Our bodymind provides our spirit and soul access to seven incredible dimensions. Within our bodymind, when we are in the present moment, all of our organ systems function on all seven dimensions simultaneously, interfacing with, and acting as highly esteemed cabinet ministers to our heart in real time.
That means, all our organ systems and all seven dimensions have very simple operating systems. And that makes them easy to understand and makes it simple for us to bring them into harmony. The two-dimensional world of our five senses pales in comparison to the beauty and wonders as we explore the inner worlds of our higher dimensions, Spirit and Soul:
When We Achieve Critical Mass, Everything Changes
Willis Harmon headed up a study program at Stanford Research Institute during the 1970s and 1980s called “Energy Futures, Human Values and Life Styles.” In this research project, his team searched through opinion polls and other research data for a time period that showed the greatest amount of tangible social transformative change (spiritual growth).
The three-and-one-half years between 1964 and 1967 stood out dramatically in his study. It was a time of tremendous spiritual growth and transformation. During this time, more than 51 million people in America alone changed their core values and became what Harmon’s team defined as “inner-directed” people.
The “inner-directeds” in the study went from having outer circumstances guide their choices to making choices based on their own principles, values and beliefs. There was never a time in history when so many people were waking up.
This marked a radical change in how a large segment of society conducted its affairs. If the news media was focusing on its job, instead of bandying sensationalism to up their ratings, so many people waking up would have been the banner headline in every media. This topic would have been given months of in-depth coverage. This is the real news.
Becoming directed toward inner values instead of reacting to circumstances based on the values laid down by previous generations is one of the first signs of spiritual awakening. Instead of letting the priest, rabbi, minister, doctor, teacher or politician tell us how to live, we began to question authority, and more importantly, to trust our gut.
The awakening that first mushroomed during the 1960s has continued to grow. Now every day in every town and city in the world, more people are waking up. You can see the signs everywhere you look—but only if you look for them. Most people are myopically focusing on the immediate problems around them, like how miserably politics has degraded, instead of looking at how far we have transformed ourselves as a people over the last fifty years.
I remember very clearly in 1951 how few people were awake. Personally, I only knew one at that time. By the nineteen nineties I knew about 200 people who were striving to be awake. That was very impressive.
Now, I personally know somewhere around 900 people who strive to be awake. There has never been, in all of history, this high a percentage of people awake at any one time. I believe that all through history, there has never been more than about one tenth of one percent of the population that was awake.
It’s a wonder that we evolved at all. In those times, values from outside ourselves seemed more important than our inner values. Imagination and intuition were considered like bastard step-children. And most of the people that were awake were ground up in the gears of a society that mostly wanted to maintain the status quo and resented anyone who threatened their worldview.
Now, we are in a profound time of awakening. As we approach a critical mass of people waking up, we are observing an implicate order that is Divine yet appears as chaos. The goodness in people whose heart guides their actions is becoming so much better. At the same time, the actions of people whose brain dominates their reality are becoming so divisive that their actions are equally worse.
When I was growing up, my father explained to me that when a process, plan or goal gets about 95% of the way to completion, everything gets crazy, chaotic. And if a person quits then, pulling out right at the end of the completion cycle causes turbulence that is so bad that their whole world disintegrates. The disintegration is so devastating that they will probably never try to achieve great things again. Then, out of their interpretation of the risks involved, they become a dream stealer, trying to convince others of the danger and outright folly of their dreams.
In this time of global awakening, just before society transforms to a higher reality, the discord between the competing heart and brain realities of our population is now at that critical level of chaos. If you watch how the media sensationalizes the news, the political situation has reached that level of insanity and chaos that is predictable just before we reach a critical mass of people waking up.
Where is Your focus?
The issue is: Where are you going to focus your precious attention? Are you going to focus your attention on all the problems of the world, like politics and other divisive actions unconscious people perform in their day? If you do, you are part of (the creation of) the problem. Or, are you going to focus on what makes your heart feel most alive and endeavors of other heart-centered people? In the latter, you are part of the solution. It’s one or the other.
The laws of human dynamics and the laws of thermal dynamics operate by very similar principles. If you want to blow up a stick of dynamite, have a thermonuclear detonation, or awaken enough people to ignite a social movement you must get a critical mass to participate.
“Critical mass” is technically 9.1816 percent of the mass—or people. You can see this transformative process in all kinds of organizations. To transform any group to a higher level of organization and effectiveness, you only need to get a little more than nine percent of the members behind the plan. Looking back years after a transformative change happened, the 70 percent who thought it was a good idea but seriously dragged their heels at the time will honestly say, “I was for it all along.”
There will always be 10 percent of any population that will vehemently oppose any new plan. In physics, they percent represent inertia. Inertia means that an object at rest wants to stay at rest, while an object in motion wants to stay in motion. In social movements, inertia can be observed as people who stubbornly resist change and want things to stay the same.
A good example is the Episcopal Church. Sometime in the 1980s, the church decided that women should have full rights, same as the men, which included ordination. When they achieved a critical mass of people pushing for the ordination of women, it hit the tipping point. At that point the 70 percent, who were dragging their feet but thought it was a good idea, were swept along in the tide. Women were ordained.
Then the Episcopal Church decided to accept openly gay parishioners. You can bet that 10 percent opposed that change too. When a critical mass of parishioners arrived at the belief that gay parishioners deserve a place in their church—just like anyone else—it happened.
In society, every day there are many examples of movements achieving critical mass, and everything changing as a result. You can observe this in every field of endeavor. When an organization or something you are involved in is striving to evolve, you might want to ask yourself, “Do I want to be part of the critical mass of people who are striving to make it better, the mediocre middle, or the inertia that resists the transformation?”
Right now, at least here where I live, it feels like about 5 percent of the population is striving to be awake. There seems to be another 10 percent that are trying to remain awake, but are more easily lulled back asleep by the siren song of the past/future world of time. There are so many distractions. Even though 10 percent are only conscious for short amounts of time, the combined 15 percent are the movers and shakers of the spiritual revolution. There is a steadily-building momentum.
Civilization is waking up from its long slumber. We are rapidly approaching a moment of quantum awakening that has been foretold by all the indigenous tribes and all the religions of the world. We are firmly in that transitional time.
Who Are Your Heroes?
As we wake up we need heroes in all the fields of endeavor we focus on. I remember in school studying about heroic people like Copernicus and Einstein. They were so far above me that they seemed totally outside of what I could do or be. When the teachers were talking about them, I remember thinking, so what? I did not realize at the time how important it is to have role models we admire.
It is so clear to me now that we all need many heroes in all our fields of endeavors, role models we can emulate during times when our struggles seem so overwhelming.
When you find yourself struggling so hard, wondering if you will fail, think: “how would my hero handle this?” Then step up. Take steps your hero would appreciate. I have a lot of heroes. I hope you do too. Who your heroes are says a lot about who you are.
The unconscious River of Time—past/future orientation—is so seductive that we all fall asleep dozens of times daily. If we don’t have habits that keep waking us up, we hardly notice that we are just drifting along in the current. The River of Time is so seductive.
I firmly believe each of us has dreams that grab us by the throat and say, “This needs to happen!” Usually we agree that it needs to happen, but we think someone else should do it. As long as we remain extras in our own movie, our dreams never get off the ground.
What are the dreams inside of you that keep trying to come forward? Dreams that keep reoccurring in your thoughts? Are there lofty ideals and principles that inspire you, that keep reoccurring in your thoughts?
Remember, you create your own kingdom, your own unique world. You are the captain of your ship, the organizer of your journeys. Don’t hold back because of difficulties. You need difficulties to feel alive. In fact, humans crave difficulty. This is your life. Dare to dream. Then do it!
The Universe Wants to Communicate with You
The entire elemental kingdom—plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and wind—desires to communicate with you, and functions as an extension of your subconscious mind. All of nature is in fact intelligent, and desires to be in relationship with you.
When you accept the fact that there are no random events, life’s mysteries open themselves to you. Native Americans have long believed that birds and animals act as messengers of the spirit world. Their presence in your life always has meaning. For example, if a skunk or a deer in the road forces you to slow down or stop, the deer may be your sub-conscious mind telling you that you need to be sweeter and gentler, that there is great power in the innocence of love.
The skunk may be telling you to be more aware of how your reputation affects the world around you, or of not releasing your sexual energy so casually. Your sexual energy may need to be elevated. Sexual energy is just one octave of the energy that flows from the energy center below your navel (second chakra). The octave above sexuality is your passion for life. The octave above that is charisma. The highest octave of sexual energy is compassion.
When a red-tail hawk flies past me, I immediately ask myself “what was I thinking just now?” Invariably my thoughts were of something I was considering doing. The hawk’s message in that situation is, “Yes! Do it.” There are two books that outline how the animal and bird kingdom desires to communicate with us: Medicine Cards by Jamie Sans and David Carson, and Animal Speak by Ted Andrews. A lot of our friends use these two books as reference books for understanding their encounters with these messengers.
Your spirit’s voyage of discovery is not only to explore the universe outside yourself, but also the dimensions within yourself. You have vast dimensions within your consciousness that await discovery. There is so much richness to discover in the subtle kingdoms of your seven-dimensional bodymind. There is even more to access in your spirit, soul and the spiritual kingdoms that patiently beckon us to enter.
As you open up to the glories of your inner life, your current vistas become the starting point of a journey in which the world of your heart, mind, and spirit keeps on doubling in size and glory. To embark on this voyage of discovery, your rational mind, your brain, must relinquish its role as ruler of your consciousness, and allow the true Ruler, your heart, to take control.
Getting Back in Phase with Life
When I was eight years old, I had six intense spiritual experiences spread over a month-and-a-half period. By the end of that time, I was left with a lot of clarity about the nature of the conscious and unconscious states, especially for someone my age.
I observed then that of the approximately four hundred people I personally knew, there was only one person, my Uncle Ted, who was actually awake. Unlike the other people I knew, he continually chose to cherish others. He never created dramas. His focus was on the goodness within each person. He lived his values. Everything about him seemed right as rain.
At that time, my observations were that only the teeniest trickle of people’s energies went inward to the goodness within themselves. Almost all of their energy, as far as I could tell, went outward toward objects or concepts they unconsciously considered “outside themselves.”
Inner values faded into the background any time money or their way of life was challenged. Most people spoke of higher values, but when it came down to what they did, circumstances outside their selves usually took precedence over inner values.
The way people related to each other seemed backward, like it went the opposite direction that consciousness should flow. People’s value systems seemed to be turned 180 degrees opposite of what was real.
I firmly believed there had been a terrible error. Somehow a mistake had sent me to the wrong planet. These were not my people. The meanness and intolerance everywhere was depressing to observe. From today’s perspective, 1951 was an intolerant period. We have evolved a long way since then.
During that time, my father asked me to help him when he was tuning a car in his shop. He asked me to start the car, put my foot firmly on the brake, put the car in drive, and slowly let off on the brake so the car would creep forward. I did that, and the car crept backward. He yelled, “Put it in drive!” I told him it was.
He came around and stuck his head in the side window and saw that the car was, in fact, in drive. He told me to put the car in reverse and slowly let off on the brake. I did, and the car crept forward.
He had me put the car in park and set the emergency brake. Then he said, “Turn the radio on.” When I did, all we heard was loud static. He revved the engine from under the hood. Static and the sound of pistons firing was all that could be heard through the radio’s speakers.
He had me shut the engine off. He said he had put the distributor in 180 degrees out of phase to how it should be. That caused the pistons to fire in reverse order. It made the crankshaft rotate opposite to the normal direction. That was why the car went backward in drive and forward in reverse.
When I asked about the radio, he said, “With the pistons firing in reverse order, the electrical current to the condenser was on the wrong side of the coil. The sound of the pistons firing had already occurred before the current into the radio could be suppressed.”
After he got the engine running and timed, the car crept forward when I put the transmission into drive. This time, when he asked me to turn the radio on, sweet music, beautiful and clear, came through the speakers.
I realized that when a person’s focus is 180 degrees out of phase, positions are more important than cherishing people. There are “reasons” for being unkind and not loving others. Huge blocks of their time were taken up with protesting what is, thinking that this problem should not be happening to them, or wondering why it was happening to them. That way of thinking always creates pain and suffering.
I saw that when we are spiritually awake, most of our awareness goes inward toward our heart’s values. Inner values, principles and beliefs drive our thoughts and actions. A person who is focused on doing something positive and focusing on the good in others is like clear sweet music. They are so much more interesting than people who are focused on any concept that has rules imposed from outside themselves, like most religion or politics.
A person who really “hears” what others are saying is so refreshing. Most people listen with their mouth open, only waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can say what they think.
When I thought about my Uncle Ted, I could see clearly that in the presence of a conscious, loving person, it’s easy to see that cherishing others, and yourself, is the path to walk. His awareness went toward cherishing people and accepting “what is.” He seemed to spend more of his time in the here and now. His presence had a liberating effect on everyone around him.
When our heart is in charge of our consciousness, everything “out there” progressively reflects our inner values and principles. When we focus our precious attention on what we cherish and what we want to do or be, we are lovingly creating our own destiny. Our actions tend to be inclusive; they invite others to participate. Our lives move in positive directions. Our choices show others better ways of being in the world. When cherishing others is our motive, we tend to blaze new paths, which leave trails for others to follow.
Changing Your Beliefs Changes Your World
Believing is seeing. This is our spirit, soul and heart’s view of life. The mortal conundrum is: You see your world the way you believe it is. What you expect mysteriously turns out to be what happens. It’s all about where you place your attention.
If you believe in lack and limitation, everywhere you turn limitations bar your way. It is hard to get what you need, much less what you want. You can have a whole lifetime, even endless lifetimes of lack. As long as you expect to get less than you need, you get less. If you believe in injustice, everywhere you look you will see injustice.
A great metaphor for life is “the holodeck” on the old television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the holodeck, a crewmember can create a personal fantasy program. He or she sets up the exact situation they want to experience. Then they get to experience that program as “reality.”
The program they set up might be mountain climbing, equestrian riding, combat against multiple foes, or whatever the crewmember could imagine. The holodeck is a great metaphor for your life. If you do not like what appears to be coming at you, change the programming. Change what you believe.
We all grew up believing that we have no control over what is happening outside ourselves. That what we think doesn’t really change what is happening beyond our immediate family or group of friends. That we are powerless to change the world. That God, or whatever we call God was up there, was outside of us. That we were just the created, having to put up with whatever was happening around us. It is true that we are the created, but that is the smallest part of who we are. We are also creators.
The big idea is: What we spend our days and nights focusing our attention on transforms into the world we create for ourselves. Just the fact that we focus our attention on it manifests it in our world. We may have difficulty with this law, but it is the law.
The universe is a lot like a clerk at Burger King. If you drove up to the window and said, “I want a hamburger with no lettuce, no tomatoes, no sauce, and no bun,” there would probably be a short pause. Then the clerk might say, “OK, you mean you just want a slab of hamburger meat?” If you say yes, they will probably say, “That will be four dollars and ninety-nine cents,” or whatever a hamburger costs.
The clerk wouldn’t say, “Are you nuts?” They would just deliver it to you as you requested. In that same unquestioning way, the universe delivers what you expect.
The universe can also be compared to a genie in The Arabian Nights. No matter what you focus on, the genie assumes that is what you want and says, “Your wish is my command.” The genie delivers whatever you are focusing your attention on. Your inner Genie focuses on the image your mind creates and ignores the polarity of wanting it or not wanting it.
We must train ourselves to focus on our heart’s desires, and quit focusing on all the things we don’t like. It’s actually pretty simple when you figure it out.
So, my wish for you is that the difficulties in your life to be mainly in the planning and execution of your elaborate plans and dreams: once you have overcome all the difficulties, you get to experience such magnificent feelings of accomplishment.
If you immerse yourself in hobbies, sports or professions that have steep learning curves, you will never get bored. Pursue goals and dreams that makes your heart feel alive. Then you are “following your bliss.” Our school systems train us to think we are replaceable cogs in the mechanisms of society. Step out of that dreary picture and think like a Renaissance woman or man.
The big idea is: You can create your world exactly the way you want it. It may take your whole life to accomplish it, but you are going to live that long anyway. Do not hold back from stepping into your dreams or ideals because of the difficulties. Life is long. You may as well have something to show for it in the end. There is such pleasure in achieving mastery of something you love, something most would shy away from because of the difficulties involved—then achieving it.
Your greatest joys come from having something to do that you can throw all your passion into. Imagine the great joy of having accomplished your splendid plans and dreams against all adversities. That is fulfillment.
Values govern our behavior, our words, our actions. They are personal, emotional and arguable, a part of our unique, individual essence. They illuminate what is important and deeply meaningful to our lives. They put the spotlight on what we stand for, guiding our behavior, providing us with the personal code of conduct we live with.
Values aren’t as much selected as we discover them. As we live more fully in the present moment, we come to realize that certain values are very important to us, things like: Being honorable, living our life with integrity: Being kinder, more attentive: Doing what we say we will do: Being more decisive: Praising people more: Spending more time in nature: Having an artistic outlet: Being committed to working out regularly: Making time for meditation: Cherishing everyone: Deciding to do whatever it takes to be fit and healthy: Choosing to be content. For me, one of my core values is: Staying on time with my patients, which honors their time, making it easier for them to schedule my treatments into their day.
I firmly believe and make it a core value to every year be healthier than last year, to have better posture, gait and ergonomics. Every year, I am better at all seven habits: I breathe better, stronger. I am better at feeling all my feelings and the other habits…
Many of my beliefs and the core values they generate have to do with what most people consider “old age.” I have a core belief that we should not have to give up any more than 15% of our prowess before we die. But most people have shared core belief that, after thirty, they give up about 70% of their prowess by the time they are seventy years old and believe that is old age.
To make aging well one of my core values requires that I live the seven habits, eat healthy, develop good relationships, that I commit to working out at least three times a week plus all my other activities. I have done all that consistently for the last forty years and will continue until the day I can’t. That’s the power of core values.
Society conditions us to conform, to fit in, to give our power away. Slumping is a classic example because most people are actually afraid of or embarrassed about being powerful. When we maintain good posture, all fifteen of our powerful circulatory systems run full on. Then breathing out strong provides the fuel to live a powerful life. How will we handle that?
Researchers have confirmed that when people have a clear set of core values, it is easier to make big life decisions, pursue passions, undertake long-term career goals or relationships. They tolerate physical pain more easily. They have greater self-discipline and focus when studying or working toward goals. They have stronger social connections.
Things we value come and go, but our core values endure. They guide us throughout our lives, no matter the situation or difficulty. Real failure is failing to live by our values. Real success is taking action and living our core values every day.
Subconscious values: Our values are completely different when we are spiritually sleeping, allowing our subconscious brain to govern our consciousness with critical thinking as the highest level it attains to. The brain focuses on problems and references everything from the perspective of the past/future world of time. It models reality from below upward, and from outside in. Thinking that way means: Its core values are based on lack, limitation and scarcity.
In this subconscious model, the past predicts the future. Trouble is, the brain, if not directed by our heart, integrates all the unresolved past memories of shame, guilt and missed opportunities into all its considerations, its reasoning. That severely narrows our possibilities while letting our unresolved fears function as our advisors.
Then, the brain’s critical thinking about the future enfolds all our projected fears, anxieties and worst-case scenarios into its projected outcomes. This lets outer circumstances compromise our values. This way of thinking would appear deranged if most of the people around us were not still thinking this same way.
Conscious values: Mindfulness of the basic habits like: Breathe Out Strong: Stand Tall and Feel All our Feelings keep bringing us back to the present moment where we are the heroes of our story. In this scenario, our heart is in charge of our consciousness and wants to live in harmony with our core values as it creates our reality. This makes a fertile environment for happiness, peace of mind, and success. We are living more authentically, the author, director and lead actor of our own story.
Our heart wants to manifest our world in the most loving and efficient manner. Its model is “Above Down, Inside Out.” In this model, our lungs breathe in the higher truths and visions from above, then downward disseminates them to the heart and other organ systems. Our kidney system decides if this is what we need to do. When we commit to it, our liver immediately starts uptakes every bit of energy we will ever need to make it so.
At the beginning stage of any endeavor, we need to ask all the hard questions: Like how will this affect my family, my beliefs, my values and principles. At the outset we need to seriously challenge how it will affect all the facets of our life. But when we decide that THIS is what we want to do, then we need to become single minded.
Right after we commit to something, we begin the heroes’ journey. There is this state of bliss. But very soon after we commit, all the fears start coming up. When we go inside ourselves and actually feel those fears, one-at-a-time they dissipate into nothingness. If we do not actually go inside and feel those fears, thy continue to build until they become the “fire breathing dragons” of our old mythologies, effectively knocking us off our quest.
The brain, if not kept on point by our heart, will keep dredging up fears and reasons why this can fail. The fears and their reasonings that our subconscious brain generates then become competing plans. At this point, as the creators of our reality, we need to address our brain like we would address a recalcitrant child. That means telling our subconscious mind to stop generating distractions, that THIS is what we are doing.
The seven habits, and other habits you may take on keep bringing you back to the present moment where your Spirit and Soul are in charge of your consciousness. In our bodymind, that means our heart is in charge. We delete our fears by going inside and actually feeling them as they come up. Being single-minded is to keep bringing our focus back to all the intricacies of accomplishing the goal instead of letting our unruly brain keep coming up with fear-based “what ifs.”
Principles, values and beliefs are generated in the sixth and seventh dimensions of our seven-dimensional bodymind.
What are principles and values?
Values are subjective, personal, emotional, and arguable, while principles are objective, factual, impersonal, and self-evident because they are indisputable. Principles are universal truths based on natural laws. While values govern behaviors, principles govern the consequences of those behaviors. An ethical person does not violate his or her principles.
Principles Defined: A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a belief system, a behavior or a chain of reasoning. A principle is a kind of rule, value, belief, or idea that guides us. Principles provide clarity and directions, even if they don't suggest specific actions. They help us develop our values and to know what is important in our life. Having no principles lets us be swayed by popular opinion or culture.
A principle is something we stand for so strongly that we will fight with everything we have to not break it. An ethical person has a lot of principles.
The Foundation of our Beingness
As a trinity of Spirit, Soul and seven-dimensional bodymind, the foundation of our beingness and of our character is a triangle, like a triangular balance board that we stand on, one that we must keep in balance for our whole life. Rudolf Steiner calls the triangle “heart, mind and will.” Being more of a “rubber hits the road” guy, and having studied Rudolf Steiner’s material, I call the three points of the triangle:
When we commit to anything, the spiritual world immediately goes into motion. Then, when we get to each intersection of our life, the gift is there, the teacher is there and the mystery is there. Look for them and you will see them.
Because the balance board we stand on is a triangle, each of the three points is as crucial as the other two. They either support or detract from the other two points.
Our bodymind and our subconscious brain operating system both align to the Constellation of Truth. A basic law is: Anytime we are out of truth with ourselves, the altered frequency of the lie causes our bodymind to dysfunction. Dis-ease immediately follows, which if not rectified becomes disease.
Our spirit, soul and our heart operating system align to the much higher frequency Constellation of Love. Love is the foundation of all matter. As creators, we love our world into being. Anything we choose to not love; we invalidate in our unique world.
In this world of time and polarities, decisiveness develops our will forces as we stand up for our values and principles in a world where most do not. Then, in overcoming the difficulties inherent in accomplishing dreams, goals and ultimately our plans, we further develop our willpower.
Within our bodymind, when we commit to something, anything, our liver immediately starts up taking all the energy we will ever need to make what we commit to a reality. No commitment, no energy, no forward progress and no future.
You may remember times when you had no commitments and could hardly get out of bed. And you can see that in others.
Above Down, Inside Out
My first week at Palmer college of Chiropractic, in philosophy class with the famed Dr. Galen Price we learned two guiding principles. The first principle is the law of “Above Down, Inside Out.”
All creation and all healing operate through this principle: The great truths and higher visions of life come to us from above, from the spiritual dimensions. We take them down into our life and own them (above down). Then, against all adversity, we manifest them from within outward (inside out). In this model we are the heroes of our stories, our lives. We each create our own unique world by what we choose to focus our attention on. In this model “believing is seeing.”
The unconscious or subconscious pattern of reacting to what is happening is “outside in, below upward.” In this model, something supposedly happens to us (outside in). Because that is happening, we now must believe and function differently (below upward). In this model “seeing is believing.”
We are no longer the heroes of our lives; we or others are victims, subconsciously reacting to a somewhat hostile environment. Viruses can do that. Sadly, this is still the dominant paradigm. Most people subconsciously believe this model. The whole medical industry operates from this allopathic principle.
