as suffering, punishment, and disillusionment, or a life filled with the love, joy and presence of the Divine flowing through you in whatever spiritual tradition you follow. It may take years for you to sort out and integrate your own personal moral code. Each little action you take to come back into your own mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual integrity is a gift to yourself. Do not rush, and do not tarry. Begin. Continue. A personal moral code is something that is developed after you have done the work to validate for yourself what is actually in your integrity. If you create it too soon what it will mostly be is a representation of your unconscious beliefs and strategies. Not helpful! As such you should always be willing to
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review your moral code, allowing the space for it to change as you continue to gain insight into your integrity and purpose in this lifetime and grow your connection to Spirit. A moral code is not a new set of beliefs! It is a plan of action, a set of guidelines to help you stay in integrity. It is there as a reminder to you of the insights you have gained and your commitment to live your life from a place of Spiritual Integrity. Here are a couple of examples from my (Raven) personal moral code.
My commitment is to the Truth, not to being consistent. This tenet arose from my exploration and validation that my life is a process that is most closely reflected by the spiral of truth. Different things are true at different points and in different situations. This comes from the many times I have validated that reality is not an absolute, it is a point of perception that is always changing.
I dont talk about my personal history except as an example to help people understand an insight or teaching. This comes from seeing in what an incredible waste of energy it is to talk about the past. Constantly cycling past events leads to attachment, limiting beliefs, and a fixation of attention that does not leave room for new ways of being and connecting to Spirit. What is
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important is NOW, this moment. The past is dead, it is not here now and I KNOW that re-hashing it keeps me from experiencing the Divine joy that is present in every moment. My support to you is to allow your personal moral code to arise from the insights you gain by truly walking your path. Dont let dogma, tradition, or other peoples opinions create your personal code, that is what you did the first time, remember? It did not turn out so well, did it? Always be willing to question what you think you know. When in doubt design actions and experiments that will help you to truly KNOW what is in your integrity, not as a concept, but as a way of walking it!
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For more information on Spiritual Integrity or any of our other programs, books and audio visit out websites at: http://www.toci.org
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