The Body Never Does Anything Wrong
The second principle we learned during my first week at Palmer was “the body never does anything wrong.” Immediately, students put their hands in the air. Dr. Price said, “Here we go.” He pointed at a student with his hand in the air and the student said, “What about cancer?” Dr. Price said, “What about cancer? If a person is in an untenable situation, one where they can see no way out, how do you think their body will respond?” A number of students responded, “cancer.”
Dr. Price taught us that our body is more loyal than the most loyal dog you ever imagined, much less had. It always does the very best it can with what you give it. But, and this is the main concept to comprehend, your organ systems take everything you think and say personally as if it’s their fault.
Our brain is a subconscious operating system that relates to everything based on linear time: The past, the future or some past/future construct. This value system views everything from a perspective of lack, limitation and scarcity. When we speak in this way, our organ systems assume it’s their fault. Then that organ system goes into terrible distress. THIS is the basis of all dis-ease, which, if we don’t change the way we think, ultimately becomes disease.
Our brain believes in injustice because of what it sees when it subconsciously views the world that it assumes is outside ourselves.
Our heart innately knows and desires what our Spirit and Soul knows and desires. We each create our own unique world and no one lives in anyone else’s world. The world our heart lovingly creates is the authentic world. Authentic comes from the root word author.
We write the story of our lives. We are the director. And we are supposed to be the lead or at least one of the principal actors of our story. In our heart’s world there is no injustice, but there are people who subconsciously believe in victims and perpetrators, and act out those artificial stories.
Principles we need to succeed:
A short list of principles we need to incarnate to truly be human beings are: Gratitude, thankfulness, kindness, humility, compassion, respect for ourselves and all life, curiosity, optimism, generosity, forgiveness, honoring diversity, persistence, accountability and integrity.
The greatest principle has to do with our attention, the most sacred aspect of who we are. Whatever we focus our attention on, that is what we manifest into our own unique world. No matter what is happening in the world around us, we have the sovereign right to focus our attention wherever we choose.
The fifth dimension of our seven-dimensional bodymind is the causal, or attitudinal plane. This dimension is ruled by an extensive meridian system that terminates at our fingers and toes. Meridians are the template for our bodymind, forming up before our organs, bones, nervous system or muscles. As our body grows, every tissue in our whole bodymind forms up around the template our meridians provide. On the microscopic level, a meridian terminates in the nucleus of every cell.
The fluid that runs inside our meridians looks like water, but has a high specific gravity like oil. The high specific gravity allows the pressure these rivers of light generate to push out and maintains our aura, a dense, palpable auric field that extends outward about 34 inches all around our bodymind, including above our had and below our feet.
Our aura surrounds us like an egg, insulating us from having to feel the pain or hear thoughts of everyone when they are near us. This allows us to have an autonomous life. The downside from being insulated from other’s pain and thoughts is an erroneous assumption that we are separate from others and all of life.
What are Attitudes?
The energy that makes up our aura is our attitudes, putting them right out there for everyone to observe. Feelings and attitudes are similar. They are either love-based or fear-based. Attitudes are feelings that are more stable over time. They are the result of a decision-making process that considers other factors like values, principles, beliefs and intentions.
Our attitudes can be thought of as the spiritual speed that we are evolving down the highway of life. Everyone is spiritually evolving, but they are doing it at the speed of the attitudes they are generating.
At frustration or irritation, it is like we are evolving at about a tenth of a mile per hour. At anger, worry, indignation, our forward progress has slowed down to about a twentieth of a mile per hour and every day we see more things that make us uptight. At hatred, jealousy, bitterness our speed has constricted down to about a thirtieth of a mile per hour slowing our evolution down so much that the best way we can describe our life is same unpleasant stuff, different day.
The lowest attitude or emotion on the love side of the equation is joy. At joy we are evolving down the highway at more like three miles per hour and life is more rewarding. At an attitude of gratitude, its like we are going twenty-five miles per hour and life is much more exciting and fulfilling. At thankfulness we’re going fifty, but each increase requires more education.
Often, we need to be thankful when our plumbing or car is malfunctioning or we are having some other difficulty. It takes education to keep focusing on the big picture without getting caught up in momentary problems.
The big picture is that we are all creators. This beautiful blue/green paradise world has been provided for our pleasure and enjoyment. But we have free will to create our own unique world within it. We can create a world of animosity, filled with victims and perpetrators, if that is what we choose to focus our attention on.
Our heart’s super power is: It is designed to continually create our unique world in the most loving and efficient manner. That’s if we don’t get distracted by our subconscious brain’s past/future view that is continually focusing on lack, limitation and scarcity.
We have sovereign power to focus our awareness on anything we choose. If we focus on all the things that irritate or anger us, we get more and more to be angry or irritated about.
We all are just making our life up. Look around you and see how many people have created a life just like yours. No one, right?
Most people are not waking up yet, so they let their subconscious brain rule their causal plane by letting it focus on the problems of the world and all the things they don’t like. Whenever you do that, a bad attitude forms up. Their fears are that life’s hard and then you die. If that’s what you believe, that’s precisely what you get.
This is a beautiful blue/green paradise world created solely for our pleasure and entertainment. More people are waking up every day, bringing more light into the planet. The good is getting better, and we have sovereign choice to focus on that. But in this world of polarities, the bad is getting worse. We have sovereign free will to focus on all the things going bad if we want, but there goes the neighborhood.
Attitude is the creative force that moves what we believe into reality. Every moment we are grateful generates more to be grateful for and life is lovely. When we are thankful, we are generating so much more grace and beauty that we become surrounded by it. Attitude is everything.
What Is Neurosis?
Neurosis or neurotic attitudes are behavior patterns that are formed up by all the ways we give our spirit and soul’s power away. Until we wake up and realize that we create whatever we focus our attention on, we get caught up in endless loops that confirm our belief that we have no power.
Believing in injustice, for example, people can go from one whole lifetime of being a victim, building up a lifetime of animosity. Then, they spend their next lifetime self-righteously discharging all that animosity and wind up being a perpetrator. They can spend many lifetimes, caught up in this loop of going from a victim to a perpetrator.
The irony is, we never hurt anyone but ourselves.
As we start waking up, we realize: There is no injustice. There are only people who believe in victims and perpetrators and give up their creative power up to those self-perpetuating and self-defeating roles. And those of us on the sidelines, who are feeling sorry for the victims and resenting the perpetrators, we are part of the problem. By focusing on the problems, we are helping create those illusions. We are creating whatever we focus the awesome power of our attention onto.
We have the power. It is time for us to get our attitudes up into the love-centered ranges and focus our attention on creating our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner.
Our definition of who we are is a trinity: Spirit, Soul and seven dimensional bodymind. Our eternal Soul interfaces with us through our imagination. Anytime we imagine something, anything, our Soul projects it onto the screen of our imagination. This allows us to preview what we want to do as many times as it takes until we can observe it exactly the way we want it to turn out. Then we act.
Our Soul projects everything we imagine tirelessly, as many times as we want, for as long as want, for our entire life. This talent Is meant to be used to create our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner.
When our heart is in charge of our consciousness, our Soul’s sense of imagination interfaces with our bodymind through our stomach system in the element of Earth. The Earth element qualities of being loved like a mother loves us and having clear strong boundaries are meant to be the guiding qualities of our imagination.
When we use our imagination to more effectively create all the intricacies of what we are manifesting, all our abilities are super enhanced.
We are living in the new world, although most people don’t know this yet. In the new world, our heart rules our consciousness. All our organ systems act as highly esteemed cabinet members that lend all their talents and wisdom in real time to our heart so we can create our unique world in the most loving and efficient manner.
In this bold new world, our Spirit guides us through all its first feelings. Our Soul dances with us through its qualities of imagination, guided by the nurturing qualities of the Earth element.
We are the heroes of our story. Courage is our guide. We are breathing up enough energy to exceed in any endeavor we attempt. Our good posture allows all fifteen of our powerful circulatory systems to run at full power.
As we are feeling all our feelings, our Spirit is our constant guide, warning us with bad feelings or encouraging us with good feelings the instant we contemplate doing anything.
Our Soul projects everything we imagine onto the screen of our imagination for us to preview as many times as it takes until we see it occurring in our best version before we act.
We are as capable of greatness as any of our heroes.
How Things Go Bad
When we unconsciously allow our brain to take over, as most of the population of the world yet does, all the enhanced qualities listed above vanish. The brain’s limitation of only being able to recognize the physical and mental dimensions eliminates all the guidance of wisdom and talents that would have come from our organ systems.
Our heart’s enhanced creative thinking vanishes and our elevator only goes up to the level of critical thinking. Our brain’s failure to feel our feelings (it thinks them) effectively shuts down our spiritual guidance. Probably the worse aspect of our brain’s way of thinking occurs with our imagination.
When our brain is in charge of our consciousness, its perception of lack, limitation and scarcity everywhere it focusses our attention channels our imagination toward darker, more limited scenarios. Our brain’s version of the future contains all the failure, shame, guilt and missed opportunities of its perception of the past.
Worse, our brain’s obsessive tendency of focusing on problems, and its tendency to isolate itself away from perceived “others,” causes it to see itself or others as victims or perpetrators. It firmly thinks that the world outside itself is the real world, causing it to feel powerless. Then the brain goes off into rants.
Yeah. That pretty much sucks. I lived way too many years with my brain in charge and life was never that good.
Bringing it back
Now, every year I breathe out strong more of the time. My posture is more erect every year. Every year I am better at feeling all my feelings and the rest of the seven habits keep waking me up more of the time. My brain’s job description is: Servant to my heart. My brain is always beta. My heart is always alpha.
Every year I am more authentic, the author, director and lead actor of my life. Courage is my advisor. I am always attempting to keep my attitudes in ever higher love-centered ranges. And life is so much better than I ever imagined it could be. This is how life is meant to be.
Spirit is both single, like a wave on the ocean, and plural. We are both the wave and the ocean. Everything we can see or observe is within us. There is nothing that exists that is not part of us.
The energy of our Spirit is most like the energy of our feelings. Spiritual and emotional energies are both expansive, filling up all the space. It’s just that spiritual energy is lighter, more ethereal than emotional energy.
When we listen with our whole body and not just our brain, we feel the truth of what’s being said, or the lie. We feel it. Feeling all our feelings is how we develop and hone our intuition, one of our seven senses. We are not limited to only five senses, as we were taught in school. Our seventh sense is imagination from our Soul. We mature spiritually as we learn to feel progressively more of our feelings every year.
Our spirit communicates with our bodymind through our feelings, especially our first feelings. The moment we intend to do something, anything, our first feeling is our spirit’s direct communication to us. Paying attention to our first feelings makes us more spiritually evolved.
Time, as we know it, only exists for our bodymind. Our Spirit and our Soul are eternal, so for them, everything is happening here and now. That means, if something is going to happen tomorrow, it is already here and now to our Spirit and also to our Soul. They always see things coming long before our ego personality does. They want to help us navigate the maze.
Before any good thing ever happened to us, our spirit expressed a good feeling the moment we first intended to do it. Our spirit’s first feeling can be intense or subtle, but it only lasts for a brief moment, usually less than a second. Then it’s gone. No residuals. If we were not paying attention, we completely missed it.
Likewise, before any bad thing ever happened to us, we got a bad feeling the moment we intended it. Sometimes we get the bad feeling when we get our first glimpse that something’s coming. Chances are, we proceeded onward anyway. Then, when it went bad, deep down, we always knew it was going to.
Spiritual wisdom is learning to notice and pay attention to feelings that are coming up, not just thinking about them. On as negative level, the instant we fail to feel a feeling that comes up, we space out and our subconscious brain takes charge. Feelings are hundreds of times more important than our thoughts.
It is alright to allow our brain to wonder why we experienced those feelings, but not until we actually went inside and felt them. Then, allowing our brain to question why that feeling came up lets us see behind the curtain, to observe the backstories, the “why” of what is or was going on.
Waking Back Up
Our brain has a processing speed limit of 24 frames per second. That only lets it recognize the physical and mental dimensions. The problem with that is, the processing speed of our higher dimensions is more like a hundred frames per second. Our heart operates at the higher speeds, but not our brain.
Our heart is always meant to be Alpha, the operating system in charge of our consciousness. Our brain is meant to be beta, a completely devoted servant to our heart. That’s where the seven habits come in.
The first three habits: Breathe Out Strong: Stand Up Straight: and Feel all our Feelings take up so much of our brain’s operating bandwidth that they keep us firmly in the present moment where our heart rules our consciousness.
Breathing out strong has the added benefit of drawing our spirit fully down into our bodymind where our Spirit’s chakras align with our bodymind’s chakras. Then, at each intersection in our life, our own values, principles and beliefs dictate all our thoughts and actions.
When we are in the present moment, our heart takes in all our organ system’s incredible wisdom and talents, integrating all of that effortlessly in real time. Because our Spirit, our Soul and our heart all align to the higher frequency constellation of love, our heart innately desires what our Spirit and Soul desires.
Our heart’s main function is to create our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner. Its warmth and unconditional love nourishes everyone and everything in our world into their highest potential. When we focus our love into a profession, art, hobbies or something we can put our passion into, then all our genius qualities and talents can come forth and bear fruit.
Our spirit and bodymind are meant to work together. Only by cooperation can either achieve their most profound desires. The brain is not qualified to be in charge of our consciousness, and should only be the servant to our heart. To take control of our brain and keep waking up to the present moment, our brain needs a fulltime job, the “seven Habits,” which is explained in detail in section I.
The past/future world of time is so seductive that we all fall asleep dozens of time daily. Giving our brain the job of maintaining the seven habits keeps waking us out of the world of time that most people slumber in, and back to the present moment.
Breathing Out Strong (the first habit) draws our spirit down into its home, just below our navel, right in front of the fourth lumbar vertebra. Japanese call this place of power “hara.” Chinese call it the lower tang tien (pronounced dongshin). We Americans and Europeans have no name for this most important part of our body so we have some catching up to do.
Every moment that we are breathing out strong, our spirit settles down into its home where it takes control of our bodymind, similarly to how an accomplished equestrian takes the reins of a wonderfully challenging horse.
We, all of us, are spiritual beings, creators, living in a physical body. We are not physical bodies who have a spirit.
This body we live in for this lifetime is more devoted and loyal to who we are as a spirit than the greatest dog any of us have ever had, or even known. But we have a very great problem: Our bodymind takes everything we think and talk about literally. Every moment we let our brain focus attention on unhappiness about the world outside ourselves, our bodymind assumes complete responsibility as if it’s our bodymind’s fault. As a creator, part of growing up is realizing the wonderful—and terrible impact our every word has on our bodymind.
The next great step in our education as creators is learning how to take control of our bodymind. Mindfulness is being aware of breathing out strong, being erect, feeling all our feelings, trusting our gut, shaking off traumatic events like a cat, being decisive and cherishing everyone and everything. The seven habits are “the reins” for taking control of a wonderfully challenging bodymind.
In the Five-Elements section, we learned how each organ system operates. Now it’s time to review our spirit’s role as creator in directing each organ system efficiently.
Our Spirit’s role Through the Five Elements
Our every thought and word functions as commands to our organs and to our bodymind. Let’s review the element of wood—liver and gallbladder. Our liver, as the architect of our life, listens in on all our thoughts and conversations. Then it draws up plans to have more of that in our lives. If we are focusing our attention on something, no matter whether we love it or would never want it in our lives, that’s what we are manifesting into our own unique world.
Our gallbladder’s job is to make good judgments about everything and everyone in our lives so our liver’s plans have basic integrity. Then, the instant we commit to something, our liver starts up taking all the energy we will ever need to accomplish whatever we have committed to.
Until we realize the constructive and destructive power of our thoughts and words, we send confusing commands to our liver system. It is appropriate, at the beginning of our planning process to have doubts and to question whether having what we want would be good for us and everyone involved; how it affects our family, our beliefs, values and principles; whether it would be good for our soul development. But once we determine our course of action, we need to switch our focus to becoming single-minded, and not let our unruly brain create more doubts.
Our faith can move mountains, but our doubts put the mountains there in the first place.
Becoming single-minded means not letting our unruly brain keep injecting its doubts and fears into our thinking process after we have decided our course of action. Each doubt creates secondary goals our liver must manifest. The more doubts we let our unruly brain generate, the more confusing the outcome becomes until the end result is unrecognizable.
Then, to make it worse, we let our unruly brain muck around, focusing on all the problems outside ourselves, like politics, conspiracy theories or work and family problems. Our liver must design similar kinds of problems into our own unique inner world as the problems we were focusing on outside ourselves. Ouch!
Element of Fire
Our heart is the root of life itself. It innately knows what our spirit and soul wants. Its goals and the goals of our spirit are similar. Our heart wants to create our unique world in the most loving efficient manner and wishes the same for every other person and for all of life. Our heart cannot do this and protect itself, so it has three systems that function like imperial bodyguards.
Our heart protector system (our pericardium) serves as ambassador and personal bodyguard of our heart by forgiving everyone and everything that causes us pain by simply feeling all the feelings involved.
Our three-heater system keeps our torso’s three spaces at just the right temperature by pulling the focus of our attention back from the illusory world outside ourselves, and focuses our awareness on our unique world that exists here and now.
Our small intestine, the heart’s third ambassador and bodyguard protects the heart by bringing everything that is nurturing to the heart while letting everything that is non-nurturing to simply pass on by. It does not resist or fight against evil, but let it pass on by while single-mindedly keeping our focus on what is nutritional in our life.
Element of earth
Our stomach takes in and ripens our food by acidifying it. Our stomach also ripens all our relationships, plans and dreams, values, principles and beliefs by thinking them through. If we wait for something to happen and then react to them, we will always have stomach problems. Through our stomach we develop imagination.
Our spleen and pancreas are the part of our consciousness where we develop clear boundaries and have good distribution, not only in all the fluid dynamics of our physical body, but in all our relationships. Thinking that we do not have enough time or resources to do what we want to do causes our spleen to believe it has failed us. And that always causes the spleen system, including its meridians and muscles to go into terrible distress.
Element of Metal
The element of metal is our connection to the higher spiritual kingdoms. The lungs breathe in our higher truths and visions. Anytime that we negate our own truth or visions of life, our lung system, sinuses and throat experiences distress.
Our large intestine system allows for transformation and change in our life. Holding on to things that have outlived our needs or wishing things could go back to the way they were causes distress to our lower GI system.
Element of Water
Water represents feelings, ruled by the kidneys and bladder. Feeling all our feelings, and being insightful about them develops intuition, and transforms us into more spiritually evolved beings. Our kidneys are the part of our bodymind where we decide whether the vision our lungs breathed in needs to be accomplished by us personally.
Because we are creators, wondering what is going to happen is such a disempowering way of thinking that it causes our kidneys go into distress. Believing in injustice, being concerned or making excuses for another diminishes that person, essentially denying their spiritual reality. And that always throws our kidneys into distress. Kidney distress causes 90% of all low back pain. But the greatest distress and resultant severe low back pain comes as our kidney’s response to being bitterly disappointed about how some part of our life turned out.
Our bladder’s job is feeling all our feelings. Unfelt feelings build up emotional pressure in our whole bodymind. The pressure causes the brain to generate one past/future-based thought form after to mentally justify not feeling those feelings. Since most people have not yet learned to feel their feelings, pet scans reveal that the average person’s brain generates 70,000 thought forms per day. Worse, unfelt feelings generate a pain body, and every year the pain worsens, causing most of the pain we experience,
When we make a habit of feeling all our feelings, the brain ceases its chatter. We go for minutes with no other thoughts than perhaps noticing something of beauty in our environment. When we start feeling all our feelings and are insightful about them, our world more than doubles in magnificence.
The Seven Dimensions We Access Through our Bodymind
Our bodymind provides our spirit and soul access to seven incredible dimensions. Within our bodymind, all seven dimensions operate simultaneously while completely interfacing with each other in real time. That means, all our organ systems and all seven dimensions have very simple operating systems. And that makes them easy for our spirit to understand and control. Each dimension gives our spirit and soul profound wonders to experience:
Chakras
The organs of our sixth and seventh dimensions are our endocrine glands and the chakras they represent. This is the part of our bodymind where we develop values, principles and beliefs.
Chakras are the subtlest organs of our bodymind, energy vortexes that appear to have flower-like petals like a daisy. Many people have learned to discern chakras. The energy of chakras is rather dense so most people can discern them if they attempt to.
Unresolved emotions like jealousy, anger, malice or worry cause the colors of our chakras become murky and dark, slowing their spin, shutting down access to spiritual wisdom.
As we become mindful, more loving, truthful and decisive, the chakras develop purer rainbow-like colors. As we grow and mature spiritually, the chakras spin faster and appear to develop more petals. The thousand acupuncture points all over our body are like mini-chakras, smaller vortexes of energy.
Since our spirit puts out more energy than our physical body can contain, the energy spinning out from our chakras and acupuncture points trails out behind us like the wake of a ship. The great mystery is how the energy generated by our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, principles, values and beliefs become the world we then observe.
The Seven chakras:
As creators, whatever we focus our precious attention on mysteriously creates our own unique world. One person focusing their attention on what makes their heart feel most alive is doing more healing to the world than hundreds of people that are concerned about or protesting what is wrong in the world. Every moment we have the sovereign choice of where we focus our precious attention.
Being Decisive: Iliocecal Valve
Even though ilium and cecum are words used long ago to describe your small and large intestines, the valve between them is still called the ileocecal valve. For your digestion to remain healthy, this valve must stay tightly closed all of the time. It only opens to allow the small intestine to evacuate waste products into the large intestine.
After the evacuation, the valve shuts tight, triggering a neurological reflex for your appendix to inject two squirts of mucous. The mucous lubricates the stool, which is especially important at times when your stool gets too dry. Then your large intestine extracts the last of the metals like calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron, and extracts enough water to firm up the stool.
Your intestines not only digest food. In the higher dimensions of your multidimensional bodymind your intestines also digest all your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, judgments, values, politics, spirituality, relationships, your work, and literally everything you take in. When you are decisive, this one-way check valve only lets digestion and life move in one direction. You become single minded.
As you become more decisive about all the little things in your life, your vision about the big picture of your life becomes progressively clearer. Indecisions blur your vision of the future like television was the early fifties, when the snow obscured the picture so badly you could barely see what was going on.
If you fail to make a decision—especially about little things—your indecision divides your consciousness because it has to make contingency plans for all the possible directions you might go, as if you were going to do all of them. You lose the awesome power of single-minded focus that directs your attention into an unstoppable force.
You are a creator. The foundation of your character is a triangle. The three points of your triangle are cherishing, being truthful, and being decisive. When all three points of your triangle are functioning together, supporting each other, they empower you to create your life simply and effectively.
All the little indecisions weaken your love, devaluing it. They diminish your truth. You wind up standing for nothing. Your values and principles get renegotiated at every intersection of your life. You give others control of your choices, which rarely works out the way you would choose.
How Indecision Causes Physical Pain
Your small intestine is extremely effective at digesting everything you take in. The food you eat takes about eighteen hours in transit, going back and forth through your small intestine until it finally arrives at your ileocecal valve. Your small intestine extracts 95 percent of the nutrition out of it. What is left over is highly toxic, but still has the consistency of a fruit smoothie.
Any indecision, especially the small ones, causes your ileocecal valve to lose its tone and become flaccid. Hundreds of times a day you do activities that tighten your abdominal muscles, forcing toxic wastes through the weakened ileocecal valve and back up into your small intestine. Your small intestine naturally does its job, absorbing the toxic wastes into the bloodstream. This is called auto-toxicity, self-poisoning.
Ninety percent of your lymph glands—the sewer system within your blood stream—are in your armpit and groin. The auto-toxicity resulting from indecision quickly overwhelms the lymph nodes in your groin area. The toxicity always causes one side of your pelvis to twist forward, and one hip to push up higher than the other. The high-side hip usually pushes the shoulder up on the same side. Indecision causes the whole spine to twist up and rotate. It causes a number of vertebrae to subluxate (go out of alignment with pathological consequences).
Indecision causes your pelvis to misalign so badly it appears that you have a short leg, which can seem permanent if you are chronically indecisive. The pelvic misalignments also cause your knees and ankles to misalign. The main cause of scoliosis (curvature of the spine) is indecision, not committing to what you know. At least 90 percent of short-leg situations are simply the inevitable results of indecision. I bet you didn’t know that.
All fifteen of your powerful circulatory systems are greatly compromised by scoliosis and the misalignments caused by indecision. Being indecisive—even though it seems like such a small issue—creates an enormous amount of dis-ease. Your whole body suffers. Over time dis-ease morphs into disease. When you comprehend how devastating indecision is to your overall health, you realize that no one can afford its terrible costs.
Families and friends that are honest with each other in answering all the little questions that come up, without sarcasm, are developing the tools that let them understand and appreciate the breadth and depth of each other’s character. Each person is truly magnificent, but most hide their light from others because of one fear or another. Indecision is the principle mechanism by which we hide from each other.
When you are asked what you want, and you go inside and think “in a perfect world, what would I want?” the answer washes through your consciousness instantly. It is usually subtle, and if you are spacing out, you can miss it. The clearer your answers are to all the little questions in your relationships, the clearer each person’s understanding of the other becomes. Then we all start getting what we desire. Health is simple. It’s disease that’s complicated.
Decisiveness—making the decision, instead of deflecting in some way—is every bit as important as being honorable and cherishing others. It’s a triangle. Each point supports—or detracts from—the other two. It’s ironic that being decisive about all the little things focuses the big picture of your life until it becomes crystal clear.
My friend James tells his daughter when she is indecisive: “Mary, you’re not exercising your ileocecal valve.” That always makes me laugh. Indecision literally throws a monkey wrench into the gears of your life. Here’s how it works: When you make a decision to pursue a goal or plan, all manner of situations are set into motion because of that decision. The spiritual kingdom starts setting up all the things that need to occur at each intersection of your life as you proceed on with your plan. Taking quick actions puts you firmly in the driver’s seat.
Remember, you are a spiritual being having a human experience. If for some reason you procrastinate or become indecisive—your own forward progress stalls out. Since the gears have been set in motion, the opportunity goes on ahead and presents itself. But you were not at the intersection to receive it, and unbeknownst to you, you missed yet another golden opportunity.
Now the good news! As you become more decisive, you end up getting your heart’s desires. Manifesting your desires is the easy part; figuring out what you want and staying committed to it until it is manifested is, by far, the most difficult part of the equation.
Start taking the action steps toward your desires as quickly as possible. The universe loves immediate action. When you arrive at each of the intersections of your life, the teacher is there, the gift is there, and so is the mystery. They are always there at all the main intersections of your life. Start looking for them and you will see.
Being decisive, you arrive at the intersections of life in time to receive the gifts. Your life has more grace. People think that you are just plain lucky. And you are.
Decisions are Emotional
Your ileocecal valve—even though it is between your small and large intestine—is part of your kidney system. How you feel about something you desire is the most significant part of your decisiveness. Your feelings are like amperage in electricity, the pressure of electrical flow. Positive feelings about plans and dreams attract them. Negative feelings push them away.
There is a problem with just holding positive feelings. You cannot sustain positive feelings about anything when negative feelings are lurking about and have not been experienced. It’s just not possible. If you have negative feelings, and you don't actually feel them, they almost always win out. But once you feel the negative feelings, they dissolve. Then they are gone. Once the negativity is out of the way, it’s easy to revel in the positive glow of your magnificent plans and dreams.
Joy is the lowest emotion on the positive scale. Gratitude is higher. The feelings of happiness and the knowingness that everything is exactly as it should be are even higher. The higher up on the emotional scale your positive feelings are, the greater their attraction is to your plans and dreams. So, whenever you are thinking about a dream or something you want to do, always check in on your feelings.
Thinking positively about a goal or plan while feeling negatively is a classic example of indecision. The effects to the body are the same as procrastination or indecision. It’s a schizophrenic outlook, even though most people conduct life that way.
Our job as creators is to experience all the fears that come up until they dissolve. This slays the dragons and monsters that would otherwise block our heroic journeys. Once the negative feelings are gone, we are free to experience the positive feelings that draw our desires toward us. When we experience life in harmony with our organ systems, that's when our lives are fulfilling, enchanting, beautiful and mysterious.
The bladder system runs its energy most intensely from 3 PM to 5 PM. The way we feel at this particular time is a direct reflection of the health of the bladder. The bladder system includes the meridians and all the muscles that make energy for the bladder including: the erector spinae muscles that run the full length of the spine and most of the muscles of your lower legs. That’s why your ankles can swell when you have a long history of carrying heavy emotional burdens while only thinking about them and not actually feeling them.
Most people think feeling their feelings means acting them out, talking about them or thinking about them. Feeling our feelings is not a thought process. Feeling your feelings means experiencing the profundity of them without the mind doing anything to change them.
When we feel all our feelings, the brain ceases its unconscious pattern of generating stories about what we’re feeling. In the calmness that ensues, we experience the depths of our own spirit.
All feelings we do not feel—whether positive or negative—build up pressure inside our body. Based on the latest pet scan research, emotional pressure causes the average person’s brain to generate about 70,000 thought forms every day. The trouble is: almost every thought the brain generates is divisive and confined within the past or future. This way of thinking causes us to think and act in ways we would not script if we knew we were writing the story of our life.
As the cumulative pressure from unfelt feelings builds up, we create a “pain body.” The constant stress of unfelt feelings creates inflammatory processes that impair physiology and shortens our life span significantly. As stated earlier, pain that is purely physical rarely exceeds a four on a one-to-ten pain scale. Pain that builds to an eight or nine is about 80 to 90% emotional.
Releasing Emotional Pressure
A habit I recommend and have done first thing every morning for many years is: Check in on your feelings when you go into the kitchen to make your morning tea or coffee. It may take a half an hour or more of one feeling at a time coming up until you have cleared the emotional pressure from the day before.
The first feelings that come up are usually so non-descript that it’s hard to define them. Usually you just don’t feel happy. As those subtle feelings clear, the more mid-range feelings like irritation or worry. By the time you have finished, you will have experienced a lot of different feelings. Feeling the feelings—without mental dialogue—releases them.
By the time you finish your morning beverage, you have usually released all the negative feelings that would have darkened your day. Then you are set up to have a great morning. This morning ritual really sets the day up right.
When you don’t feel your feelings, they build up over months and years, creating stagnant or polluted feelings. The build-up of negative feelings causes the bladder and kidney systems to suffer distress. The stress from built-up feelings is the principle cause of high blood pressure.
Taking on Other people’s Emotional Pressure
Another way we develop a pain body is by listening to, absorbing and taking in other people’s problems. Being a sponge. Often, we’re sympathetically resonating with the emotional pain of “their story,” concerned about them, suffering with them. This causes us to absorb their negative feelings into our bodymind, as if they were our problems.
We need to learn to see everyone as powerful spiritual beings, and not resonate with their problems. Only then are we seeing people correctly. Remember, everyone is exactly where they need to be to learn the precise lesson they are here on Earth to learn, and everyone has every talent they will ever need to handle every problem they will ever face. When a person is talking about their problems, ask yourself what is this powerful spiritual being needing to learn from this lesson?
As soon as the conversation opens, ask your friend what kind of lessons they think they need to learn from this. Resonate with their strengths, not their weaknesses. Ask them, “On balance, what are you supposed to learn from this situation?” It’s important for them to focus on the good that is happening in their life—their triumphs, the sweetness—not just their tales of woe. Tragedies are always bittersweet. To achieve balance, inquire about the sweetness in this situation.
Friends listen to each other’s stories so they can help each other work things out. That’s what friends do. But many people habitually dump their problems on others. People like that are too toxic to be around. After they dump their trash, they feel good. They dumped their trash. You feel bad. Whoa!
You may need to separate yourself from people who do not respect this boundary. In the end, you are the one who suffers from their problems. When you keep taking in everyone’s problems, it is harmful to your own bladder.
Your Need for Water
Most people don’t drink enough water. They are chronically dehydrated, which causes 128 low-grade symptoms such as constipation, headache, fatigue, and swollen joints. None of these symptoms will kill you outright. They just dim your life force down until your whole life feels difficult. All your body’s functions suffer when you do not drink enough water. When you’re dehydrated, your brain shrinks. Whoa! That may get you to drink more water.
I recommend putting a full glass of water by your bedside at night and drinking all of it before you let yourself leave your bedside in the morning. Drinking a big glass of water first thing in the morning makes you thirsty all day. When you’re thirsty it’s so much easier to drink enough water.
If you do not drink water until later in the day, you’ve trained yourself to be a camel. Then it’s all but impossible to force yourself to drink adequate amounts of water. You are slowly killing yourself if you do not drink enough water. Coffee, sodas and alcohol actually dehydrate you—including your brain. You can drink them if you want, but you can’t count them as water. They don’t hydrate you.
Stagnant, unfelt feelings show up as bags under your eyes and edema in the lower abdomen and legs. The situation escalates when you don’t drink enough water. The unfelt feelings create stagnant water in your body which negatively affects both your kidneys and your bladder system, including the meridians and all the muscles that make energy for them.
Because impurities and unwanted minerals are not being flushed out, your system is gradually poisoned. The resulting toxicity stresses your kidneys out, especially when you add an overload of unfelt feelings. The intuitive feelings that help you avoid the problems of life get so obscured by internal toxicity that your intuition is diminished.
On the other hand, if conditions like diarrhea or prolonged grief cause your bladder to eliminate wastes too quickly, water reserves fall low and you can have dry skin and hair, headaches, general discomfort, loss of appetite, tiredness and irritability. Your eyes and mouth get dry. In times like this, you may need to take supplements that bring up your electrolytes. I personally like “Ion gut health” from IonBiome.
The kidneys are tucked up under our lower three ribs next to the spine in the back of the body. Anytime they go into distress, the muscles over them go into spasm and stay spasmed, which is the main cause of low back pain. There are three pairs of muscles, psoas, iliacus and upper trapezius that make the electrical energy the kidney system needs for its operations. When part of the system has difficulty, the whole system suffers.
The kidney meridians—which run from the top of the torso to the ball of our feet—run their energy most intensely between 5 and 7 PM. How you feel at that time is a direct reflection of the health of your kidneys. This is traditionally the time when we eat our dinner meal and discuss family issues.
Each kidney has between 15,000 and 25,000 filtration units called glomeruli, which filter 20% of your blood per hour for your entire life. That’s how you make urine. The glomeruli are completely lined with grey matter (the thinking portion of your brain). For over a hundred and fifty years, anatomist have known that our kidneys are some kind of brain.
The kidneys are actually our higher mind. The brain is our lower mind, the greatest servant anyone could ever have. But when left in charge, the worst master anyone could ever have.
Like any good servant, the brain needs a clear job description. It should never be left in charge of your consciousness. On its own, it stops at critical/linear thinking, confined to the past, future or some past/future construct and is incapable of creating the world of our dreams. That’s our heart’s job.
We need to give our brain the job of constantly maintaining “the seven habits” and keeping the triangle upon which you stand (cherishing, being truthful and being decisive) in balance—for our entire life. For our whole lifetime, these habits are of sufficient difficulty to fully keep our brain focused on its tasks. When it is, our whole life is enchanted.
If we don’t give our brain a difficult enough job, it will focus our attention, our creational power, on problems and issues (outside of us). And every moment that our attention is drawn away from creating our own unique world—our kingdom suffers.
The Four Things that Really Freak the Kidneys Out
Being in the present moment is realizing that we are creators within the Greater Dream of Creator. As creators, there are four things that really freak our kidneys out.
The first thing that freaks your kidneys out is wondering what's going to happen to you. If you put this into a skit, you see it more clearly: So, imagine you are driving your car about 40 miles per hour in the foothills on a lovely country road when you see signs that say “Curves Ahead," "Slow to 25” and “7% Downgrade, Use Low Gears.” You throw your hands in the air and yell, “Oh my God, now what’s going to happen to the car?”
When we put “wondering what’s going to happen to us” into a skit, it helps us see how silly it is. And yet, how many times has a problem come up and we’ve heard our self say, “Now what’s going to happen?”
Remember: Our bodymind is completely literal and it freaks out every moment we are out of truth with life. Acting like we are powerless when each person creates his or her own unique world is such a lie that it instantly and continuously causes our kidneys to inflame, to overheat. And that causes the para-spinal muscles over the kidneys to be spasmed, causing approximately 90% of all the low-back pain we experience.
Through the kidney system, we develop the “vision” of our plans, dreams and ideals. As creators, the part of our consciousness residing in our kidney system—under the guidance of our heart—commits to higher truths, noble dreams and ideals. Once we commit, our liver uptakes all the energies we will ever need to make our visions happen. No commitment means no energy and no future.
The second thing that freaks our kidneys out is worry, or some would say “concern” about another person’s problems. If we work out the unconscious motivations of our concerns, we fear that their problem is more than they can handle; that they don't have what it takes to get it done; that they are going to screw it up; and that, somehow, it's going to fall back on us.
On the spiritual level, the person we are concerned about grasps our low opinion of them. Most people are not evolved enough to actually hear our thoughts, but they get our judgement of them. They react as if they heard what we were thinking. And they resent our opinion of them, unconsciously sabotaging our noble efforts. We’ve all experienced this reaction to our efforts and probably wondered why that person was acting so weird. This is the mechanism.
Remember, we are all powerful spiritual beings who are living in the material world, whether we are being in truth with who we are or not. When we feel sorry for them or are concerned about them, we have demoted them to third-class citizens in our world. We no longer see them as who they are: powerful beings that have every tool and asset they would ever need to handle every problem that would ever befall them.
Believing in injustice, that people are somehow victims, is just another form of feeling sorry for people, or ourselves. There is no injustice. Everyone is exactly where they need to be to learn the precise lessons they need to learn. Everyone!
Having said that, there are millions of people who live large portions of their life in victim or punisher mode, not realizing that, at any time, they could step out of that toxic projection of life. Consciously or unconsciously, we all just make our life up out of thin air.
The third thing that freaks our kidneys out is making excuses for someone, or ourselves. Again, our assumption is that we, or that person, because of prior conditioning, does not have enough personal power to handle that particular circumstance. Our bodymind acts like a lie detector. Our kidneys displays distress when we give our power away, or consider someone else powerless.
The fourth thing that cause kidney distress is bitter disappointment about how things have turned out for us. This way of thinking is the cause the worst kind of disabling low back pain, pain that builds to a nine or ten on a one-to-ten pain scale. This is when your back feels broken.
Remember, our organs take everything we think personally. If we are disappointed with how things turned out, our kidneys firmly believe they failed us, that they let us down. They can go into such utter distress that we suffer terrible pain.
If you have ever experienced this pain, you remember how disabling it was. So, when your low back feels broken, especially on both sides of your sacrum, get in touch with what your spirit is so disappointed about. Let yourself experience the depth of the emotional pain you have been ignoring. Actually feel those feelings. Then the pain rapidly dissolves.
Developing Intuition, Our Seventh Sense
Our spirit is not constrained by the time/space continuum. To our spirit, everything is happening here and now. For example: the instant we meet someone new, our spirit is taking in the full measure of that man or woman. Our first impressions are our spirit’s appraisal of that person. If someone invites us to a function three weeks from now, as they start talking about it, our spirit is actually standing there, experiencing it as if it were happening here and now. To our spirit, it is.
Our first impressions are the way our spirit communicates with us, mostly in feelings. Paying attention to our first feelings and impressions informs us of the greater truths, guiding us toward our heart’s desires and safely around dangers and situations that would otherwise do us harm. This is why the fourth habit is “Trust your gut.”
Because our kidneys are where we interface with our spirit, when we let ourselves experience and ponder our feelings, the insights from pondering those feelings develop our sense of intuition. Our kidneys, with their intuitive connection to our spirit, send this wisdom to our heart in real time. That allows our heart to create our own unique world wisely and in the most loving manner.
Feelings are much more important than thoughts. Learning to feel our feelings—instead of just thinking about them—makes us more spiritually evolved. We more than double the world we were previously aware of.
A huge part of mindfulness is paying attention to all our feelings, especially our first feelings when we think about doing something. If we reflect back, we had a bad feeling before every bad thing ever happened to us. We often did it anyway, and when it went wrong we said to ourselves, “I knew it would go bad.” We also had a good feeling before every good thing that ever happened.
When we think about something that’s coming up and we get that warm fuzzy feeling in our heart, that’s our intuition telling us that we are really going to enjoy it. Our first feeling can be intense, but it doesn’t linger. It only lasts a brief moment before it’s gone. Yet it contains the wisdom of our spirit. Everyone is psychic. Everyone! There are three main ways we receive wisdom from our spirit, and it varies from person to person:
If you are more kinesthetic, your spirit communicates with you mostly through feelings and body sensations. You often know what you need to do or not do. When you don’t do what you know needs to be done, it always turns out badly. When you do what you know needs to be done, magic happens and you seem so insightful.
At different times in our lives we have probable received information from our spirit in all three ways, but we tend to predominantly be one or the other most of the time. Trusting our intuition gives us greater advantage in every area of our life. Every day we can get better at listening to our inner feelings. The learning curve never ends.
Remember, each one of us is a spirit having a human experience. Paying attention to our feelings during a typical day gives us the clarity to handle all life’s difficulties more easily. As we get better at these skills, we move with more grace through life.
When we move in the directions that make our heart happy, the whole spiritual kingdom has much more opportunity to lend their assistance. Grace is the result.
How Worry Negatively Affects Everyone
Worrying about others is like throwing a wet blanket of your gloom and doom over the top of that person’s already difficult situation. It does absolutely nothing to make their situation better or help them in any way. Worse, the great power of our attention directly influences their outcome by collapsing all the possibility and probability waves that do not coincide with our low opinion of them.
Because we are creators, worry’s effect on others is so destructive that it’s like we’re doing voodoo on them. The black joke is: it turns out the way we worried, justifying our worry; enabling us to worry more.
For you personally, worrying about yourself or others causes the muscles over your kidneys to go into spasm and stay spasmed. Kidney pain radiates into your low back and sacrum. People who constantly worry or wonder what is going to happen always have those muscles spasmed. Their low back is a constant source of distress.
There is a better way. When you catch yourself worrying about a loved one, or yourself, take a couple cleansing breaths (fast deep breaths) to break the pattern, the unconscious the spell. Then go over a checklist of that person’s strengths and assets. Every time you think about their positive attributes, those attributes light up in that person’s consciousness, helping them to see their own better qualities.
That actually helps them to see a way out of their difficulties. As they start seeing their attributes instead of only the problem, they start to see the next steps they need to take. As soon as they see their next step, they start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you catch yourself worrying about a loved one twenty times a day, go over a checklist of that person’s strengths and assets twenty times a day. Recruit other loved ones to help in the process. During the times you and others are going over a checklist of their strengths, your thoughts influence their awareness toward positive steps they can take.
That is real help. My patients and I have done this for a great number of people during difficult times. The results are impressive. You really help people this way, whereas worry is always destructive.
Your Wellspring of Superhuman Strength
Classic Chinese philosophy considers the kidneys your storehouse of ancestral life force, an exquisite energy passed down from your parents. Ancestral energy is considered one of the “three treasures.” Your spirit and qi (the life force that animates all life) are the other two treasures.
Ancestral energy is very much different from the energy you make and use every day. You tap into the wellspring of ancestral energy during your most difficult moments. During adrenaline rushes, times when you mightily exceed the limits of your everyday abilities, you draw directly from this energy. During these moments, time can slow way down. You can muster clarity and power beyond anything you normally possess. You can—and most likely have—performed superhuman feats.
When danger comes up, your rational mind’s version of reality, fate, is what will happen if you deal with this emergency with your normal consciousness. You access this reservoir when you say “NO!” to fate. In these moments, who you are—and what you are capable of doing—is leagues beyond the limitations your brain considers to be reality.
In times of danger, when you say an emphatic “NO!” to the dire fate your brain presents, you access this powerful reservoir of superhuman capacity. In a moment of clarity, you see or know what must be done, and then single-mindedly commit to the reality our spirit points up.
You have entered an altered state. The normal laws of gravity and physics are reduced to suggestions that can be transcended. You seize the moment and save the day.
The element of water is the most mysterious of all the elements. In the season of winter, when the time of night far exceeds the time of day, when all our energies are at their lowest ebb, life-giving water is replenishing the earth. Water gives all life the ability to endure. The element of water also gives our plans and dreams the power to endure.
When our water element is healthy, our mind has fluidity. We have an abundance of energy and resources to complete all our plans and dreams. Thoughts and ideas flow effortlessly. It is easy to think things through. The element of water within our consciousness gives us the power to endure anything that happens to us. The act of feeling our feelings dissolves all our fears and anxieties into nothingness.
The ancient Chinese called the brain "the sea of marrow," and included it as part of the kidney system. Bones are like our spiritual antenna, their marrow part of the kidney system. Weak bones, poor healing of fractures and many hereditary growth and developmental problems are related to water imbalances. Most low back pain originates in the kidneys. Kidney issues also cause knee pain, teeth problems, hearing loss and excessive fear and insecurity.
The normal feelings of the kidneys are fear. Feeling and responding to them guides us around the minefields of life. Unfelt fears create a water imbalance that shows up as a bluish-black hue and puffiness around the eyes. Puffiness around your eyes is a sure sign you are letting feelings build up to toxic levels. Ears are the end organs of the water element (just as eyes are the end organs of the element of wood). Kidney stress can sometimes feel like you have water in your ears.
Emotional Pain
Our brain was never intended to be in charge of our consciousness. It’s a great servant, but a terrible master. But when fears come up and we don’t actually stop to feel them, our unruly brain instantly takes over, weaving endless stories about why we have those feelings.
Unfelt feelings build up pressure and intensity in our bodymind. Emotional pressure amplifies all our pain. Physical pain, by itself, rarely exceeds a four on a one-to-ten pain scale. When pain builds to a seven or eight, it’s a sure bet that seventy to eighty percent of the pain was amplified by the build-up of emotional pressure from unfelt feelings.
When we have been in this kind of emotional pressure and can see no let up, no way out of it, it can seem like we are in a drought or a flood.
Experiencing a Drought
We can start feeling like our life is in a drought when all our thoughts and feelings get fixated on what we don’t have, how what little we do have is slipping away from us, that our access to money, resources or love has dried up. Feeling this way for a prolonged period of time dries out our hope and possibilities.
As these unfelt fears continue to build, our brain increasingly generates bleak stories about whether or not we can survive, feeling more and more hopeless. Our brain can spin endless stories about how hard life is, not having enough, that the resources we have are slipping away.
Other people in similar situations may have a totally different perspective, and not experience a drought at all. The pain and suffering we experience comes from letting our brain put negative spins on situations. Our brain can create stories that are quite morbid.
Overpowering Feelings Feel like Being in a Flood
Flood is when we let unfelt fears—which we deemed too painful or toxic to feel—build up to such a great level that it consumes our thoughts. The buildup of feelings can become like a flood, swamping us, inundating us with fears, anxieties and other difficult feelings until there is no safe place. In this state, self-preservation dominates our mind.
The sound of dysfunction in the water element is moaning or groaning, often unconscious. A person who moans or groans, even though their life may not be worse than anyone else’s, indicates that they are either drowning in unfelt feelings, or that the drought they feel is so severe that they can see no future for themselves.
The Solution: Feel Rather than Think Your Feelings
Unfelt feelings function like grappling hooks, binding you to unhealthy relationships, memories, situations and toxic people. Feeling those negative feelings dissolves them, releasing the grappling hooks. Then your spirit is free to focus on the beauty that is all around you.
Feelings are like water. They are hundreds of times more powerful than thoughts. Water has great power. It has no boundaries of its own. Yet it is an inexorable force that cannot be stopped. It will always find a path through anything in its way. It never gives up. It can bring down mountains.
Feelings can move mountains to achieve what you desire. But unfelt negative feelings have the power to push your desires ever further away from you. Faith and trust can move mountains, but your doubts create the mountains that block your way.
Once you actually feel the negative feelings they are gone and you are free of their oppression. Then your heart naturally generates the positive feelings that draw your desires to you. When you sustain positive feelings about your plans and dreams, your determination gives your plans and dreams flexibility and endurance (qualities of your kidney system). You never give up. You can move mountains.
The Season of Winter
Winter is the time when we reflect on the profound values of our life. This is when we ask ourselves the deeper questions of life, like: Who am I? What did I incarnate into this life to do or be? Am I doing what I really want to do in this lifetime? What are my deep, abiding values? What principles and values do I hold dear? Am I living a life that is aligned with them? Would my eight-year-old self be proud of who I am today?
When you ask these profound questions, your own spirit answers. In this mysterious time, you find yourself reflecting on the directions available to you. New avenues open to you where none would have existed had you not asked. Your questions access profound information about the pathways and destiny of your life.
Winter is the time for going inside and curling up by the fire with a good book, to ponder the direction of your life, what you have accomplished, where you are heading. Winter is the time when you carefully select the seeds you will plant in the coming spring.
If the world were a perfect place, which seeds would you want to grow, blossom and bear fruit? The true magic of life is: This beautiful blue-green paradise world was created so all beings can evolve and achieve their most profound desires. When you follow your heart, you discover that the world is indeed a perfect place.
After the small intestine digests 95% of our food, the large intestine digests the last five percent, mainly metals like calcium, phosphorus, magnesium etc. It also extracts the last of the water so our stool can firm up. By eliminating the dregs, the large intestine purifies our blood.
All our meridians run a normal amount of energy all of the time. But in each 24-hour cycle, the meridians of each specific organ system run quite strongly for two hours. The meridians of the large intestine run from the side of the nose, out each arm to the index finger.
The large intestine meridians run full out from 5 AM to 7 AM. For most of our long history, that’s when we would wake up and have our morning bowel movement. This is normally the time when we focus on what we want to get done this day.
The muscles that make electrical energy for the large intestine system are the hamstrings, fascia lata and qauadratus lumborum.
Transformation and Change
The ancient Chinese considered transformation and change, not atoms, to be the building blocks of reality. Nothing stays the same. Thinking that we can make things stay the same creates havoc to our large intestine.
The large intestine is responsible for transformation and change in our life. The lungs and large intestine both function in the rhythm of taking in and letting go of what no longer serves us. We must let go of what no longer serves us to make space for inspiration to come into our lives.
Simply feeling all our feelings is the best way to let go of the toxic thoughts, feelings, and beliefs we get exposed to each day. Symptoms of not letting go include constipation, dry stools, skin rashes and being emotionally fixated on some issue, so we’re stuck and unable to move on. Hoarding is also a symptom of not letting go of toxic feelings and the thousands of toxic thoughts those feelings generate.
Feeling all our feelings progressively releases the pain and limitations of our past, even if we had a terrible past. The more toxic the past, the longer it is going to take to clear it. Worse, you remain attached to the people that caused you the pain as you go into your next lifetime. That ought to be enough incentive to deal with those painful feelings.
Dietary Considerations
If you are experiencing chronic IBS, you might consider going on an elimination diet. There are seven main food groups that cause most dietary difficulties: Wheat, corn, dairy, eggs, sugar, soy (which is in all processed foods as lethitin) and peanuts. Begin by only eating food that is on the elimination diet, completely bland food for three to six weeks, depending on your severity.
Then you start entering your favorite foods back in one-at-a-time. As you start letting your favorite food groups back in, you eat as much (of the first food you choose) as you want for three days, then stop for the next four days. If your symptoms blossom toward the end of the week, that food group should be eliminated from your diet. If you have no symptoms, you can let that food group back into your diet.
Then you choose the next favorite food group and eat as much of it as you want for the first three days, then none of it for the next four days to see if your symptoms bloom. This way, you recognize foods that have always irritated your colon. For many of you with IBS, this process will be quite illuminating.
Hanging onto the Pain
If we hang onto old pains, the season of fall can feel like relationships or things we need seem to slip away, like sand slipping through our fingers, that every year we seem to lose more of what we had. We can spend our precious time dredging up problems and what went wrong. Our spirit and soul can become quite toxic.
When we are preoccupied with dredging up the past and what went wrong, there’s no room for the blessings life wants to bestow on us. Focusing on the rear-view mirror, we have trouble moving on. We can become locked into rigid beliefs and ideas.
This rigidity shows up in our character as viewpoints of life that are so ossified that they leave no room for new possibilities or inspiration, for transformation and change. The rigidity that shows up in our character can generate frozen joint problems. Mainly affected are the shoulder, wrist or elbow along the meridian pathway of the large intestine. Less often we can also have ankles or knees that freeze up due to rigidly holding onto old pain or limiting beliefs.
When we can’t let go of toxic memories, we may also have trouble letting go of possessions that no longer serve any useful purpose. Hording is one of those issues. It may be time to clean a closet and take clothes we no longer wear to Goodwill. Or it may be time to clean the garage. Clearing out debris in our home coincides with getting our inner house in order. What do you need to let go of?
If the colon fails to get rid of the garbage, constipation, the progressive build-up of toxicity makes it difficult for our organ systems to perform their duties. All the organ systems in our body suffers.
The power to transform our life exists within each moment. The large intestine’s gift of “letting go” lets us rewrite our DNA. At every intersection of life, we can choose to be the best version of who we can be. Time just adds it up for us.
Lungs: Living Our Truth
The diaphragm—the wall-to-wall floor of our lungs—is a very effective bellows. As we breathe out strong, the diaphragm pushes up like a dome, forcing the maximum amount of carbon dioxide out, purifying our blood.
When we breathe back in, the diaphragm pulls down like a bowl, taking in a big mixing bowl’s amount of oxygen with each breath. Breathing out strong provides our organ systems with all the energy they need to face everything life sends us, the energy to accomplish the dreams we commit to. Big breath lets us live a powerful life. Small breath limits us into living a small life.
Our lungs and large intestine are the organs associated with the element of metal. They both symbolize the steady rhythm of taking in and letting go.
In the higher dimensions of our bodymind, our lungs are the part of our consciousness that receive the pure energy from the heavens. Our lungs don’t just breathe in air. They breathe in the higher truths and visions that illuminate our lives.
The muscles that make energy for the lung system are the deltoids of the shoulder and the anterior serratus at the side of our rib cage.
The lung meridians run their energy most powerfully from 3 AM to 5 AM. We often wake up with insights that change our perspective on life around this time. But if we are dealing with grief and sorrow—and have not actually gone inside and felt those emotions—we often toss and turn or can’t sleep at this time of night.
Downward dispersing
In the symbology of the cross, which predates Christianity by thousands of years, the element of metal is the vertical bar, our connection to the divine. The element of Earth is the horizontal bar, connecting us to all others. The circle between the horizontal and vertical bars, shown in some cross symbols, represents our heart—the root of life itself. Our heart naturally knows the desires of our spirit.
The ancient Chinese medical treatise Nei Jing Su Wen describes the lungs as the “lid” of all our organs. The lungs receive “pure energy” from the heavens and send it downward. The pure energy includes higher truths, life’s visions and noble thoughts that inspire us.
The lung’s downward dispersing action disseminates the inspiration to every cell and organ enabling us to live a fulfilling life.
Lung problems come when we reject our own higher truths and visions, or refuse to believe the possibility that we can step into our vision. Our bodymind is mostly energy and consciousness. Letting our unruly mind talk us out of our vision or higher truths is the main cause of lung and bronchial problems.
Various forms of lung congestion are due to not letting our wisdom be dispersed downward. When we reject our wisdom, the fluids are also blocked from dispersing downward. Asthma, COPD, bronchitis, emphysema, pleurisy, and upper respiratory infections can all be traced back to fluids not getting dispersed downward. In acupuncture, this is referred to as rebellious chi.
When I ask people with lung issues what they want, most of their dialogue is about what they do not want. When pressed about what they want, most only have vague ideas, like “better health” or “less stress.” When we only generate vague ideas about what we want, the bodymind can’t figure out how to accomplish them.
Your bodymind is image oriented. It needs substantial images to work toward: like imagining hiking mountains and swimming rivers late into your nineties? How about running a marathon within a couple years? Can you imagine your mind sharp as a tack until the day you die? Can you see yourself at your optimal weight or dress size, a definite number?
Visualize yourself doing the exact things you would want to do if the world were a perfect place. When the images are clear, our bodymind can grab hold of them, make them happen.
Choose image-oriented goals—goals that scare you a little—that stretch the imagination of who you think you are. If your bodymind does not have specific images and goals to emulate, it can perceive no way to get there.
Let Go of the Insults; Hang onto the Compliments
Most of us cling to the mean, discouraging or dismissive things others have done or said to us. Often, those painful episodes form the basis our own limiting thoughts, feelings and beliefs. To release those discouraging thoughts, we need to actually go back to that moment in time and feel the feelings that come up around those disparaging memories.
As we feel them, they dissolve into nothingness. If we cannot let go of old conditioning, we have no room to take in new concepts. When our thoughts are wrapped up in rehashing old insults and mean discouraging things people have said to us, we are not even trying to make sense of what we are hearing. Talking to us can be like talking to a blank wall.
All these negative thoughts, generated by unfelt fears, cut us off from our spiritual connection.
When we do not feel a fear that comes up, our body’s immediate reaction is to start breathing shallowly. For as long as we breathe shallowly, we are trapped in our old dramas, separated from our own divine nature. We see God or a spiritual life as something outside of us.
Breathing out Strong settles our spirit into its home, just below the navel. Then, at every intersection of life, our own values, principles and beliefs dictate our thoughts and actions. With our spirit controlling our bodymind, both get what they want.
We realize that the source of creation has never, ever been separate from us. Every moment that we are breathing out strong, the power of love, the nobility of our truth, and our right to be here—just as we are—is self-evident. Then we realize that the world is, indeed a perfect place.
The qualities of metal within us represent our drive, strength, determination, persistence and power. Metal is the strength of our character. It is our drive to succeed, “the fire in our belly.” Lungs and large intestine are the organs of metal.
Metal is flexible and can maintain incredible strength of form. The talents we forge into the makeup of our character can display the strength and malleability of the finest metals. With the right amount of heat—the balance of unconditional love and firm boundaries—our metal becomes malleable. Our talents and our particular genius can be shaped into tools that are useful to our self and society.
We develop the positive qualities of metal by becoming someone who trusts life and respects those who might think differently than we do, someone who makes wise choices, someone others look up to. We do what we say we will do. We are true to our word. We know we are an integral and necessary part of our community, our world. One positive step at a time, then another, leads us to becoming this person in our community.
Breathing out strong strengthens our metal. Breathing in is autonomic. It happens whether we are conscious of it or not. When we breathe out shallowly, we breathe in shallowly. When we breathe out strong, we breathe in equally as strong, waking us to the present moment. Spiritual awareness is simply mindfulness.
We are a spirit who lives in a body, but our body has its own animal spirit. Breathing out strong can make our animal spirit as powerful as a grizzly bear. Breathing shallowly or chest breathing can make our spirit as timid as a mouse. Moment by moment, how much air we breathe determines how powerful our spirit is.
Each time you notice yourself breathing shallowly—take a cleansing breath—a fast deep breath, which interrupts the unconscious pattern. As you resume breathing out strong, you wake up from a low-grade spell, like feeling inadequate, worried, anxious or any number of unconscious ways of coping.
When you make a habit of breathing out strong, you normally catch yourself breathing shallowly about twenty times a day. How you handle the situation replaces it with a more empowered one. This habit about doubles your self-esteem every year while creating a stable foundation for living powerfully on this Earth.
Habits Develop our Character
Each of the seven habits empowers us when we are maximumly injured. They empower us when we want to compete at the highest levels. Each habit wakes us to the present moment where all potential and all possibility are accessible to us, where we create the world our heart desires.
We can’t just go from being a chest breather, like I was, to breathing like a truly empowered person instantly. Habits take time to develop. The more we practice a habit, the better our entire health and well-being becomes. As years go by, once unobtainable ideals and goals become accessible. Mastery develops simply committing to a habit, then putting one foot in front of the other and not quitting on ourselves.
Habits make us who we are. Most people's habits are unconscious, causing their vitality to decline every year. Breathing out strong allows us to experience ever-higher levels of vitality as we age. Age empowers us. We live our life more powerfully every year until we breathe our last breath. One moment, one step at a time we become the promise of ourselves.
At each stage it becomes easier and more enjoyable to breathe out strong. Commit to a habit of breathing twice as good every year as the year before. That is a doable goal. When you make breathing out strong your lifetime habit, every year your life will be more yours. You find yourself being more authentic, more courageous just by breathing enough life force to stand up to all the situations you face.
Look at the people you most admire. Notice how disciplined they are. Notice their habits. Committing to good habits shapes you into becoming the best version of yourself.
The Mechanics of Forgiveness
The second habit that heals, purifies and strengthens your metal element is to forgive, especially your father (metal) and other father figures in your life. Forgiveness is simply feeling the painful feelings that separate you from loving others.
The practice forgiveness lets go of old painful traumas. All that weight lifts off you. Old aches fade away. Your inner light increases its radiance and shines more brightly. Your metal starts holding its form better. You find yourself standing taller during trials and difficulties.
The archetypes of Father (metal) and Mother (earth) form about 60 percent of our internal makeup. The biggest portion of our worldview is occupied with these two archetypes. Holding onto painful memories about our parents and siblings is a major cause of pain and dysfunction.
Ultimately, we must forgive everyone and everything that causes us emotional pain. The more we clear out the old pain, the more room we have for inspiration. The brighter our light shines. The more we can forgive, the easier it is to achieve our spirit’s higher ideals. Pursuing our heart’s desires guides us to create and live the life of our dreams.
The Ability to Grieve - The Season of Autumn
The element of metal is associated with the season of autumn. This is the season when the energy of growth slows dramatically. As we progress into Autumn, the air becomes heavy with mist and rain. Leaves die and fall to the ground.
Death and dying—a natural part of the cycle of life—returns essential nutrients and metals to the soil to nourish vigorous growth the following spring. The death and the dying of what no longer serves us replenishes the soil, creating a nurturing environment where new dreams and aspirations can grow.
Our lung system is the part of our consciousness that grants us the power of grief. It is normal to grieve when someone or something is lost to us. And it's normal to feel grief when summer is gone. But if we don’t allow ourselves to feel grief, we cannot move beyond it. Then, any new loss hits us like a punch in the gut.
With each new loss that we do not allow ourselves to actually feel/experience, life leaves us feeling more traumatized. Instead of living life head-on, much of our time is spent focusing on the rear-view mirror, thinking “if only,” wishing things were the way they used to be. If we cannot let go of the past, there is no room for inspiration, no space to create a future or even contemplate one.
Everything has seasons of change. Everything! Let’s take relationships as an example:
It is important to say “yes” to each phase of life as it is happening. There are things that need to die so the cycle of renewal can bring new life and nourish vigorous growth to the relationship in the following spring. If we cannot embrace the winter of a relationship, the springtime cannot come forth.
The spleen tucks under our rib cage just forward of our left elbow as it hangs down. As blood passes through the spleen and liver, they effectively cleanse it of bacteria and foreign bodies and mobilize white blood cells to resolve infection.
Blood cells live about 120 days. As they get old and brittle, they tend to rupture and are recycled as they pass through the spleen with its enormous maze of blood vessels.
The paired spleen meridians go from the outside lower rib cage up to the armpit, then down to the great toes, and run their energy most powerfully from 9 AM to 11 AM. The way we think about our life at this time greatly influences the health of our spleen system.
The muscles that make electrical energy for the spleen are the latissimus dorsi (lats), triceps, mid-trapezius and the opponen muscles that make the thumb oppose our little finger.
The spleen and pancreas are the two organs of the spleen system. This paradise world provides us with all we need. In life, the sweetness is always there for us but we have to make the effort to get it.
The Spleen is our Distributor
The spleen system is the part of our consciousness that maintains clear boundaries in our life and handles all distribution issues in our bodymind. It can be likened to the head of a trucking company that transports and distributes all food, energy, and commodities into and waste products out of every cell and organ in our entire bodymind.
If anything flows within our bodymind, the spleen flows it. It faithfully distributes all our bodymind’s needs twenty-four hours a day getting all nutrients into and waste products out of every cell and organ. Our spleen’s contribution to our overall health and well-being is huge and vitally-important.
I cannot overstate the importance of movement. When you were a child, you naturally had lots of activity in your life. As you get older, it takes planning and commitment to get enough movement into your life. You have to make movement and exercise a priority and commit to it. In societies where people are long lived, having good relationships and working up a sweat every day is the norm.
How the Brain’s Way of Thinking Causes Disease
Our brain, when not directed by our heart, looks at our life in terms of scarcity, being a victim of circumstances or comparing our lot in life to others more or less fortunate. Based on this linear way of thinking, our brain decides that we don’t have enough time or resources to do what we want to do.
There is a huge problem with this way of thinking. Every part of our being—spirit, soul and bodymind—function as creators. We manifest everything we think about, and it doesn’t matter whether we love what we are thinking about or hate it. All of our organ systems assume responsibility for what we are thinking.
Thinking that we don’t have the time or resources we need to do what we want, our ever faithful spleen assumes that it has failed us. It goes into serious distress, taking other culpable organ systems into distress with it.
The spleen organ overheats and swells up. The entire spleen meridian pathway inflames on both sides of the body. All the muscles that make energy for the spleen and pancreas inflame and weaken. Often the liver and kidneys assume culpability and all aspects of those systems also go into serious distress.
This represents a vast portion of our bodymind going into distress. Because most people still live in their brain and think scarcity thoughts, this is a principle cause of a lot of our pain and dysfunction.
As the spleen inflames, it starts having trouble getting nutrients into all our cells and waste products removed. It is not difficult to imagine the resulting health problems if your brain creates a steady diet of thinking about all the ways you don’t have the time or resources to do what you want to do.
Autopsies reveal that most people developed about five to seven cancerous growths during their lifetime, usually at times when they thought their life was at a dead-end. Then when they figured out how to get back into the game of life, their body shrink-wrapped those cancers, and they never knew that they started developing cancer.
Imagine how you would feel if you always gave 100% excellent performance and efficiency at your job, then overheard your boss talking about how you were a failure, not doing him or her any good. How you would feel is exactly how your spleen and associated organ systems feel when you allow your spiritually unconscious brain to keep thinking and talking about how you don’t have the time or resources to do what you want to do.
Bringing Your Spleen Back into Healthy function
If you believe you don’t have the time or resources you need, lift your awareness up spiritually to where you can see your whole lifetime relative to all your friends and the people around you. When you view your lifetime from this larger more accurate viewpoint of being a creator, you see that you are creating your life and you have many years of time and all resources you need to manifest all that you need to do in this lifetime.
But more importantly, from this viewpoint, you realize that you really need to give yourself some pats on the back—to praise what you have accomplished and the goodness your life is contributing. Just like you, your spleen needs to be appreciated. Otherwise, just like you, it goes into distress.
At one time or another, most patients come in to my office with a hot spleen. Invariably they have been thinking that they do not have enough time or resources. The instant they “get” the above concept and appreciate themselves, the spleen meridians and the meridians of other involved organs return to normal.
Within approximately forty seconds, all the inflammatory pressure in the spleen and the other affected organs dissipates completely and is gone—like releasing the pressure valve on a hydraulic jack and watching it come all the way down. Observing this phenomenon so often in my practice confirms that we are mostly consciousness. And yet, it never ceases to amaze me.
Boundaries
Boundaries, also a spleen issue, are all the ways we respect our own principles and values without allowing others to override or negate them—or us overriding theirs. It is how we stand up for and say yes to what we want and a firm no to what we do not want.
Boundaries represents how we guard our precious time and energy by knowing what does and does not work for us. The more decisive we are with our yes and no, the clearer and stronger our boundaries become. And our life becomes our own.
In the Jungian archetypes of “warrior-lover,” our heart is the lover. Spleen is the warrior. The true warrior does not yell at or berate others. That’s the false warrior. Our spleen’s job is maintaining clear boundaries. It says “That is your responsibility or belief. This is mine.” When the spleen system is healthy, we are just as impeccable about not trampling over other’s sacred gardens, sacred beliefs, as not letting them trample over ours.
With healthy boundaries, there is a line that we will not go beyond in compromising our values, principles and beliefs. We can never be whole until we develop firm boundaries.
People crash through our boundaries through manipulating our feelings. Or they may create a perceived threat that makes us voluntarily give up our boundaries. Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up their freedom for security deserve neither,” definitely a spleen issue.
What psychologist call socialization is the build-up of emotional pain and self-destructive thought forms from manipulation in families and later society with guilt trips concerning lifestyle choices, controlling shared space and controlling each other’s time and energy.
We collapse our own boundaries by needing to fit in, giving up our choice, not wanting to seem pushy or selfish, believing our choices are not valid, feeling like we are not good enough or that our needs don’t matter. What others think of us is of little consequence compared to our developing a strong spiritual warrior archetype and having firm boundaries.
A larger truth is: We have the right—and sacred duty—to create the world we want to live in. By developing firm boundaries, we can manifest the world we want to live in, consciously. Our yes can be “yes,” and our no can be “no.” Again, this is the way of a healthy spleen, the peaceful warrior.
When is Enough?
Enough—a definite spleen issue—is not something most of us consider. We don’t notice when we have eaten enough, when we have shopped enough, when we have played enough, or worked enough. When it comes to the topic of enough, most people fall into extremes between wanting more and feeling like they don’t have enough.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Comparing ourselves to others often leaves us feeling deprived. We can polarize our thinking into a lifetime of wanting more: more money, more food, more clothes, more cars, more of whatever. We can be insatiable. There’s always the sense that we need more "just to get by,” even though we may have way more than enough on every level. Many of us never experience the satisfaction of having enough.
We let our brain tell ourselves stories about how we don’t have enough time, money, resources, education or opportunity to have or do that. There is never enough, no matter how much we have. Although this happens subconsciously, this scarcity-based thinking keeps us deprived. We can’t do any of the things that bring us joy or afford to do any of the fun things because "there isn’t enough!”
There is a moment while eating, playing, or working when we experience the exquisite quality of “enough”—but only if we are looking for it. If we are not paying attention, we go past all these exquisite moments in a blur without recognizing them.
We become aware later, after we have eaten too much and wished we had stopped earlier. Many of us don’t notice that we have worked enough until we have used up all our stamina and are totally exhausted.
In your own life, there is a delicious moment in dining when you have eaten just enough. When you observe this phenomenon, the enchantment of the dining experience takes you to whole new levels of experience and appreciation. Similarly, there is a moment when you are working, a moment when you know you have done enough for today.
When you become aware that you have done enough, you can look for the cutting off place where you can put everything away and bring the job to completion. By not working yourself to exhaustion, you leave room in your consciousness for inspiration from your own spirit.
When you pay attention to that moment of enough, you also notice when you have not done enough. You might need to do just a few more things to bring the project to a truly satisfying conclusion. When you pay attention to when is enough, life becomes enchanting.
We each create our own reality. As we make it a habit of focusing on all the ways we have enough, our life begins to naturally unfold in ways that let us experience the great fullness of life.
Everything has a gestation period. When we see ourselves having it, instead of wanting it, getting it becomes a foregone conclusion. Own it now. Let it manifest in God’s time. We just make our life up. Why not make it up where we have enough?
The meridians of the stomach start at the bottom of each eye, wrap around our eyes, go down the neck and out the collarbones, down to the nipples and down to our second toes. The meridians hold out our energy field, our aura.
When the stomach organ system is in distress, where the meridian goes around the eyes puts out so much more energy than we are accustomed to. The visual distress from having so much more energy around our eyes than we are accustomed to is the main cause of dizziness.
The stomach meridian runs it energy to the fullest from 7 to 9 AM. That's often when we have breakfast, the ideal time to imagine how we want our day to play out. The stomach nourishes the whole bodymind, spirit and soul much like a mother nourishes her child.
There are twenty-two sets of muscles that make the electrical energy the stomach system needs to function well, all of them in the neck, shoulders and arms. The function of the stomach, its meridians and its supportive muscles are linked together. When the stomach is dysfunctional, the muscles of the neck/shoulder and arms go into distress. When we have neck/shoulder/arm problems, look to the stomach.
Ripening our Food, Ripening Our Thoughts
Thinking our thoughts through well is the bodymind equivalency of chewing our food well. When we become aware that something needs our attention, that’s when we need to think through how it affects all our relationships, our work, beliefs, politics and all the other important issues in our life.
The moment we commit to thinking through whatever we become aware of, our stomach meridian instantly come into balance. Then the pressure in the stomach organ immediately starts to release, similar to how a hydraulic jack lets the car down. Within about forty seconds, all stomach pressure is gone.
We discover that digestive issues we thought were so permanent simply fade away. Even though I observe organ systems release their stress and come back to normal within about forty seconds many times daily in my office, it always seems like a miracle. It confirms that we are mostly consciousness.
Our stomach, like all our organ systems, exists on all seven dimensions. In the higher dimensions of our consciousness, food also includes all our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, principles, values, beliefs, all our relationships, work, religion, politics and our philosophy of life.
How Our Stomach Works
On the physical level our stomach churns our food while secreting four different kinds of hydrochloric acids into the mixture, ripening it before releasing it into the small intestine. When our stomach makes the food acidic enough, the bile and digestive enzymes become nine times more potent.
Anytime we are not thinking our thoughts through, the stomach is not making our food acidic enough. As a result, the small intestine keeps rejecting it back into the stomach until it is acidic enough. Medically, that's diagnosed as "Gerd," or "acid reflux."
If our stomach does not acidify (ripen) the food adequately, the bile from our liver is unable to break down the fats and proteins. Enzymes are similarly ineffective. Digestive problems begin with not adequately ripening our food.
Ripening our food has a powerful grounding effect for our body, mind and spirit. The direction associated with our stomach is downward, grounding us to Earth. When our stomach system is strong and healthy, we have a profound sense of balance and equilibrium, and we feel safe and loved.
Persistent or long-standing digestive issues show us that we are chronically not thinking our thoughts through well. Our intelligence and instincts are so effective at waiting until something happens and then reacting to them that we can become spiritually lazy about thinking our thoughts through.
We often try to fast forward through the more mundane aspects of life because we don’t think those issues are as important as the “big issues.” This way of being greatly distresses our stomach.
Imagination: How Our Soul Interfaces with our Bodymind
We have seven senses, not just the five (sight, sound, taste, smell and touch). Imagination is how our soul interfaces with our stomach. Intuition is how our spirit communicates with us through our feelings. You can read about the spirit/kidney connection in the element of water.
We correctly use our imagination when we ripen our plans and dreams by imagining them as if they currently exist. As we imagine something, our soul projects it onto the screen of our imagination, and never tires of doing so.
A caution here is: We seriously darken our soul by imagining ways we can be unkind to someone who was unkind to us. A far better and more efficient strategy is to feel all the feelings about that particular unkindness. As we feel the toxic feelings, they are released out of your body and the unkind acts loses its power over us.
The right use of imagination is to use this incredible talent as a tool for creating our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner.
Playing in our imagination, like we did as children—as if our goal or dream currently exists—lets every part of our incredible bodymind participate in the manifestation process.
The part of our consciousness that resides in our liver immediately starts drawing up plans that make the goal happen in the most effective manner. Good discernment from our gallbladder about everyone and everything involved allows the liver to make plans that will stand the test of time.
Our heart provides the unconditional love, warmth and guidance our goal needs to come into fruition. Our heart’ attention brings the whole process into being in the most loving graceful manner.
Our pancreas figures out how to get the sweetness out of it. Our spleen’s role is to help us maintain strong clear boundaries, have good distribution and to know when is enough as we are imagining the end result.
Our lungs breathe in the higher truths and visions from the spiritual kingdom. It also breathes in enough life force to make it happen. The large intestine lets go of what no longer serves us, which makes room for inspiration.
Our kidneys—our higher mind—incarnates the vision, makes it real. Our bladder releases all the negative feelings (by feeling them). When we don't feel our fears, they inevitably grow to become the monsters that sabotage our dreams. Once the fears are gone, it is easy to maintain the joy or gratitude that attracts our desires to us in record time.
With our whole bodymind participating in the visualization process, manifesting desires is fun and takes a lot less effort. Remember, we create our own unique reality by what we are focusing on—and it doesn’t matter whether what we focus on is what we want or what we would never want. Creation becomes easier when we single-mindedly focus on what we desire.
The trinity of our spirit, soul and bodymind are all completely literal. Clearly visualizing the end result in our imagination makes it real. It shifts the paradigm from, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to get there?” to “I’ve already seen it, so I know I can do this,” or “this is doable.”
Moment by moment we heal our stomach and bring it into harmony by focusing our attention toward ripening the life our heart desires by thinking it through.
Sympathy vs Empathy
Sympathy: An unconscious default of our brain operating system, means “I suffer with.” When we sympathize, we lose objectivity and become part of the problem. We become enablers.
When we feel concerned, worried or feel sorry for a loved one, spiritually we have reduced that person to the status of a third-class citizen. If we reason it out, the underlying assumption is: That person doesn’t have the goods. They are probably going to screw it up. And somehow it will fall back on us.
Worse, the creative power of our attention collapses all the possibility and probability waves that do not agree with what we believe. Because we are creators, worrying that a person will fail quite often makes it so.
Further, sympathy is like throwing a blanket of gloom over their already difficult situation. It's like doing voodoo on them. Because most people are still spiritually asleep, it is assumed that if you don't feel sorry for people, you don't have a heart. But that's the way a person thinks when their brain’s still in charge.
When we are concerned or feeling sorry for someone’s trial or tribulation, we are actually ripening their pain in our body, developing a pain body, while souring that relationship. But the worst thing about sympathy is: We are not actually seeing them.
Empathy: the action our stomach puts forth when our heart is in charge of our consciousness: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another: The understanding that the core essence of every person is a powerful spiritual being, a Christ in training, a Buddha.
When we empathize with a loved one who is going through a difficult time. We become a “fair witness” to this powerful spiritual beings’ travail and inevitable triumph. Later, when they have triumphed over their trial or tribulation, it is so good that someone accurately saw them for who they were, a spiritual warrior that stood tall through a difficult experience.
In this way, we hold them in the power of their true self. We truly see them. This is empathy. Empathy actually helps our loved ones.
When We Worry
When we catch ourselves being concerned or worrying about a loved on, which is the unconscious program we all default to: Breathe out strong to interrupt the unconscious pattern. Then go over a check-list of that person’s admirable traits, their strengths and assets.
If you find yourself concerned twenty times a day, go over their strengths and assets twenty times a day. There are no one-way thought patterns. Each time you go over their strengths and assets, they become aware that they have those assets and strengths.
As soon as they can see their next step, they begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Then, the power of your attention actually helps them. This is the creative power of empathy.
How Sympathy Affects Your Stomach
From early childhood, we may have stuffed anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, sadness, and any number of difficult feelings into our stomach by sympathizing with others or feeling sorry for ourselves. Our brain goes crazy thinking one worst-case scenario after another.
When we are not actually feeling the negative feelings, we also stuff happy positive feelings that we were not able to feel. And they build pressure too. The build-up of unfelt feelings cause the following symptoms:
• Thinking you have too much to do and not enough time
• Dizziness and nausea. Excessive pressure in the stomach meridians is the number one cause of dizziness
• Recurring bouts of anxiety
• Migraine headaches. Migraines almost always have a digestive component
• Wanting to withdraw from life
• Long-term depression
Feeling the good feelings cause them to expand inside us, giving us great fullness of joy and happiness. As good feelings expand, they can fill our life to overflowing. We can allow the feeling of peace and contentment to fill up our bodymind, radiate out into our energy field and go out to our people.
Food as Fuel: The Acid Base Balance
Seventy percent of our food needs to be vegetables and fruit, the more organic the better. Fruit and vegetables are alkaline and everything else, like meat, grains and dairy is acidic (exceptions: millet, quinoa and amaranth are high-altitude alkaline grains).
Eating five to seven servings of vegetables or fruit per day is our greatest insurance against all diseases. A serving is the size of our closed fist. As a general rule, when we observe our meal, three quarters of the plate should be vegetables.
Eating this way makes our blood sugar levels rise slowly then fall just as slowly, keeping our energy levels strong and stable from one meal to the next, allowing all our digestive processes to work at their highest levels of efficiency. Our body feels good.
Stable blood sugar levels create stable internal environments. Eating this way provides greater physical, emotional and mental endurance and stamina. It provides us with a sense of security and well-being from meal to meal.
Without the modulating effects of alkaline foods, vegetables and fruit, our blood sugar levels rise too quickly, then crashes below acceptable levels between meals. Milled grains are pure sugar. They make our blood sugar skyrocket upward then crash downward just as quickly.
Initially, the sugar rush buoys our spirit. We have big plans. The sky's the limit. But by mid-morning and mid-afternoon, our blood sugar levels fall below our ability to handle stressful situations. But because we still have to perform our duties, even though our low-blood sugar levels do not support our efforts, a myriad of stresses, aches and pains descend on us.
Currently, this is how most people eat, and how they handle life: Stressed out a lot of the time, seeking comfort food, having lots of little aches and pains, lots of highs and lows in their life. When blood sugar levels are erratic, so is life. Blood sugar levels directly equal energy levels.
Most breakfast foods are way too acidic to support high energy levels. Because of this, I do a blender drink every morning with frozen blueberries and powdered sprouted vegetables that are in a pleasant tasting formula. It starts my morning off with an alkaline rush. My energy levels remain stable all the way to lunchtime.
Then a salad, soup or a mainly vegetable meal with protein keeps my energy levels stable for the next five hours until I can get home for dinner. When I ate mostly carbs, I felt awful most of the time. Now my energy levels remain stable enough to sustain a high energy lifestyle. No more mid-morning, mid-afternoon sags. I love how I feel eating this way.
Thoughts are Alkaline or Acidic
Our bodymind reacts to every thought, feeling, and belief as if they also were food. In essence, they are. Positive thoughts are alkaline. Negative thoughts are acidic. Just as with our food, we need a certain amount of both.
A small amount of fear, from 10 to 30%, is healthy. If we have no fear, we might naïvely step in front of a bus, give our password or credit card information to a scammer, or do any number of things that can get us into trouble.
The trouble is, most people's fear levels are more in the 70 to 80% range. Fear of death shows up as being shy, not wanting to stand out, not thinking our perspectives matter, not wanting to be pushy, wanting to fit in and a host of other limiting thoughts.
A combination of eating too acidic and letting our brain do most of our thinking continually throws us into sympathetic dominance, which is also known as “fight, fright, flight.”
In sympathetic dominance, we shut down our immune, digestive and sexual systems, which are superfluous when we are in danger. We shunt all that energy to our sense organs and muscles so we can survive the supposed threat. Most of the drugs advertised on TV are for just this problem.
Health is simple. It is disease that is complicated. Correct thinking and eating are the very best medicine. Examples of nurturing (alkaline) thoughts are:
• I am safe and loved
• The universe loves and supports me
• Life happens for me, not to me
• I have enough time and resources to do what I want to do
• I love what I’m doing
• I am appreciated
• I am respected
• My family, friends and life are supportive
• Life is good
• And about difficulties: This too shall pass
The element of earth is the largest and most complex of the elements because all the other elements exist within Earth. I have italicized all the words that represent the qualities of the earth element to make it easier to see them at a single glance.
One of the most profound qualities of Earth is being held, not only when you were a baby, but developing friendships and relationships in your current life where you feel held at times by your friends and associates.
When your earth is healthy, you experience getting all the nourishment you need. You are creating situations where the fruit of your activities are continually providing you with the sweetness of life.
In order to create your life in a way that feels safe, you must develop firm boundaries. Your yes needs to be yes and your no needs to be no.
Earth ensures that we have good distribution in all areas of our life, and knowing when we have enough. Notice all the ways that we have an abundant harvest on every level—body, mind and spirit. Then we are nurturing a healthy earth element into being in our own unique world.
Attitude is a very important and vital aspect of health in all elements. Teaching ourselves to live constantly in an attitude of gratitude generates a powerful force that attracts more of what we are grateful for into our world.
We can nurture the element of earth within ourselves similarly to the way a mother truly loves her child. That love becomes a stable foundation for feeling safe and secure. Our spirit and soul love all our quirks and idiosyncrasies. All our "faults" connect to potential genius qualities. For example: impatience is connected to our passion for life.
Our greatest security comes from knowing that we are safe and loved. As a spirit and soul, we know that we are completely safe and unconditionally loved. It is our job teach that to our bodymind all during this lifetime. Every dysfunctional thing any of us does comes from not feeling safe and loved.
If we did not get the support or attention we needed growing up, we can act out in all kinds of dysfunctional ways, our psychological development fixated in some traumatic early stages, usually early childhood. As adults, we may still be crying out for love, support, attention or sympathy—acting out those fixations in unconscious attempts to get the attention we are missing.
Teaching our bodymind to feel safe and loved creates a stable loving foundation for every aspect of our life. If we didn’t get the nurturing that we needed growing up, we can cultivate and nurture all those qualities within ourselves as adults.
Your Three Heater system
The third Imperial Bodyguard of our heart is called the three-heater official, triple burner, or triple warmer. It is the part of our consciousness that is responsible for keeping the temperature in the three warming spaces into which our trunk just the way we like it, regardless of the circumstances or the outer temperature:
· The upper warming space contains our heart and lungs.
· The middle warming space is the part of the torso that includes the liver, gall bladder, pancreas, stomach, and spleen.
· The lower warming space includes the small and large intestines, kidneys, bladder, and sexual system.
All our organs within our torso represent particular portions of our total consciousness. They all work better when the temperature is in the Goldilocks zone. When one or more of our three warming spaces becomes over-heated, the organ systems in that space get agitated, causing them to function with less efficiency. As a result, we become agitated and are far less productive.
Every moment we are focusing on problems outside ourselves overheats all three warming spaces and throws our nervous system into sympathetic dominance, which is also knows as the fight, fright, flight response. Feeling threatened, we automatically shut down our immune system, digestive system and sexual system and shunt all that power into our muscles and sense organs so we can survive the supposed threat.
On the other hand, when we become indifferent to the world around us, there is not enough warmth in one or more of our warming spaces. Some people experience this as having cold hands and feet, while others might experience depression or feeling uninspired. When our fire element lacks warmth and joy, it feels like our spirit can’t match energy with the other party revelers.
When the triple-warmer official gets out of balance, we lose the ability to keep our emotional and social thermostat in balance. We can blow hot and cold. These kinds of mood swings drive friends and loved ones to desperation. We oscillate between overenthusiasm and indifference, making it is difficult for others to maintain anything like an appropriate balance with us. This particular imbalance has sent a lot of people to counseling or divorce.
For this reason, the triple-warmer official has been referred to as the heating engineer. When our body’s temperature is maintained just the way we like it, we are more inspired to achieve our maximum creativity and productivity. Yeah!
The meridians of the triple heater run most intensely from 9 to 11 PM. This is the time at the end of your day where it’s beneficial to reflect on all the goodness that has come into your life and power down into sleep mode.
Keeping our Three-Heater Balanced
We always knock our three-heater out of balance by focusing our precious attention on problems outside ourselves, dysfunctional acts of others, or stuff we don’t like. We can go for days, weeks, months or years with our life force dissipated by problems outside ourselves.
Our three-heater comes back into balance the microsecond we pull our awareness back to the unique world we are creating or focus on the people or things we love.
We maintain the healthy temperature of our three warming spaces by focusing our attention on dreams and goals that make our heart feel most alive. The good news is: all three aspects of our consciousness—spirit, soul and bodymind—are designed to create our world on purpose, just the way we want it. And that is what changes the world. Individuals pursuing their heart's desires is the only thing that will ever change the world.
Why Did He Do That?
We knock our triple warmer system out of balance every time we wonder why someone does something in a dysfunctional manner. Just wondering, “Why did he do that?” runs that person’s logic—how they rationalize that it’s all right to act out in such inconsiderate, thoughtless, bullying or helpless ways—through the matrix of our bodymind. Ouch!
Reasoning out that one silly question can take days, throwing our three warming spaces out of balance and taking our heart offline for the whole time. Wondering why anyone does dysfunctional things is “the curiosity that killed the cat.”
Define dysfunctional acts by saying, “That was inconsiderate,” or whatever defines that particular dysfunctional act. But never wonder why.
When you become aware that you are focusing on something you do not like, your three-heater’s wise counsel is to quit gawking at the ugliness of unconscious activities. Instead, focus on your plans and dreams, on the beauty that is all around you. There has always been unconsciousness in the world. The great news is that every day more people are waking up. The goodness and beauty all around you is growing more each day. That deserves your attention, not the darkness.
Your attention is your most precious possession. Putting it on problems you have little influence to change or putting it on dysfunctional behaviors takes your heart offline. Focusing on problems you have no way to change makes you feel powerless. It is really unhealthy. The result is that your bodymind, and your kingdom are left without a ruler—and that’s never good.
“Fight, Fright, Flight”
Your sympathetic nervous system has probably saved your life a number of times. In times of great danger, you get an adrenaline rush that lets you react with speed, strength, and clarity many times greater than any of your normal capabilities. Time slows down so much that you have all the time you need to do what you must do. You save the day!
The problem is living in sympathetic dominance. Our bodymind takes everything we focus on personally. We watch the news about war in Syria and your bodymind reacts as if when we open our front door we will see tanks and soldiers running by. Focusing on alarming events, our heart reacts by loading our sympathetic nervous system into the “fight, fright, flight” response, shutting down our immune system, digestive system and sexual system for the whole time.
Where the news focuses mostly on alarming events and worst-case scenarios, like in America, people live their entire lives in a state of hyper vigilance. And we have the digestive, immune, and sexual problems to prove it. Billions of dollars’ worth of drugs are sold in America each year—just for these problems. The irony of this would be hilarious if it were not so calamitous.
The instant we bring the focus of our attention back to the unique world our heart creates, those problems dissipate. The triple warmer immediately comes back into balance. The healthier parasympathetic nervous system turns back on. Our digestive, immune, and sexual systems turn back on. They get all the energy they need.
We innately know that we are safe and loved, that we have plenty of time, that people love what we do, the universe loves, supports and approves of us. Life is good. When we are thinking this way, digestion and our immune system receive enough life force to keep everything healthy. Our sexual system gets all the energy it needs to thrive and function well. And we don’t need all those drugs.
Keeping Our Three-Heater System in Balance
We can also destabilize our three-heater system by getting so overly excited and worked up when things are good that our thermostat gets stuck overheating. Then we rebound, getting overly depressed when things go bad, plunging us into the deepest of depressions afterward. It is difficult to maintain any kind of balance with this type of behavior. This kind of emotional roller-coaster is not uncommon.
The three-heater’s job is to keep redirecting our focus back to our plans and dreams, and to the things in life that we love. Its job is to revel in beautiful sunsets and all the wonders of this blue-green paradise world, and toward reflecting on the joys of our loved ones. When we focus our precious attention on those kinds of things, our heart creates more of that in our unique world.
In the circle of life, the love our heart feels becomes the agent that heals our heart. As we focus on aspects of loved ones we admire, our heart loves the best aspects of that person into being. We become people others admire. It is incredible how powerfully our love affects everything and everyone it focuses on. Focusing on what we love creates a more loving world. Our heart makes everything we focus on sacred.
Where is Your Focus?
The unconditional love, warmth and guidance our heart provides personifies the finest qualities of our spirit. Every moment that our heart is focusing its precious attention onto what it loves, it’s developing insights into how we can have more to love in our own unique world. That’s how it works. The more we love, the more loving our world becomes until we are completely surrounded by love. Year after year every part of our life keeps getting better.
Based on the insights our heart develops from unconditionally loving, it issues the moment-to-moment operating instructions that all our cells and organs need so they can live in harmony. The result is: age is kind to us and is easier to bring our desires to fruition in all situations.
In our busy lives, we find ourselves in dozens of different environments in a single day. In each and every situation, the insights from our heart allow us to manifest our unique world in a more loving manner and to create healthy limits and boundaries.
To help your three-heater to stay focused on the love all around you, say a resounding “yes” to all your lessons and difficulties. After all, your spirit and soul created them. Our supposed difficulties are actually stepping stones, created by our own spirit and soul, that lead us in the most direct path toward achieving our heart’s desires. The trouble is, those stepping stones come disguised as obstacles and difficulties.
Notice how happy your body feels when you say “yes. Yes. YES!” to life. Then every part of your life starts making sense.
The Pericardium System
The pericardium system, also known as the heart protector is the pericardial sac. It is the second bodyguard in charge of protecting our heart. It does just that. It absorbs the physical blows as well as the mental, emotional and spiritual traumas and shocks that would otherwise traumatize our heart. The last thing we want is for our heart to get a cramp.
Our heart is not a pump. The heart protector—not the heart—directs the peristaltic action of our arteries, distributing our heart’s warmth, unconditional love and guidance to every cell in our body and bringing it back thousands of times each day.
Ancient texts called this system circulation sex because muscles that make energy for this system—the piriformis, buttocks muscles, multifidus and the adductor muscles that draw our legs together—are essential for making love. These are powerful muscles that make the electrical energy our pericardium uses, big muscles that make a lot of energy. That should clue us into how important our heart protector is.
The heart protector system runs at its strongest from 7 to 9 PM. This is a good time to shut down the television or computer screens, settle down with a book or cuddle with your sweetheart.
On the higher levels of conscious, the heart protector sends our heart’s unconditional love, warmth and guidance to everyone and everything we think about. As we grow and evolve into our power as spiritual beings living in the material world, learning how to love in ever more situations makes our life all that more fulfilling. All life is about relationships.
Relationships
Relationships hold the universe together—everything from atoms to galaxies to friendships—and our heart protector is the ambassador to and from all our relationships. As our heart’s Imperial bodyguard, the heart protector's job is to keep all our relationships healthy by extending the heart’s unconditional love, warmth and guidance to everyone and everything while maintaining clear boundaries.
Authors, speakers and friends Gay and Katie Hendricks clearly explained the difference between relationships and entanglements. A relationship has two definitions:
• A relationship exists when two whole people come together to share their essence.
• A relationship allows the entire gamut between intimacy and aloneness.
The above two definitions seem so simple but they take years to master. In a relationship, both parties walk away with more energy than they had when they met.
A Whole Person
To consider a person “whole,” is to assume that he or she has every skill they will ever need to handle every problem they will encounter, that their essential nature is Christ consciousness or a Buddha in training, no matter how they are acting.
When we worry or are concerned about someone or make excuses for their behavior, in our world they are no longer whole. This way of thinking handicaps and invalidates that person from being a powerful spiritual being. In our unique world, we have transformed that person into a third-class citizen. And that influences them to react in ways we will not like.
Everyone reacts to our thoughts as if they heard them. Their unconscious reaction to us seeing them as less than whole is usually resentment. Worse, our negative opinion of them influences them to screw up, just as we thought they would. And the drama goes on.
We come into better relationships and harmony with others when we think of them as whole. That means assuming that they are powerful spiritual beings that have every skill and talent they will ever need to handle any problem that comes at them.
The Balance Between Intimacy and aloneness
When a person needs space and we give it to them, magic happens. We are giving them what they need—what they want. When we give people the space they need, they can more quickly resolve whatever problem has arisen. We allow them to feel safe.
When a person wants intimacy from us, it usually doesn’t require that much. Briefly listening or a touch or hug usually fulfills their need. But when a person wants intimacy and—for whatever reason—we push them away, we create a dysfunction that can take hundreds, often thousands of times more energy to handle. We have created an entanglement. And, unlike relationships, entanglements are never fun.
Any encounter that does not fulfill the two definitions of a relationship is an entanglement. If someone wants space and we cling to them, that is an entanglement. If we make excuses for them or are concerned about how they will handle something, which is technically worry, that is also an entanglement. The emotional undercurrents that follow suck all the joy and happiness out of the encounter. Both parties go away with less energy than they had. Currently, most people’s encounters with others are entanglements.
If we simply wonder how much intimacy or aloneness a person wants, we innately know the answer. A person may want 10 percent intimacy and 90 percent aloneness. Give them space. A short time later that same person may want a moment of intimacy. Interactions become more fluid and fulfilling. Everyone is physic in their own way, although most dismiss it as “only their imagination.” Some of us hear, others see, while others simply know (auditory, visual or kinesthetic).
As we simply observe these two simple rules of relationships, our encounters transform into relationships. Relationships give back much more energy than either party expended. They provide increasingly more protection and health to our heart. Cherishing others is the greatest protection we can give our heart. As a result, our heart is able to keep our kingdom safe, peaceful, productive and healthy.
We Fall Asleep Dozens of Times Daily
When any negative feeling comes up—and we don’t actually feel it—our heart and the higher dimensions our bodymind are instantly taken offline. And, in that same instant, our brain defaults to being in charge and starts spinning stories that justify why it is acceptable to hold that feeling against the other person.
The stories our brain generates are oh so familiar because it has spun them so many hundreds of times in the past. This process is so subtle and so seductive that we all fall asleep dozens of times every day.
Negative feelings we don’t actually feel build up emotional pressure within our bodymind. That pressure causes most of our pain. It also causes our brain to generate thousands of negative thoughts and actions—thoughts and actions we would never script if we knew that we write the screenplay of our lives.
Our bodymind is more devoted to doing what our spirit/soul wants than any dog we ever had or could even imagine, but it takes everything we think and say personally. It assumes that the negative thoughts our brain is aiming at others are actually aimed at it. The emotional pain it experiences impairs all our cell’s and organ’s functions, forcing them to operate at much lower levels of efficiency, often self-destructively. Most of the pain and disease we experience results from wrong thinking.
Most people think they are feeling their feelings when they are actually only thinking or talking about their feelings. The brain’s seduction is rationalizing how and why it is acceptable to hold those feelings against the other person. That is not feeling or resolving the feelings.
To be sure you are actually feeling your feelings:
• Come to a full stop.
• Only let the brain have the one sentence that brings up the negative feeling, like “That makes me angry.” That’s enough words. Now, go inside yourself and experience the feeling of anger. Any further thoughts actually stop the process of feeling/experiencing.
• You can become aware of where that emotion is in your body. It may be a tightness in your chest. It may be a knot in your gut. It may be a feeling of tiredness. You may experience the feelings in any part of your body, or over your entire body.
• Stay with the feeling—without dialogue or letting your mind try to manipulate the incident in any way—until it dissolves. This is forgiveness.
Forgiveness is simply feeling your feelings
When hurtful inappropriate words are spoken, we often walk away from it—stoic—holding all those feelings in our bodies to later become indigestion, a pain in the neck or elsewhere.
Who do we forgive? How about our own self for not being able to respond authentically with our feelings in the moment it happened? What treasures come from that authentic exchange?
A big part of what we need to forgive is our inability to be present in the moment. We hurt ourselves for what that person carelessly said or did. They could have been oblivious to the pain we went through. Their words or actions often had nothing to do with us.
We need to be response-able. Able to respond in the moment, in a non-judgmental way, speaking “I” statements instead of “you” statements. We should never be victims. No matter what we must physically do or say when dealing with others who are toxic, feel the toxic feelings. Then, how we respond to situations says more about who we are than who the other person is.
When we feel all the feelings that come up as we go through our day, we are living the spirit of forgiveness. We are forgiving ourselves and the world.
We are always overwriting our DNA. Simply feeling our feelings changes the past, present, and future. We rewrite our DNA strands in a more loving and empowering way. And our forgiveness helps others to rewrite theirs in wonderful and powerful ways.
Small Intestine: The Heart’s First Bodyguard
Our small intestine is about 32 feet long. Its inner lining looks like velvet due to millions of villi—finger-like projections approximately one millimeter long that are resplendent with veins, arteries, lymphatic vessels and meridians. Our small intestine effectively digests 95% of all the food we eat and life we take in.
Besides food, our small intestine also digests our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, values, principles, beliefs, all our relationships, our politics and our world view, sending all that is nutritive to our heart.
Our small intestine keeps our heart healthy by bringing everything that is wholesome and nutritive to the heart, while letting everything non-nutritive pass on by. “Pass on by” is the operative concept.
In the ancient texts, this quality of sorting is described as “separating the pure from the impure.” Its job on the higher levels of our consciousness is to separate out limiting depreciative thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, principles and values, allowing all that is non-nourishing to pass on by while sending our heart all that is nourishing.
In health, our small intestine does not resist evil or fight against all that is wrong in the world, which dissipates our life force. Its job is to allow all the negativity to pass on by, while taking in the goodness that is always occurring all around us. In this way, our small intestine also acts as ambassador to our heart.
Letting things that we might consider evil or bad to “pass on by” is infinitely more powerful than resisting or fighting against them in any way. What we resist persists. Fighting evil actually gives it more power. The good one individual does while focusing on their heart’s desires is more healing to the world than the efforts of hundreds of people protesting the world’s problems. The world needs our contributions now more than ever.
All the Moments When We Are Not Awake
When we allow our unruly brain to focus on all the problems outside ourselves, that takes our heart off-line. Days, months and even years can slip by while we are so distracted by all the problems of the world that our heart cannot provide the unconditional love our friends, family, plans and dreams require.
Because most people yet slumber, their brain in charge of their consciousness, there is a lot of darkness in the world. I observe that patients with digestive issues are obsessed with problems. A mother may be obsessing about her family’s troubles so intensely that every part of her own health suffers. A father may be focusing all his attention on struggles at work, politics or things going wrong in his body. In every case, digestion is impaired and every cell worse off.
When we observe our world with a more wide-angle lens, we observe that we have never had so much personal freedom as we have right now. When our small intestine focuses our attention onto all the love and goodness occurring around us, we become aware that we really don’t need to focus our precious attention on all those problems.
Keeping our Small Intestine Happy
We keep our small intestine healthy by focusing our precious attention on all the good things that are happening. In ill health, we can’t remember the good things that happened in the last few days but we remember all the slights that have happened to us for years. Which camp are you in?
When we come across conflicts and differences that we need to resolve, our small intestine is the part of our consciousness where we develop our natural sense of justice. This is where we build the foundation of our most precious moral codes.
Protect your heart from dwelling on foolish things
On the best day of your life, half the things that happened were non-nutritive, but you didn’t notice because you were having a wonderful day. On the worst day of your life half the things happening were supportive and wonderful, but you probably didn’t notice because you were “having a bad day.” When we honestly reflect upon this, it actually comes down to perspective.
Our small intestine’s job is to focus on everything in our life that is nutritional, good, kind and wholesome. Most of our focus needs to be on our own plans, dreams and what we love. With this practice, our heart becomes the benevolent wise Ruler who rules over a happy, thriving kingdom. And every year it just gets better.
Every minute of our life, about five liters (1.3 gallons) of blood passes through the heart. Despite what we have been taught, our heart is not a pump. The top of it isn’t thick enough to pump blood through the almost 62,000 miles of blood vessels in our body. Arteries pump the blood out to all our extremities by peristaltic contractions. When you feel a pulse, you are feeling a peristaltic contraction that originated at the heart as it travels out to that extremity.
Externally, our beating heart generates a toroidal energy field similar to the magnetic energy field that stabilizes our atmosphere—like the north/south poles of our earth—radiating outward in all directions to support our atmosphere. It’s like the north pole comes out the top of our head and the south pole coming into the bottom of our torso. South of the equator, this would reverse: The South pole would most-likely relate the head and north pole the bottom of the torso.
Our energy field projects outward approximately 10 feet in all directions. Our heart’s energy field can positively affect everyone within twenty feet of us as our energy fields comingle. Or we can bring people down.
Internally, as blood passes through our heart, it goes out the aorta like a cyclone. This cyclonic energy "structures" the blood most strongly as it is passing into the stomach, spleen and liver, energizing the blood in magical life-enhancing ways, enlivening all our blood’s qualities. We are just now beginning to learn about these effects.
Our heartbeats generate 10,000 times more electromotive force than our brain puts out, with enough neurons to be a brain. 60% of them are focused toward controlling which one of the four lobes of our brain that we are functioning through.
Our heart is designed to be the ruler of our consciousness. Our brain is designed to be the heart’s servant, like a valet or lady in waiting. A good servant needs a well-deliniated job description. I give my brain “the seven habits,” found in the seven habits section of this blog. I recommend others do the same. If not directed by the heart, the brain will always focus on problems, creating endless problems for us to deal with. Not good.
When the brain is fully occupied with keeping us focused on breathing out strong, sitting/ standing erect, feeling all our feelings, it’s like building your house on a solid foundation, one that will withstand everything life throws at you. The more we can be mindful of all seven habits, the more poised we are to pursue our own unique “hero’s journey.”
The seven habits keep bringing us back to the present moment. Shamans have always maintained that there are two world, one illusional, and one world authentic. Authentic comes from the world author. We write the story of our life. We direct it. We are the leading lady or man of our story, not some supporting actor. And our heart is designed to be the undisputed ruler.
When we are living in the present moment, all our organs function as a benevolent ruler’s wise and highly esteemed cabinet members. Our heart graciously invites them all, in real time, to contribute their incredible talents and wisdom into the singularity of our consciousness as our heart lovingly rules over its kingdom.
Our heart is the closest thing to God that we will know on this side of the veil. It can be thought of as the root of life itself. It wants to love everyone and everything, which means we need to do trainloads of forgiveness. Our heart never relinquishes its childlike quality of loving, no matter how badly we may have been hurt by life.
Our unconditional love influences whatever and whomever we focus our attention on to mature to their highest potential. Every cell and organ functions best when receiving the loving warmth and guidance that comes from our heart. Without that love, no part of our body can mature to its full potential. The same is true with our plans, dreams and all our relationships with friends, associates, relatives, children pets and the environment we are co-creating.
For example, when we lovingly expect children, co-workers, friends or pets to be successful, kind, and brilliant, they consistently exceed our expectations. On the other hand, no matter how much we love them, if we inwardly expect them to screw up, they will consistently exceed our expectations. The latter version creates love/hate relationships. Our attention is that powerful.
The heart's unconditional love improves every aspect of ourselves and our world, influencing us all toward being our best, illuminated self. Many people’s lives were changed by just one person seeing their true potential.
The heart meridian runs its energies most intensely from 11 AM to 1 PM. This is a time to relax and enjoy a good lunch. This is prime time for lovingly reflecting on the unique world each of us are creating.
The Heart’s Three Imperial Bodyguards
The heart cannot unconditionally love our own unique world into being while protecting itself. Those are mutually exclusive concepts.
Learning about the heart's three imperial bodyguards in the next sections dramatically expands our awareness of all the heart’s functions.
The Western medical physiology model of our heart is linear and terribly incomplete. The first three years of every doctor in America or Europe is taken up with anatomy, physiology and pathology, the basic sciences. In this model, the brain is in charge and only the physical and mental bodies are actually recognized. Emotions, attitudes, principles, values and beliefs as well as our spirit and soul are ignored at best and generally treated as if their impact on our health is minimal.
In the next sections we learn that our heart has three imperial bodyguards: Small intestine, heart protector and triple heater. The small intestine protect and nourishes our heart by bringing everything nourishing to the heart and letting everything that is not-nourishing to simply pass on by. And the three-heater keeps bringing our awareness back to the real world, the unique world each of us is creating.
After the powerfully upward surging growth of springtime (wood), the energy of summertime (fire) slows down slightly and softens. As the energy slows down, it blossoms into a blaze of colors, fragrances and tastes that inspire joy and fun within every being, producing a bounty of vegetables, fruit, grains, seeds and nuts that sustain us all.
Every moment that we are awake, our heart—the organ that rules the element of fire within our bodymind—rules our consciousness. In our own unique world, everyone and everything needs our heart’s unconditional love, warmth and guidance to be able to achieve their potential and come to fruition.
The inner world our heart creates is the real world. The world “out there,” the world our brain focuses on, is the more illusory world.
Decision Making and Discernment
The gallbladder concentrates the liver’s bile about ten-fold and stores it for release into the small intestine after we have eaten a meal. The bile emulsifies fats and is essential for digesting both proteins and fats. Without bile we would literally starve to death with a full belly.
Our gallbladder system includes the anterior deltoids of our shoulders and popliteus muscles at the back of our knees. It also includes the gallbladder meridians on both sides of our body. The meridians begin in the outside corner of our eyes, go back and forth along the side of our head, and eventually terminate at the fourth toes.
The liver and gallbladder—the two organs of the wood system—work better together than either can separately. The part of our consciousness that resides in the liver is always drawing up plans to manifest whatever we focus on, no matter whether we want it or hate it. Our gallbladder is the part of our consciousness that faithfully executes all the plans that we commit to in the liver.
Within our consciousness, our liver can be likened to an architect, while the gallbladder is like the contractor in the building of a house. Neither is as powerful individually as they are together. Through the liver we develop noble ideals, have wonderful dreams, and make mighty plans. But we still need the contractor’s skills to make all the split-second and long-range decisions that bring our visions to life.
How Form and Function Affects Our Bodymind
Our musculoskeletal system is part of the element of wood. When our liver and gallbladder are healthy, we have elegance in all our movements and flexibility with our tendons and sinews. We exhibit good structure to our logic, which leads to enhanced powers of reasoning. Because the eyes are the end organ of the liver/gallbladder system, our thinking process has the kind of clarity that allows us to “see” our vision. We get our point across clearly to others. We can visualize a positive future for ourselves.
The musculoskeletal system gives structure to our body as well as structure to our plans and dreams. Imbalance in the element of wood often shows up as bad posture, like letting our torso slump and break over, which pushes our head project forward. We might let our feet toe out like a duck. These kinds of postural faults lead to creaking joints, stiffness, and movements that are jerky. Tendons easily sprain. When our posture is poor, the integrity of our thinking process is similarly impaired.
Good posture and flexibility gives our liver and gallbladder the clarity, strength, and adaptability that lead to clear thinking and emotional stability. This stability gives staying power to our attitudes and provides power and flexibility to our beliefs. A strong, flexible body helps to build a strong, flexible mind.
Our liver cannot make sound decisions and create plans that have integrity without the good discernment of our gallbladder system. Each and every plan our liver makes depends upon discernment and good judgments from our gallbladder. We need to make good judgments and discernments about everyone and everything we encounter. For most of us, this is the part of our consciousness that has been most heavily socialized—and compromised.
Good judgment might come into play when we are deciding whether to be friends with someone. Do their values align with ours? They may be exciting to be with, but do their actions and beliefs enhance or detract from our values and principles? Besides me, what kind of people do they associate with? Are they kind? Is this someone who can be stubborn and choose not to do something just because he or she gets an attitude about it? These are the kind of questions a healthy gallbladder asks to keep things honest.
Good discernment from our gallbladder gives our liver the input it needs to make sound, honest plans relative to that person. With good judgement, we can wisely decide how much—or how little—energy we want to commit to that person. Being judgmental is putting someone down or name calling, like saying “He’s a jerk.”
Each moment we stand at the nexus of eternity. Will we choose this or that? Will we go here or there? Our gallbladder is the part of our consciousness where we discern the merits of each decision. The gallbladder's decision-making process shapes our world for better or for ill.
Reframing
The primary, honest emotion of the gallbladder is resentment. Any time our plans are thwarted, resentment is like saying, “Why can’t I have what I want?” Feeling the resentment dissolves it into nothingness.
If we do not actually feel resentment that comes up—experience it without the brain’s internal dialogue—the internal pressure that builds up pushes less honest feelings like stubbornness to the surface of our consciousness. And we start a long saga of stubbornly arguing for our limitations; believing that someone or something outside us is holding us back, making it so that we can’t do what we want to do.
Other, less honest emotions that come up if we don't actually feel the resentment are feeling galled or repressed. These less than honest emotions transform into entrenched attitudes, defining our reality in more sinister hues. They can hang around for years, for life. We see it in people who incessantly complain about their job, politics, their spouse or kids and everything else.
This is where reframing comes into play. When plans or dreams get thwarted, the first thing we need to do is feel the resentment. The next step is to reframe our plan or dream so we see ourselves having what we desire now, even though it may not actually manifest in the linear world of time for months or years. We see ourselves having it the whole time. Reframing is a tool successful people use quite often.
The Power of the Wood Element
There are nine driving energies of the wood element: hope, vision, future, vitality, exuberance, birth, growth, activity, and regeneration. These qualities exist both outside of you—like a spring rain or the surging, vigorous growth of springtime—and inside of you like the vitality that allows you to complete a challenging goal.
When your wood element is healthy, you can feel the noisy exuberance of your plans and dreams wanting to burst out from within your being. You have vision. You have a bold future to manifest into being. You want to shout it out. Nothing can stop you.
You want a life of action, not one of holding back. Do not hold back for fear of making mistakes. Give yourself permission to make mistakes—even big ones. Mistakes are your greatest teachers. The greatest among us will readily admit that they failed their way to success. When you do something stupidly or in a way you do not like—and learn from it—you learn far more than you can from doing a thousand things right.
When you first start to do something, rarely do you know how it will actually turn out. You may need to think or move in the direction of your dreams for a while before they flesh out into something you can share with others. Have a life of action, not one of holding back.
The more engaged you are with your hopes and dreams, the healthier your liver and gallbladder are, the better your flexibility and stability, and the clearer you can see the visions of what you want. Your noble ideals and magnificent dreams give purpose to your life. They expand the depth and breadth of your character. All this is the function of your liver/gallbladder system (wood) within your bodymind.
Assertion, the driving force of your life, is generated in your liver system. But any time your plans or dreams are thwarted, anger is the raw emotion your liver generates. Anger is divinely inspired, vigorous, and forceful. It’s like a wild horse running across the prairie, racing the wind, making you feel like you are all that. It needs to burst out. It is intimate and does not need to be unkind. After all, love is its inspiration.
Most people misuse their anger by projecting angry thoughts onto others, or their selves. Or they let their brain protest the lessons coming at them out of fear that someone or something outside themselves is controlling their fate or holding them back.
Truth is, our own spirit and soul create our lessons. So, just say “yes” to life’s lessons. Life is so much more exciting and fulfilling that way.
Thinking about anger causes it to rapidly build up in our bodymind until our countenance takes on a tainted appearance. When we hear about anger, horror stories come up about when angry thinking built up so much hatred and other vengeful thoughts that it turned violent. The news media capitalizes on sensationalism, providing horror stories every morning and evening about anger gone awry. As a result, society has demonized this childlike force and made it into something “mean.”
Feeling anger releases it. When we ignore anger or repress it, it keeps building up until it degrades into depression or irrationality. Depression or repressing our actions can become so entrenched that it seems like part of our personality. The more we can feel/experience all our feelings, especially anger, the more we dissipate depression and irrationality. When a person is depressed, anger is actually an upgrade. It’s much higher on the scale of emotions.
Anger is a wonderful, powerful tool in our consciousness. It’s the catalyst that breaks us out of deep old ruts, helping us overcome stifling inertia. When we get stuck in old patterns of grief, confusion, depression or other emotions that hold us back, anger can grab hold of us, shove us out of our rut and into actions that get us back on track.
We need to honor our anger, appreciate it for what it is. It is a vital ingredient of any intimate relationship. When we start to stray from the profound truth and love in our relationships, anger provides the impetus to push us back on track. When we get stuck in a rut of defensiveness or indecision, it’s anger that lights a fire under our rear-end to shove us back into action.
In a healthy state, anger’s mantra would be something like, “Either lead, follow, or get out of the way.” The more we ignore anger, the more pressure it builds up, which can be quite distressing. Anger is a kind of divine discontent that continues to build until we figure out what we want and commit to it. Anger is the honest healthy emotion of our liver. Anger is our friend.
Transforming Anger, using “The Slow Turn”
Often, we can’t get out of our funk until we get righteously angry. Then we storm around channeling all that anger into getting things done that we had previously stalled on.
Any time we become aware of anger, irritation or frustration building up, it’s usually because the direction our spirit wants to go appears blocked. Then it’s time to do the slow turn:
Commitment
The instant we commit, all the built-up pressure in the meridians return to normal in a fraction of a second. Then all the heat of inflammation and swelling in the liver starts dissipating similarly to releasing the valve on a hydraulic jack. Within twenty to thirty seconds, the pressure is completely gone.
This process happens because our bodymind, and energy itself, is almost exclusively consciousness. Check it out for yourself. It always seems like a miracle, but I watch it happen every day at my office.
The anger transforms into heartfelt emotions like thankfulness or certainty that what we commit to is happening. Then our liver starts up-taking all the energy we will need to accomplish anything we have committed to.
“The slow turn” transforms anger into a powerful force. Then, if you single-mindedly focus on what you want to do, that makes you unstoppable. The process of successfully manifesting your heart’s desires is a large part of developing your willpower.
Lean into Life’s Difficulties
I love downhill skiing. It is such a great metaphor for life. When you ski, your skis only work for you when you lean forward into your ski boots. In other words, you must lean into the difficulty. In life, that means committing. Only then does the liver uptake enough energy to accomplish that goal or dream.
When the slope is steep—or life is hard—saying “yes” to the difficulties, feeling all the feelings, and committing to your path is like having the hottest new ski equipment. They make it easier for us to get through difficult terrain gracefully.
When we hold back, it’s like trying to skid to a slower speed while skiing through rough terrain. That makes everything harder. Skis are not designed for holding back. Neither is our liver. Like, skiing, life only works well when we lean into the difficulties of the terrain ahead.
We all suffer from socialization. There are hundreds of thousands of subtle ways that society has conditioned us to hold our greatness, to not stand out, to be safe, to give our power away. For example, researchers studying family dynamics observe that the typical parent says “no” to their children in about three hundred different ways each day, while only saying “yes” about three times.
School and church reinforce this pattern. Our friends are similarly socialized, so they also reinforce this pattern. By the time a child is seven years old, they have completely internalized the negative reinforcement. “No,” which translates as "you can't do that," automatically comes up any time their mind thinks in positive directions.
We peel away layers of societal conditioning by training our minds to say “yes” to all the difficulties that come up. Saying “YES” to your difficulties is like leaning into your ski boots. It’s the only way to take the hill.
From medical physiology, we learn that our liver is an organ with 50,000 to 100,000 filtration lobules that filter over a quart, a liter of blood every minute for as long as we live. As it filters the blood, the liver effectively removes debris and pathological bacteria from your blood. It generates bile, stores and releases vitamins A and D and also glucose to stabilize the blood sugar levels. Without bile, your body would not be able to digest proteins or fats.
But our liver is more than just the organ. All our organs are actually organ systems. The liver system includes both pectoralis and rhomboid muscles. They generate the electrical energy the liver needs to perform all its functions. Our liver system also includes the liver meridians that run down either side of our body from the middle of our torso to the great toes.
Meridians Create our Auric Field, our Aura
In our seven-dimensional bodymind, our meridians represent the fifth dimension (causal). This is the part of our bodymind where our attitudes develop. The meridians become the template that all our other tissues, including our organs form up around as our body develops from two cells to the complex being we become.
The energy our meridians generate is stable enough to maintain our aura—a dense, energy field, like a big energy egg that surrounds our body for about three feet around us, including above our head and below our feet—dense enough to be palpable by almost everyone. Our auric field puts our attitudes right out there for everyone to observe.
The density of our aura insulates us from having to experience everyone’s pain and thoughts when they are nearby. This allows us to experience our own autonomous life. The downside is: We can easily believe that we are separate from Creator and all life.
All meridians run their energy 24 hours a day, but every two hours the energy runs much more intensely in one of the twelve paired energy systems. During the time that particular system runs more intensely, it rules the bodymind's activities.
The energy of the gallbladder system runs most intensely from 11 PM to 1 AM. The gallbladder is the part of our consciousness where we handle decision making, discernment and where we build our self-esteem. If we are not being decisive or not adequately discerning the issues that impact our life, the build-up of stress may cause difficulty sleeping during this time.
The energy for the liver system runs most intensely from 1 AM to 3 AM. If we have let anger, frustration or irritation build up and have not actually felt these feelings, our sleep may be disturbed during this time.
Willpower and Our Sense of Purpose
The liver can be thought of as the architect of our life. It’s the part of our consciousness that listens in on everything we think, feel, believe, and talk about with our friends. Whatever we are focusing on, our liver continually draws up plans to have more of that in our life.
What we focus on is what our liver creates in our life. It really doesn’t matter whether we love, fear or even hate what we are focusing on. Just the fact that we are focusing on it causes the liver system to manifest it into our life. Through the element of wood, we create our own personal reality. This also explains how "what I fear has come upon me."
If we are letting our unruly mind muck about thinking about all that’s wrong in the world, that forces our liver to manifest more problems and things going wrong in our world. This is one of the problems of being a creator.
I hear people saying things like, “I can’t do that.” “I’ll never be able to get down to the weight I want to be at,” or “Things just don’t work out good for me.” And it’s true! What we believe will happen happens—just as we thought. Our words are actually commands, which our bodymind, spirit and soul take literally and unfailingly delivers—even though that might not necessarily be what we want.
Take responsibility for what you believe. Every time you hear yourself thinking or saying something that doesn’t feel right in your gut, especially something disempowering, ask yourself this question: “Is that how I want to create my own unique world?” If it’s not, kill that belief. Shoot that sacred cow dead. Replace it with how you want to create your world. We all just make our lives up. Then we live it. Part of being awake is creating our lives consciously, intentionally.
We seriously dissipate our precious life force by letting our brain focus on all the problems it tends to want to focus on. It is so easy to fritter our life away. I observe very intelligent people spending enormous amounts of time worrying about what family members or friends are doing, arguing over politics, conspiracy theories and government or corporate shenanigans.
Focusing on something we cannot personally change in the next few days depletes our life force. Worse, it makes us feel like we have no future, no growth potential. We cannot change problems by focusing on them. That is the grand illusion. We can only change the world by focusing on the positive contributions we make.
We develop our sense of purpose and willpower by training our mind to stay focused on the plans and dreams that make us feel most alive, plans and dreams that excite and challenge us, that probably caused a twinge in our gut when we first considered them.
The nobility of your dreams, plans and ideals give depth and breadth to your character. Dare to dream dreams that stretch the imagination of who you think you are. Then commit to them with the kind of certainty that you believe the sun’s coming up tomorrow. Anything less than that is just wasted energy. Your life can be great when you train your mind to single-mindedly stay focused on your heart’s desires.
The fabric you weave into the tapestry of life with your positive contributions is more valuable than all your concern about the world’s problems combined. Manifesting is much easier than most people think. The hard part of manifesting is training your unruly mind to stay focused on your heart’s desires. It’s like keeping your eyes on the road when you’re driving. There are so many distractions.
Commit to Your Plans and Dreams
Commit to the dreams and ideals your mind won't quit thinking about. Committing to your plans and dreams is very much like putting your car in gear. Nothing happens until you commit. Then keep bringing your precious attention back to what you want to manifest.
Make plans, review them often and change them when necessary. That focuses your attention on what you can do to make the world a better place. Less than two percent of the population make and review their plans regularly, yet they make most of the changes that happen in the world.
The moment you commit to a goal or dream, your liver immediately starts up-taking all the energy you will ever need to accomplish that goal. As you overcome obstacles in your path, you develop willpower, one of your super powers. You also develop the depth and breadth of your character. This is a fun part of being a creator.
Creating a Heroic Character and Stepping into it
A character we just make up is more real—and infinitely more powerful—than a character we have been conditioned to believe we are. Imagine a character who represents all the positive qualities you would embody if the world were a perfect place. Ask yourself:
What would I do, or who would I be if the world were a perfect place and I could do or be anything I wanted?
Dare to invent a character in a role that might be a little scary, that stretches the limits of what you thought you could ever be. Use your imagination to create that role in a perfect world where you could do or be whatever you want to be. Then boldly step into your creation.
When you firmly commit to something, anything, your liver immediately starts up-taking all the energy you will ever need to accomplish that goal. It’s important to realize that each one of us has every talent and skill we will ever need to handle every challenge that comes at us—if we stay focused and don’t quit on ourselves.
I can promise you that creating a bold character—and stepping into it—will probably cause you to wake up hundreds of times over the next fifteen or twenty years around 3 A.M. sweating, frustrated because you are not facing up to a particular challenge your ideal character faces. Usually, by the second or third night you wake up with the answer, which is remarkably right on target and explains many other related issues. With each success, your expertise grows.
If you do not create a bold character—and step into it—you will not have all those 3 A.M. wake-ups, nor will you achieve those delightful insights that help you to understand a host of similar problems. And you will never develop the genius qualities within yourself or know how powerful you actually are.
One step at a time you ultimately become, and often transcend your heroes. Imagine you are watching a movie of your life: in every scene, you have the option of being the leading lady or man. Dare to dream.
Start paying attention to the background dreams you secretly long for. Often, they are dreams you think about a lot, but think that you can’t do them or that someone else should do them. But they keep coming up in your consciousness. As you allow the dream to form up, you begin to see that you are “The One” to do this.
As you come to understand your spiritual nobility, you realize that the world is indeed a perfect place.
Slay Your Dragons
There is a sense of magic when we first aspire to a dream. But soon after we start taking the courageous first steps, fears start floating up to the surface of our mind. The dragons of our old mythologies represent those fears. Because most of us only think about our fears, they build in intensity and increase in size until they resemble forty-foot tall fire-breathing dragons. Feeling our fears dissolve them into nothingness, slaying the dragons.
Dare to dream but guard your dreams. Protect them. Newly forming dreams are delicate and vulnerable, like newly emerging shoots in the springtime. Do not share your unformed dreams or plans with friends or even loved ones until you have nurtured and developed them enough that they can withstand the scrutiny of well-meaning others.
Most people have been hurt by life and just listening to your newly emerging dream causes their own inner demons attack the innocent dream before it has developed enough substance to withstand the onslaught. Even though you might be innocently sharing your dream with them, their unresolved fears cause them to unconsciously function as “dream crushers.”
Just telling them your dream kills it. Their well-meaning advice often comes from such deep-seated fears that your dream begins to feel foolish. Their fear effectively stops you from doing what your heart profoundly desires. Once your dream has formed up and has enough substance, then you can share it, but only with a select few.
We all need your dreams, the threads that are your contribution to the tapestry of life.
Your life and your contributions are precious. Most people are waiting around for a dozen doves to fly by in the sign of a cross or some other divine sign before they commit to their life. Here’s the deal: Everyone’s contributions in this life are essential. Everyone.
Everyone has genius in one or more areas of their life. Everyone! As you grow into one of your particular genius qualities it starts fleshing out, which causes your next genius quality to start bubbling up into your awareness. If you never step out of your comfort zone—if you hold back because of your fears—if you don’t risk going for it, you will never discover your own genius qualities.
If you boldly go for it in the areas your heart opens to—pursuing the dreams your mind will not quit thinking about—you will experience your genius qualities. My prayer is that you find your genius. And ultimately you discover that the world is, indeed, a perfect place.
Wood represents the beginning phase of growth of any cycle or relationship. Like springtime, this part of any cycle is when everything is growing at its fastest rate. When we are in the springtime of a relationship, it feels like the upward surging growth will never end or even slow down.
Within our consciousness, wood represents how we assert ourselves. This is where we develop the power of our will. The nobility of our ideals, the magnificence of our dreams, and the thoroughness of our plans give depth and breadth to our character. These are sacred parts of character that must be developed if we are to be whole. The liver and gallbladder are the organs of the element of wood.
Introduction to Section II
We have two conscious operating systems: Heart and brain. All through our long history, almost everyone’s brain has been in charge of their consciousness. The brain is our subconscious operating system.
The trouble is, our brain references everything to either the past, future or some past/future construct. It avoids the present moment. This way of thinking perceives everything from a lens of scarcity, lack and limitation. The brain gets caught up in polarizations like religion, politics and family or work dramas. It is a problem solver. If there are no problems, it dredges up old problems to fixate on.
The brain only ascends to the level of critical thinking. It stops short of creational thinking. Brain centric thinking is the reason why there is so much inequality, war and poverty. Technically, we are spiritually asleep every moment our brain is in charge.
Heart or Brain as Our Operating System?
Every moment we are awake, our heart takes charge of our consciousness. But what is being awake? Spirituality is simply being mindful of basic habits.
The first three habits provide a foundation that allows us to handle anything life throws at us: Breathing out strong from below our navel: Standing and sitting erect: and Feeling all our feelings. These basic habits have one thing in common. They keep waking us up to the present moment.
Being in the present moment is what being spiritually awake means. When we fall back asleep, we have a subconscious system that can keep us in our lane at the right speed limit if we are driving our car. It has many hundreds of thousands of programs for everything we have ever done more than twice. It has programs for “talking with mom.” It has programs for driving the car and everything that we do on a repetitive basis.
The brain’s programs are so effective that we can go for days, weeks, months or, like most people, even years with the brain playing disc jockey; plugging in the program it deems appropriate for whatever occasion we are involved in. The only reason this seems normal is because almost everyone around us has the brain as their consciousness operating system.
Heart Operating System
Every moment that we are awake, our heart takes control of our consciousness. Our heart automatically aligns with the intentions of our spirit and soul, the eternal parts of who we actually are.
We are a trinity of spirit and soul, both eternal, and a seven-dimensional bodymind that lives in the world of time and polarities. All three are creators. Every person lives in their own unique world.
What we think about all day long creates that world. It does not matter whether we want or would never want what we are thinking about. If we are thinking about it, we are manifesting it and it’s coming right at us. That’s why it is so important to keep our focus on what we love.
When our heart is in charge of our consciousness, all our organ systems lend their incredible talents and wisdom, in real time, so our heart can create our unique world in the most loving and efficient manner. Our heart wants to love everything and everyone and let them love us back. It also wants everyone else to be successful.
All our organ systems operate simultaneously, in real time, throughout all seven dimensions. What that means is: All our operating systems are very simple. That makes them simple to understand and simple to bring into harmony.
Every moment our heart is in charge gives our spirit and soul access to seven incredible dimensions: physical, etheric, mental, emotional, attitudinal, and the dimensions that deals with our values, principles and beliefs. The inner world our heart creates is the real world. The world “out there,” the world our brain focuses on, is mostly a world of illusion because we are mostly powerless to change it.
All of the laws of the universe are inclusive. We come into harmony with all creation when we cherish others, ourselves and the world around us. All life is about choices. Moment by moment we have the sovereign power to choose where we focus our precious attention. Whatever we focus our attention on is our God.
Everyone and everything in our world needs the unconditional love, warmth and guidance from our heart to be able to achieve their potential and come to fruition. The only thing that will change the world is when enough of us wake up to focusing on our heart’s desires. Then the whole world changes.
Why We Need Habits
The unconscious past/future world of time is so familiar, so seductive that we all fall asleep dozens of times every day. The Seven Habits (section I) keep waking us to the present moment. As we wake up, The Five Elements (section II), the basis of classical Chinese acupuncture, show us how simple it is to bring our consciousness into harmony with all life.
The ancient Chinese developed an understanding of the human body called The Five Elements, which is used to describe all our interactions and relationships. It is the most accurate diagnostic system in the world to truly understand the human body. The five elements are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. This system plumbs the depths of awareness about how each of our organs generate their portion of our total consciousness. Because of our cyclical nature, each element also represents a season of the year.
What Are the Five Elements?
The ancient Chinese did not consider atoms and cells to be the building blocks of the material world. Instead, they considered transformation and change to be the building blocks on which reality is based, and the predictable patterns of change and interaction. We learn that we do not have a separate body and mind. We actually have a bodymind. The five elements lets us clearly understand how simple it is to bring each aspect of our consciousness into harmony with all life.
Each of the five elements describes unique portions of our consciousness and how we can easily bring it into harmony:
The purpose of life is to cherish others, ourselves, and the world around us. That’s what we are here to learn. We also need to pull our focus back from the mostly illusory world outside of us and keep it on creating the unique world each of us creates. Our ideals, our splendid plans and dreams need our loving attention. There are so many distractions.
All life is about choices. Moment-by-moment we have the sovereign power to choose where we focus our precious attention. Then our little slice of life starts making sense.
The Dalai Lama—one of the brightest spiritual lights on the planet at this time—has said numerous times, “The purpose of life is to cherish others.” He followed that up by saying, “When I cherish others, they tend to cherish me back. And when they cherish me back, it makes me feel so good inside that I cherish others for purely selfish reasons.” If our heart spoke of its purpose, this would surely be it.
The Dalai Lama is a living example of how our heart is the sovereign ruler of our consciousness while living on Earth. He loves everyone, even the Chinese leaders who had millions of his people killed or tortured. It is easy to love someone who is nice to us. It takes courage to love someone who treats us badly, but they are our greatest teachers.
There is no injustice. Everyone is exactly where they need to be to learn the precise lessons they are here to learn. But we can fritter away huge portions of our lives putting on a victim role in one situation or another. We can be angry with others, worry about them, try to fix them, or any number of other dramas. Or, we can simply love them on the ground they stand on.
Loving Others into Being the Best Version of their Selves
Negative feelings we have about another person creates a wall, a barrier that separates us from them. When we simply feel the negative feelings, the wall between them and us dissolves. The barrier ceases to exist. Once the wall dissolves, our heart naturally loves them.
We don’t have to teach our heart how to love any more than we have to teach a three-year old child to play. No matter how traumatized any of us has become, our heart never loses its child-like innocence. It always wants to love others, especially the difficult ones. It is only our unruly brain that holds onto old pains and slights from others. Every moment our brain is not ruled by our heart, it can easily be our worst enemy.
Forgiveness is simply feeling the negative feelings we hold about others. Forgiving others changes the context of the present moment in a more loving way. It transforms the future.
When we have forgiven someone, our forgiveness also transforms and changes the past. We come to understand that person in a deeper more profound way. Our memories about the past are as fluid and ever-changing as our views of the future.
After we have felt the negative feelings—feelings that cause our brain to generate toxic thoughts and memories about others—our memories change. We begin to notice deeper, more meaningful qualities of that person as come forward to become the most prominent features in our memories.
As our attention focuses on their more significant qualities, it becomes easier for that person to emulate those qualities. Forgiveness helps them transform into the best version of themselves. And, more importantly, we change. We both transform into the best versions of ourselves.
"No man is an island." We all live in relationship with others and with everything around us. All life is about relationships. From the tiniest sub-atomic particles to the spiral galaxies, love is the glue that holds everything together.
Staying in the Moment
We squander our life force when we let our brain focus on what’s going wrong in the world outside of us. We come into harmony with all life by wresting our attention back to doing or being what we love. Life has so much more value when we focus our precious attention on the good we want to do. Only then are we making the world a better place.
Every moment we are focusing our precious attention on what we love, our heart gets to provide insights into how to make our world a more efficient and loving place. Focusing on what we cherish creates thousands of times more healing to the world than even the most insightful thoughts about—or protests against—what is wrong in the world.
Focusing on what we love and loving what we have brings us into harmony with our spirit, soul, bodymind and the whole universe. Our face and eyes brighten. Our mind lights up. There is a lightness to our step. We find ourselves humming or singing more. We laugh more.
We are filled with enthusiasm for life. Others can see it in us and hear it in the tone of our voice. Enthusiasm, by the way, comes from the Greek words Theos (God) and ism (condition of). The condition of having God within. I like that.
Anyone can fault find. That's the unconscious default of our brain. It's communicating from our poorer self. Cherishing others takes real courage, mindfulness. It also requires life-affirming habits.
The Seven Habits will make every part of your life more interesting. They give you the strength, clarity and power to be authentic, real, unique, a one-of-a-kind original. They take your whole life to master, but they give you back the joy you had as a child doing something for the very first time. You get to live your life in "beginners mind," an exquisite viewpoint to adopt.
Spiritual awareness is simply mindfulness, staying in the moment. Peace of mind is the natural by-product. Consider your consciousness to be the peaceful harbor, protected from the outer storms by the power of your habits and understandings. The outer world with all its noise and confusion is mainly an illusion. Your inner world is the real world. And consistently choosing to cherish is the true revolution.
The foundation of our life is a triangle. Each point supports—or detracts from—the other two. Each point represents an essential quality of our character that needs to be developed and matured throughout this lifetime:
Our job is to keep these three points of the triangle in a state of balance. It is like standing on a three-way balance board and keeping the triangle somewhat level throughout all of the varied circumstances of life. This is how we build character.
Each time we come to a point where we need to decide, and we fail to make that decision, our brain is compelled to run endless scenarios on all the possible ramifications of all those decisions. Then if we are indecisive about another issue, and then another, our brain keeps going over all those possible scenarios and choices.
By the time we are indecisive about five or six issues or more, processing all those scenarios takes up so much bandwidth that they slow our brain’s processing speed to a crawl. We can hardly think. Indecisions act like viruses in our computer-like brain.
Imagine putting a four-way stop sign where two busy freeways intersect. Imagine what that would look like in rush hour, all that traffic backing up for miles, all that frustration. That’s how our thought processes are affected when we leave a lot of issues undecided.
Our character is just the culmination of our habits. When we make procrastination and indecision our habit, the clarity of our thinking is always somewhat impaired, overwhelming us when too many things stack up.
The moment we decide—about anything—our brain quits running all the possible scenarios. Once an issue is resolved, the brain stills. It becomes calm. We experience spaciousness, which creates more space for inspiration, peace of mind. We have the freedom to contemplate other things that may be more important or just be still in the moment.
When we fail to make our own decisions, in the vacuum that is created, someone else makes them for us. And that rarely turns out the way we want. The trick is to consciously decide instead of unconsciously letting others decide for us. After all, we live in our own unique world, not someone else’s. We have free will, but also an obligation to make the decision.
Many people are quite decisive about big issues in their lives, while letting the little issues pile up. They assume little issues don’t matter. A wife might ask her husband, “What do you want for dinner tonight?” If he answers, “Whatever you make is OK,” all the meal planning and shopping decisions fall to her.
She ends up feeling frustrated, having no idea what her husband actually wants to eat. If he does not like what she has cooked, she experiences resentment, and wonders why she even bothered. The emotional undertow from little indecisions creates seemingly unrelated outbursts in other parts of our life. The frustration has to blow out somewhere.
Women can be just as indecisive in relationships, but for different reasons. They often defer to their husband or children, putting other’s dominate needs ahead of her own. By not letting her family know what she needs, what she wants, she is actually hiding out, depriving them from getting to know the real being she is. In this situation, it is important to realize that everyone's opinions, wants and needs are equally important, including hers.
Saying Yes to Life
When we love something or believe in the truth of something, committing to it develops our courage. It takes courage to be decisive. The weak usually don't stand up for what they want or believe in.
We build character by saying a resounding “yes" to the lessons that come our way. Being decisive is every bit as crucial to our character as being honorable and cherishing others. Remember, it’s a triangle.
Our own spirit and soul create most of our lessons, even though the duality of time and space makes them appear to come at us. Saying a joyous yes to all our lessons, making decisions and acting quickly when difficult situations come up lets us operate from a higher level of spiritual awareness.
Attitude is everything. It directly affects everything. Facing life with a joyous attitude enhances everything we do. We are more empowered. Life is a lot more fun.
When we are indecisive about the little things, the big picture of our life will always be fuzzy. The clarity of our thinking can be like television often was in the nineteen-fifties, when there could be so much “snow” it was really hard to see the picture. Indecisions keep us wrong-footed. They sap our life force.
Years can go by while we putter around on the sidelines of our own life. The only reason this doesn’t seem totally weird is because most of the people around us are doing the same thing. But that does not make it right.
The Power of Commitment
There is a poem by W. H. Murray that hung on a wall right next to my adjusting table for about fourteen years. I read it about twenty times every day while I was working on patients. It affected my life quite profoundly:
Commitment
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that never otherwise would have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
I have come to have a newfound respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
Over the years, as I continued to read this poem, a deep understanding of the underlying principles of creation began ripening in my mind. I began to see clearly that commitment is the access key that unlocks the goodness of the universe. Without commitment, you're stuck. You just sit there. Even with all the possibilities and potentials surrounding you, you just sit there, not moving.
Single-Mindedness
The greatest tyrants in history were single-minded, so there are serious warnings to this section. In the beginning, when you desire something, ask yourself tough questions like a hard-nosed investigative reporter would.
Remember, you are a spirit living in the material world. Just because you can have or do something doesn’t mean you should.
We all have conflicting thoughts about things, and we really should. I think about something I want and conflicting questions immediately arise, like: How would this affect my practice? What would my wife think about it? Will having it be good for my spirit/soul development? Is this taking me the right direction for my life? And dozens of other relevant questions.
As kind loving people we should have conflicting thoughts when we are contemplating the directions and acquisitions of our life. Conflicting thinking is good for the soul. But there comes a time for single-minded thinking too. Our faith can move mountains, but our doubts are what put them there.
We are creators. Our bodymind is a creator. Our spirit is a creator. Our soul is a creator. We are essentially creators to the third power. We just need to learn how to use our innate tools.
Once we have done due diligence and made the decision—it is important to not allow our mind to generate competing images, fears, worries or reasons why we can’t have it. We seriously need to single-mindedly focus the awesome power of our attention and intention on the outcome we expect. Then we most feel all the fears that inevitably come up. The habit of single-minded focus allows us to make powerful changes in our life and in the world.
Living in the Universe
The universe is like an interactive computer game where our own spirit and soul project all our desires—and fears—onto our pathway as we move through the game’s maze. When we commit to moving in a different direction, the doors of opportunity in our present situation begin to close off to us. Simultaneously, the doors of opportunity blow open in the direction we have committed to. Our life is mysteriously propelled in that direction.
Until we make the commitment, all those opportunities are only vague possibilities. Without commitment, very little changes in our life. But on a positive note, as we become more decisive about our life, especially about the little things, our life experiences change quickly and significantly. We progressively fulfill more of our hopes and dreams.
Because we are spiritual beings, living in a universe that has spiritual rules, all manner of assistance from the spiritual kingdom occur as the direct result of our commitments. The entire universe aspires to help us.
The Gift, the Teacher, and the Mystery
When we commit, our life takes on a trajectory, a definite direction of movement. This is important because when we are coming toward the intersections of our life, the spiritual world hustles to have the mystery, the teacher, and the gift at all those intersections. They are always there at the intersection points of our life’s lessons. Start noticing them.
The teacher may be someone who angered us so much that we stormed around getting things done—things our heart wanted to do all along—but we would not have done them if we hadn’t been so blasted angry.
The gift can be someone who later becomes a friend. It can be realizing how fortunate we are to be involved in a situation as rich and rewarding as the chore in front of us.
The mystery that is there at every major intersection of our life can be an epiphany or a breakthrough in our understanding that carries over into many other avenues of our life.
Life has a definite timing. When we make a commitment, that starts the cycle. The spiritual world immediately starts setting things up for us so that when we get to the projected intersection, everything is primed for us to have a rewarding experience.
But if we procrastinate—or second-guess ourselves so that we delay moving in the direction we committed to—the lesson, gift and teacher all made it to the intersection. But we do not! And we are oblivious that yet another golden opportunity passed us by. Life can appear dull and boring when we are indecisive.
What we tend to think of as obstacles are actually building blocks, intelligently placed there by our own spirit and soul to lead us in the most direct pathway toward our heart’s desires. We often fail to recognize blessings because they come dressed in work cloths.
When we rail against life’s lessons—the direct results of decisions we made—life can seem unfair. We may get to the intersection on time, but if we are thinking “this should not be happening to me,” we can be so distracted by our own protestations that we are oblivious to the gift, teacher and mystery that were right there. The goodness the Universe has for us at every intersection of life is so much greater than most of us comprehend.
So, next time a lesson comes up, say “yes” to it. “Yes, yes, YES!” Then don’t lollygag. When you pay attention, you will see that there—just beyond your normal depth of perception—is the mystery, the teacher, and the gift. You may not notice them if you are not looking for them, there they are.
As stated in the third habit (Feel Your Feelings), the energy of our spirit is most similar to the energy of our feelings. Because our spirit is not confined in any way by time or space, it sees everything as if it was happening here and now. First feelings and first impressions are our spirit's way of talking directly to us. First feelings are “our gut instinct.”
If someone invites us to a function that is happening three weeks from now, the first feelings we experience when they start talking about the event are our spirit’s preview of how we will feel if we actually go to that function. If we get a warm happy feeling about it, that is our spirit communicating to us that we’re going to have a good time if we go.
Before any bad thing ever happened to us, we got a bad feeling. Chances are we did it anyway. Then when things went bad, we knew they were going to go bad.
If our first feelings are happy or sad as we are hearing about a future event, that’s pretty much how we’re going to feel if we go to that event. Anticipating something with dread is a dead give-a-way. Either way, it’s our spirit giving us priceless information.
Our spirit’s first impressions often only last a second or two—then they are gone. But in that brief span of time, our spirit informed us of what we were about to encounter. The feelings can sometimes be intense, but a couple seconds later they are so gone it’s as if they were never here. Most of us discount them.
Developing Intuition
Your feelings are more important than anything you think or hear with your ears. If you are paying attention to your feelings as you listen, you can hear a lie, as it is spoken, or the truth of something, even if have never heard it before. Listen with your whole bodymind, not just your ears.
Start becoming aware of your first impressions. Not just about the big things, but in all the moment-to-moment events of everyday life as well. The first feelings you have from one situation to the next lets you avoid life’s bumps and bruises. They also lead you into wonderful situations.
You can become profoundly insightful and face life with progressively enhanced awareness. This enhanced wisdom helps you control your own destiny. Trusting your gut helps you grow spiritually. It is how your intuition develops and matures.
Your first feeling works with people as well as experiences. When you first meet someone, your spirit is taking in the full measure of that woman or man. The first impression you have of them is valuable information you will need later if you have further encounters with them.
When driving somewhere and you have two choices of roads to take, one at a time imagine taking each road. As you travel each road in your imagination, if there is a blockage on that road that you cannot get past, you will not be able to get post it in your visualization. The impressions are always dead-on accurate.
Then visualize taking the other road. Pay attention to how you feel as you visualize taking each potential road. Often one feels jangly and the other feels peaceful. Most of us would rather take a few minutes longer if it means feeling peaceful along the way.
I had an example where I was coming up to Grass Valley from Sacramento. When I visualized taking Highway 49, just past Lake of the Pines I couldn’t go further, even though I visualized it several times. When I imagined going up to Colfax and across Highway 174 to Grass Valley, the journey felt peaceful and absent of traffic, so I went that way.
Later I learned that there was a terrible accident just past Lake of the Pines and Highway 49 was closed for three hours so a med-evac helicopter could take injured people away from an accident. I would have definitely been stuck in that traffic. I have also had some wonderful adventures as a result of this way of choosing.
When my wife and I are driving somewhere and looking for somewhere to eat, I physical look at every restaurant we pass. The way my gut instinct works in this situation is: When I look at a passing restaurant and my mouth waters, that’s my gut saying “this is the place!” Over the years, we have discovered some real gems. A couple of them didn’t look that promising from the street, my wife saying "Here!!!?"
Also, when choosing menu items in a restaurant I have never been to before, I imagine putting possible choices in front of me and see how my heart feels about them. If three of them make my heart feel happy, then I imagine there are only the three choices. Then as I put each of the three remaining plates in front of me in my imagination, usually only one them makes my heart feel happy. This way of choosing has never disappointed me.
You probably have stories about your gut instinct leading you out of situations that later went real bad. Trusting your gut provides you with enhanced wisdom about what’s going on in your life. It’s a learning curve that takes your whole life to master. Every year you can trust your gut in ever more subtle everyday decisions.
A good rule is: Never allow your brain to talk you out of a first feeling. About anything! Every time you do, you pay dearly. It’s alright to commission your mind to investigate why you had that first feeling, but never to talk you out of it. This rule lets you observe mysteries of life that might otherwise have passed by without your conscious awareness of them.
Your first impressions are like precious gems. Every year you can further enhance your intuition, gaining true wisdom in the process.
The Fourth Habit that brings our heart back in charge of our consciousness is “Shake it Off Like a Cat.” When I was a teenager, I saw a young tomcat get tangled up in my friend’s feet. He was in a big hurry, moving way too fast in his house. His cat got tangled up in his feet and slammed hard against a wall.
The cat’s reaction was incredible. He got up, glared at him for a micro-second. If looks could kill, that micro-second would have given my friend a heart attack. Then he shook it off, and walked away as though “that never happened.” No limping. No favoring the trauma. Only one second elapsed and the cat had already put the trauma behind him.
For a cat, the past is past. It’s like ancient history even though it just happened a moment ago. I have come to understand that cats who spend much of their time outside live fully in the present moment.
They are not like dogs or people who linger in self-pity by limping, gimping, or favoring an injury. With their consciousness focused laser-like in the present moment, cats do not squander their life force by dwelling on injuries of the past.
The world of cats is fascinating. Cats who spend their time out of doors are like psychic kung fu masters. They heal very fast. Their focus is on reflecting the highest quality of being a cat.
When you shake off any trauma—whether it’s physical, mental, emotional or a trauma that shatters deeply held principles, values or beliefs—and walk away like that never happened, you bring your attention back to the present moment. Your actions are restorative. You are reflecting the highest quality of a spiritual being living in a human body. You move like you are the hero of your own story.
Winston Churchill once said about politics, “Success is going from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Politically, that’s shaking it off like a cat.
Dogs teach us how to love. Cats teach us how to live in the present moment. After a physical injury, you are often battered and bruised. It may be impossible not to limp or favor the injury. But, as soon as humanly possible, you need to walk away from any trauma in perfect posture, breathing out strong and feeling all your feelings.
Right after an injury, you may have to make smaller movements or move slower than normal to keep from favoring the injury. As your body learns to trust you—and you must earn your body’s trust—it will give back your full range of motion and speed of movement much sooner than you would imagine. You heal much faster when you do not favor injuries in any way.
Favoring injuries sets up aberrant neuro-emotional feedback loops that are much more detrimental to your health than the original injury. Remember, your body has fifteen powerful circulatory systems that flow vertically up and down your body. Limping or favoring injuries causes all kinds of long-term secondary problems that old age usually gets blamed for.
Age is meant to empower you.
Most of us go through life ignoring our feelings, treating them like weeds along the highway, thinking that our thoughts are so almighty important. Truth is, what we feel is infinitely more important than what our brain thinks.
As we learn to feel all our feelings, we become a more evolved soul. Because the energy of feelings and the energy of our spirit are the most similar, our spirit communicates directly with us through our feelings.
Spiritual Energy
The energy of our spirit is most like the energy of our feelings. Within our seven-dimensional bodymind, spiritual energy is nothing like the energy of our thoughts, actions, attitudes, values, principles or beliefs. Our feelings are actually a spiritual guidance system, connecting us directly with the wisdom of our spirit.
To our spirit everything is occurring here and now. Our spirit is not confined by time or space. Our physical body is, but not our spirit or soul. When we meet someone new, our spirit is instantly taking in the full measure of that woman or man. The feelings and impressions we get in those first moments are our spirit’s exact preview of how we will feel about them if we have future dealings with that person in the future. Our first impressions give us priceless information.
If someone invites you to a function that’s occurring three weeks from now, the instant they start talking about it, your spirit starts experiencing it as if it were happening here and now. To your spirit, it is. The feelings and impressions you get in those first moments are your spirit’s exact preview of how you will feel if you actually go to that event three weeks from now.
Our spirit and our soul are eternal. To them, everything is happening here and now. Our physical body is an incredible mammal that we get to live in for this lifetime, but it lives, minute-to-minute within the polarities of time and space. Time, as we know it, is only relevant to our physical body.
When we think about doing something in any future moment, our spirit is experiencing it as if we were actually there. The first feelings we have are our spirit’s exact previews of how we will feel if we actually do what we were thinking about doing.
Before anything bad ever happened to us, we got a bad feeling about it. Before any good thing happened, we got a good feeling about it. Those first feelings are our how spirit directly communicates with us.
Spiritual awareness is simply mindfulness of basic habits. The first three habits: Breathe Out Strong, Stand Tall and Feel Your Feelings form a stable foundation for our life, empowering us to meet life head-on as the hero of our story. They keep waking us up to the present moment.
Replacing unconscious habits with empowering ones is a solid pathway to higher consciousness.
Emotional Pain
When we don’t actually feel our feelings, they build up emotional pressure. The pressure, as it builds up builds up, amplifies all our aches and pains. The pressure also causes our brain to unceasingly generate thought forms, most of them fear-based. Pet scans confirm that the average person’s brain generates 70,000 thought forms every day, steadily cranking out one thought form after another like a hamster running in a squirrel cage.
Physical pain rarely exceeds a four on a one-to-ten pain scale. The more intense aching pain we experience comes from emotional pressure that builds up from feelings that we did not actually go inside and feel. As the emotional pressure builds up, it intensifies and amplifies any pain or dysfunction we have. The deep ache from the build-up of emotional pressure is more painful than purely physical pain.
When deep aching pain builds to a seven or eight, we can safely bet that seventy to eighty percent of that pain is emotional. The emotional pressure causes our brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts and actions that we would never actually script if we fully comprehended that we write, direct and hopefully star in the screenplay of our life.
Worse, all those thoughts forms keep us trapped in the past, the future or some past/future construct where we lack the leverage to create our life the way we want it. The brain’s version of the past drags heavy chains of shame, guilt and missed opportunities to every consideration. Its version of the future projects worries, fear, anger and irritations into all its projections.
When the brain is in charge, we constantly focus on victims, us or other people. Our brain gets trapped in thousands of polarizations, like Republican vs Democrat. But mainly, the brain is a problem solver. If there are no problems, it dredges up old forgotten problems for us to get tight about. The brain is not now nor has ever been capable of creating our world in a loving manner.
Our brain was never intended to be in charge of our consciousness. That is our heart’s function. Feeling our feelings releases all the pressure in our bodymind. Our mind quietens and calms. Long minutes go by without a single thought. Peace of mind naturally fills that space.
Set a Goal and Fears Immediately Come Up
As soon as we commit to a goal, fears always come up. Always! The process of feeling our fears dissolves them into nothingness.
If we don’t stop and actually feel the feelings, our thoughts about them continue to escalate and that builds up emotional pressure. This creates a vicious cycle. As the pressure builds, our brain generates increasingly fearful thoughts. Thinking about our fears builds them up to such intensity that they can seem like sixty-feet tall fire-breathing dragons. Unfelt fears are the monsters of our old mythologies.
Under the brain's onslaught of negative thoughts and stories, the courage of our heart wilts. Our earlier bravado gets nudged aside by the onslaught of fearful thoughts. Fear becomes our advisor. Our heroic journey starts to fall apart and seem like a bad idea, and yet another noble dream or plan gets derailed.
Anytime we commit to a bold action, but don’t actually experience the fears that always come up, the fears usually win out. That’s why it’s so important to feel all the negative feelings that invariably come up. Ignoring a pervasive fear is like turning our back on a junkyard dog. The unresolved fears will come up and bite us in the backside.
The Dance that We Do
Life is so much better when we actually feel negative feelings we have about others or ourselves. As soon as we feel the feelings, the brain calms. It quits generating fear-based thoughts. Negative attachments that would keep us attached to dysfunctional people also dissolve.
After we feel the negative feelings about them, our heart naturally loves them for who they are. Magically, our thoughts about them also change.
Without exception, everyone is telepathic. Although most people are still trying to remain unconscious at this time, on the level of our spirit, everyone hears our more potent thoughts. They unconsciously react as if they heard what we were thinking and respond with reciprocal thoughts and actions.
If we cherish someone, they tend to cherish us back. If we think an angry thought toward them, they respond with either an angry, resentful or self-depreciating thoughts and actions. This is the dance we all do dozens of times a day.
Thinking or talking negatively about someone influences them to act the way we expected. Ethically, we need to assume responsibility for how we think and talk about others, not just when they are present.
Remember, it’s all energy—actually consciousness—a dance we are having with others. There are no “one-way thoughts.” We are always existing in relationship with others and all of life. Part of being impeccable is assuming that everyone and everything responds to our thoughts, as if they are physically hearing us. On the level of their spirit, they are.
Our body is mostly consciousness and energy. We have 15 very powerful circulatory systems that run their energies up and down our torso, our arms and legs. Although our circulatory systems are powerful, they are all easily kinked by slumping, favoring injuries or letting our feet toe out.
I have distilled posture down to four simple rules:
The better your posture, the more powerfully your circulatory systems run. Your life force expresses its full potential. Your innate intelligence has clear, open channels for all its communication throughout your entire bodymind, through all fifteen of your circulatory systems.
Stand tall and sit erect. Having correct posture holds you in the present moment where you are the hero of your own wonderful life, the author of your own story.
Spirituality is simply mindfulness of basic bodily functions like posture and breathing out strong. When you are walking in correct posture, you experience whole-body awareness, bringing you fully into the present moment. This creates such a stable platform that your bodymind, spirit and soul can integrate a more dynamic well-being with each passing year.
The simplest definition of health is: Every cell is communicating clearly with every other cell. A strong flexible body creates a strong flexible mind. You make better decisions. Elegant posture is one of the secrets of longevity.
Walk Like This
Research from universities all over the world shows that: When walking, or running, land on the midpoint of your feet—not on your heels. Feel the arches of your feet expressing upward as you push off at the end of your stride.
Practice the “short foot exercise,” which is shortening your feet by making your arches come up, without clawing your toes. Walking like that, with your arches expressing upward, enhances the muscular tonus of all the front and back muscles of your legs, torso, and even up to the top of your neck and head. This gait moves you forward more vertically, eliminating the side-to-side movements that creates the knee/feet dysfunction that so many people experience.
Most people I observe only complete one side of their pelvis’s figure eight movements, and have the low-back problems to prove it. Becoming aware of each foot completing its push off at the end of each step forces both sacroiliac joints to complete their figure eight movements. This resolves many low-back problems.
Walking this way, your whole body feels incredibly alive and turned on. You are aware of your feet throughout your entire gait, like most animals are. You feel more connected to Mother Earth.
When you are walking this way, just walking out to your car feels magical. All your muscles and ligaments function harmoniously, more effortlessly. Every year your energy levels increase dramatically.
Just walking out to your car this way takes you back to the sense of exhilaration you experienced as a child doing simple movements with your body. Everyday life becomes more exciting. The child-like joy you experienced as a child is not gone forever. You get it back one simple movement at a time.
Going for a 30-minute walk in good posture will literally walk most of the misalignments out of your spine and extremity bones. Pre and post x-rays would confirm that you realigned most of the bones in your spine, legs and feet by simply walking correctly.
When you have problems that you can’t just “walk out,” seeing a chiropractor is a great idea. Chiropractors are specialists who can help you work out the kinks in the alignment of your spine and extremities. It is amazing how much better every aspect of your health becomes when you see your chiropractic doctor at least once per month.
Walking Up Stairs or Hills
We all have entrenched old posture and gait patterns that kink all our circulatory systems and keep us in an unconscious state. The only way we can actually break those old patterns is by coming to a full stop, even if only for an instant. Coming to a full stop is a pattern interrupter.
When you find yourself walking up a slight grade or up steps, stop! Now, lift up your sternum so you are standing erect. When you resume walking up the stairs or hill, you will notice that you are using entirely different muscles that connect you to your core.
Most people walk up hills or stairs leaning forward. Many walk leaning forward on flat ground. Standing or walking like this compresses both shoulder bursa in your upper body and both sacroiliac joints in your lower body. Then every movement or action creates micro-sprains, and they add up. It is the main reason people require hip socket and shoulder replacement surgeries.
With each step, both your sacroiliac joint compress, making it difficult to perform their normal figure eight movements. One side of your pelvis will complete this cycle, but not the other. I see this gait in most people. Most people walk and move unconsciously.
Within our bodymind, each organ system has a number of dedicated muscles that make energy for that system. Leaning forward unbalances all our muscles. Many muscles work too hard while others under-function. This imbalances the organ systems that use that electrical energy to function.
This imbalance disorientates our consciousness so much that most people balk at going up stairs or hills. When we walk up hills or stairs with our sternum erect, every step heals and balances our bodymind. We feel energized, enlivened by stairs and hills. The same is true for lifting things.
Keep your sternum lifted up and lift with your legs. Every step, every movement either heals or destroys us. Time adds it all up.
How We Go Unconscious
Current pet scan studies reveal that 90% of the brain's functions are directly linked with posture. 90%! Wow! Let's look at this brain posture link more closely.
Each slumping posture contains sensory/motor feedback patterns that re-create old unresolved pain and suffering. They are actually repositories of unresolved memories from earlier dysfunctional times. The instant we slump, we go unconscious.
Our brain takes control of our consciousness. We are transported back to the earliest situation that this posture holds unresolved emotional charge about. Our brain loads that old pattern, with all the feelings, attitudes and beliefs of that unresolved time. That pattern gets superimposed over what we are experiencing. Spiritually, we just fell asleep.
We find ourselves unconsciously responding by acting out all the old attitudes, beliefs, thoughts and actions of that unresolved time. Our unconscious actions tend to cause hurt feelings with everyone around us.
We might be having a picnic with our family on a beautiful day. But our slumping posture loads all the pain and suffering from some earlier unresolved time to the forefront of our mind. In this scene, we are hallucinating. In this hallucination, all the unresolved pain from the past unresolved event gets projected over our family at our picnic. All this happens the moment we slump.
We are no longer in the present moment. Technically, we are fixated in an unresolved past/future construct. Our brain keeps dredging up around our family and friends until we actually feel all those feelings from that time.
For most people, these unconscious hallucinations occur dozens of times daily. Because they have reacted this way thousands of times in their past, it seems normal to them. Others around them are acting out similarly. These unconscious reactions occur every time we slump.
Our brain has hundreds of thousands of programs for everything we have ever done more than once, and keeps them updated, even to the last time we thought about that subject. It acts like a disc jockey, playing what it considers the most appropriate tape for every situation we face.
Then it thinks numerous thoughts about it. As a result, the average person’ brain generates approximately 70,000 stories a day, like a hamster running on a squirrel cage. And all those thoughts are the brain’s reactions to problems it focuses on and judgments it makes about how unfair life is.
Spiritually, there are two worlds. The world our heart creates is the real world. The problems outside of us that the brain wants to focus on are mostly illusion. On the spiritual level, the 70,000 thoughts we think are only distractions that keep us asleep.
Now the good news: Every time we resume breathing out strong (first habit) or sit or stand erect (second habit), we wake up to the present moment where our heart creates our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner and help others to do the same.
Waking Up
Every time we resume breathing out strong or sitting erect, we wake up from yet another old mental/emotional pattern of our past. More importantly, how we handle ourselves replaces that old unconscious program with the more empowered one.
Every moment we are overwriting our DNA. But until we wake up to the present moment, we keep overwriting our DNA with the same tired old stories our brain has generated for our whole life. When we are breathing out strong and standing tall, we are continually overwriting our DNA in ever more empowering ways.
Practicing abdominal breathing and good posture replaces dozens of limiting thought-forms with ever more empowering ones, enhancing our self-esteem in the process. With this practice, we just about double our self-esteem every year. Life becomes exciting. Such promise awaits us.
We move—and experience life—as an authentic woman or man, free from society’s conditioning, free from the limitations of all the old stories about who we have been or what we can’t do. We become the lead actor as our lives transform into hero’s journeys.
Breathing out strong is our first and most important habit. We must breathe a lot of fuel to be the leading actor in our own story and courageously live the life we dream about. And yet, most people breathe just enough air to not die.
Breathing out is the primary phase of breathing, the active phase. Breathing in is autonomic, meaning it happens whether we are conscious of it or not. Breathing out strong causes us to breathe back in just as powerfully.
Breath is life force. When we breathe shallowly, as most people do, we don’t actually develop enough life force to rise above the adversities that we encounter. When we don’t have enough energy to rise above a situation, fear becomes our chief advisor.
Breathing out strong strengthens, stabilizes and energizes our core, draws our spirit down into its home just below our navel, fully oxidizes and digests the food we eat, and gives us all the energy we will ever need to face our adversities courageously.
The first time you practice breathing abdominally, you need to be standing up:
Every moment we are breathing out strong, our thinking sharpens. Our attention becomes more focused. Our enhanced mental stamina allows us to wrap our mind around the big picture. When we have enough power to handle all our life circumstances, courage becomes our chief advisor. We become the lead actor in our own movie.
We are breathing in enough life force, energy, wisdom and power to truly live our own hero’s journey.
The Mechanics of Breathing Out Strong
As we breathe out strong, our diaphragm pushes upward like a dome, forcing the greatest amount of carbon dioxide out of our bell-shaped lungs.
The diaphragm (the wall-to-wall floor of the lungs) has two muscles, one on either side of our stomach. They attach downward to the vertebra just below our navel. As we breathe back in, those muscles “involuntarily” pull our diaphragm down like a bowl.
Going from a dome to a bowl, turns our diaphragm into a powerful bellows. We draw in a big mixing bowl's worth of air with each breath cycle. This powerfully oxygenates our blood all the way out to our fingertips and toes—and to that other extremity—our brain. This way of breathing gives us the energy and stamina to accomplish anything we commit to.
Chest Breathing
Most of us have been taught to “take a deep breath,” but that’s just wrong. It’s the main reason so many people are chest breathers. You can tell if you are chest breathing because your collarbones will go up and down with each breath. Check yourself out in the mirror.
Lungs are bell-shaped, small at the top, big at the bottom. Chest breathing only activates the upper three ribs, breathing in a tiny dessert bowl’s worth of air. Worse, chest breathing completely disengages our diaphragm. It’s not even working! Chest breathing is the puniest way we can breathe. I was a chest breather when I first learned to breathe abdominally.
Ironically, a chest breather looks like they are really taking in big breaths, especially when they are in distress. They breathe so hard and struggle so valiantly. But this way of breathing does not take in enough oxygen to handle their rising anxiety demands, much less feeling safe and secure.
A vicious cycle ensues. The higher their stress builds, the less oxygen chest breathing takes in, and the more overwhelming their anxieties become. They are gasping big gulps, yet only taking in tiny amounts of air. Over the last fifty years, every person I ever observed having anxiety attacks or heart attacks was a chest breather.
Chest breathing builds up so much stress that in cardiac ICU centers, almost every patient is a chest breather. And chest breathing was definitely one of the major reasons for them ending up there.
Hara, Our Spirit’s Home
Every moment we are breathing out strong, our spirit gets drawn down into its home just below our navel, in front of the fourth lumbar vertebra. Japanese call our one-point center of power “hara.” If we grew up typically Japanese we would have at least fifty different sayings about hara, emphasizing its proper importance in our life.
As our spirit is down into its home, it controls our chakras, which represent our values, principles and beliefs. Then at every intersection of life, our own values, principles and beliefs shape and control all our thoughts and actions.
Breathing out strong also strengthens—and connects us to—our core, the very core of our being. This makes our core musculature stronger and more stable, giving our low back greater stability. Our balance continually improves, giving us greater stability.
Americans and Europeans have no name for the most important place in our whole body, so, most of us breathe shallowly. When we breathe shallowly, our spirit—which puts out more energy than our physical body can contain—floats up to our head, provoking our brain to take command of our consciousness.
Then at every intersection of life, our brain thinks about our feelings instead of actually feeling them. The brain also renegotiates our principles, values and beliefs. No part of our life turns out as good when our brain in controlling our consciuosness.
All animals have an “animal spirit,” as does our physical body. The life force of our body’s animal spirit changes from moment to moment depending upon how much air we breathe (or don’t breathe). The power of our animal spirit is a dynamic, constantly changing reality. In any moment, we can be as awesome as a grizzly bear or as timid as a mouse—and breath is the factor.
In more advanced breathing: after we have breathed back in, imagine filling the kidneys up full of breath too, adding even greater volume of air to the in-breath. Voice coaches and opera singers have been taught this way of breathing for hundreds of years.
Waking Up
Breathing out strong is the most important habit of our life. It's the first habit of spiritual awareness, mindfulness and courageously living the hero’s journey. Breathe is life.
In the five elements the element of metal, lungs and large intestine, represent the vertical bar in “the cross,” which predates Christianity by thousands of years. Our lungs not only breathe in life force, they also breathe in higher truths, visions and understandings from the spiritual realms.
When we commit to breathing out strong, we catch ourselves breathing shallowly about fifteen or twenty times a day. Every time we take a cleansing breath (fast deep breath), we wake up from some low-grade spell, like focusing on worry, anxiety, anger or some other drama.
Then how we handle ourselves breathing out strong, replaces that old program with a more empowered one. That means, we replace fifteen or twenty old dysfunctional programs with more empowered ones every day. By the end of each year, our life force just about doubles, but so does our self-esteem.
I noticed that my energy levels and self-esteem doubled every year for at least ten years, then continues to improve every year. Even a half-hearted attempt at breathing out strong gives impressive results.
It may seem daunting to take control of breathing, but every moment we are breathing out strong wakes us to the present moment. Every moment that we are awake, our heart creates our world in the most loving manner. Time just adds all those moments up.
The Seven Habits That Change Our Life
As discussed in the introduction, our brain is a wonderful servant. Actually, it is extraordinary, but only if it is given a job description. Lacking a well-defined job description, the brain will endlessly default to focusing on the problems of the world.
When we give our brain the fulltime job of practicing the seven habits, that task fully occupies, and focuses our brain. As a result, our brain ceases its chatter and finds its true purpose. When our brain discovers its purpose as a servant to our heart, we discover how magnificent our brain truly is.
All seven habits keep waking us back to the present moment. Every moment that our heart is the ruler of our consciousness, its focus is creating our own unique world in the most loving manner. Only then does our brain become an integral part of our unified bodymind.
Why We Need Habits
Our brain, our rational mind, operates within a mostly illusory world of time, the past, the future or some imagined past/future construct. Its highest potential is critical thinking, which is based on lack, limitation and scarcity. It has very efficient programs for everything we have ever done more than once, like driving the car, talking to a loved one or making diner. But for all its incredible computing power and subtility, the brain is actually our subconscious operating system. Most of society is still spiritually asleep. This is why we have created so much poverty, war and inequality.
We are a trinity: Spirit and Soul, both eternal, living in a seven-dimensional bodymind that gives us access to the universe of time, space and polarities. All three of aspects of our self are creators. Every person creates his or her own unique world. The Great Mystery is how each of us is dreaming our world into being within the greater dream of Creator.
Living in the present moment, our more conscious heart operating system innately knows and desires what our spirit and soul desire. Being awake is living fully in the present moment, our heart creating our own unique world in the most loving and efficient manner. Connecting with our spiritual nature is accessed through mindfulness of basic habits.
The unconscious past/future world of time is so familiar, so seductive that we all fall asleep dozens of times daily. As we lull into spiritual unconsciousness, we instantly default to our brain being in charge of our consciousness. There are seven habits that keep waking us to the present moment.
The first three habits: Breathe out strong; sit or stand erect and feel all your feelings provide a solid foundation for consciously handling all of life’s difficulties. The other habits are shake off all traumas and walk away like a cat, trust your gut, be decisive and cherish everyone.
Excerpted from Body Intelligence, A New Paradigm by John L. Mayfield, D.C.
