Thinking like a creator
We have stepped out of the old world, though we may not know it yet. The old world—our whole history, the past/future world of time where the past dictated the future—was just the fateful way our brain sees reality when not controlled by our heart. With our brain in charge, we employ "critical thinking," and the elevator doesn’t make it to the top floor.
In the new world, our heart is in charge of our consciousness. We live in the eternity of the present moment with its nearly infinite range of possibilities and probabilities. In present moment consciousness, all our organs lend their incredible talent and wisdom to our heart, in real time, so our heart can create our unique world in the most loving and efficient manner. With our heart in charge, we are as capable of greatness as any of our heroes.
Thinking like a creator, with our heart in charge of our consciousness, the elevator finally goes to the top floor. But, there are imperatives.
Thinking like a president
If our president’s words are kind, hundreds of thousands of citizens do kind things in response. If the president’s words are inflammatory, hundreds of thousands of citizens do inflammatory things in response. Cynicism ripples out into obstructionistic actions. Distrust from cynical ways of thinking cause people to lose faith, and then act out in fear-based ways.
In the body, our words cause millions of cells to act in similar ways. All our organs, our 270 billion cells and the unfathomable numbers of microscopic creatures that digest our food and repair our cells are like an entire universe within us. They are completely loyal and devoted to us. And all of them respond in kind to the words we speak and the thoughts we persistently hold. Our next great learning curve is learning to think like a creator.
As creators, all our thoughts and actions magnify out into the world, ripples expanding outward like a president’s words and actions do. Like how our universe is constantly expanding outward. So too are the ripple effects of our thoughts and actions. Our thoughts and actions are important. But the reasons behind them are even more important.
Our spiritual speed
Our attitude is the spiritual speed that we are evolving down the highway of life. When we allow ourselves to remain irritated or worried, it’s like we are evolving at about one mile per hour. It takes about a month just to make it to a town thirty miles away, and that’s if nothing distracts us. Life doesn’t change much. The best definition of a life of worry, irritation or anger is “same stuff, different day.”
At joy we are going about three miles per hour but life is definitely better. At an attitude of gratitude, it’s like we are evolving down the highway at about twenty-five miles per hour. Now we are starting to see change in our world. We are no longer feeling stuck in dead-end situations. At happiness, we’re going about fifty miles per hour and life is really exciting.
The higher the attitude, the more education it takes to maintain that speed. We have to learn to not look at life so myopically, to not only see the immediate problems around us, but also how much real change has gone on in our lifetime. It takes courage to hold the big picture in our mind. It’s so easy to just focus on immediate issues and grumble, but life sucks when we think that way.
It takes even more education to maintain an attitude of composure. That’s when we know the universe is unfolding exactly as it should, that nothing exist that should not be, that the purpose of life is so all beings can evolve and obtain their most profound desires. To remain in composure, we must hold the bigger picture in mind as we observe the details of life.
“Eyes to see”
One of the indicators I look at is how many people are beginning to wake up to their heart being in charge of their life. In 1951, when I was eight years-old, I only knew one person who was awake out of about 400 people. That’s only ¼ of one percent. And that was Northern California. I figured it got worse in other parts of the country and world.
Then between 1964 and 1967, there was a spiritual tsunami that woke up a lot of people. Suddenly, I knew about eighteen people who were waking up. By the year 2,000 I knew about 200 people. Now I know about 900 people. There has never been that many people awake in one area at any time in history. We are truly in the new world that has been foretold by all the different traditions, the world of the present moment.
If you could somehow go back to 1951 and hang out there for a month, you would be appalled by the darkness of how everyone thought at that time. Women and minorities had no power. People believed in fate and were generally unkind. In school, it was within societal tolerances to torture anyone who was different, fat, had buck teeth or tattered clothes. At that time, I could not believe that these were my people.
Then, if you could go back one hundred years and hang out for a month, you would be flabbergasted by how much darker people’s consciousness was from the year 1951. More than 90% of the options in life you take for granted would not be accessible. The further back in time you would go, the darker the consciousness and the more “fate” controlled people’s lives.
With this in mind, if you stop at any moment and look around the circle of your life with a longer timeline perspective, there are more than two million things to be thankful for, and maybe 400 things that upset you. Keep that ratio in mind as you ponder life.
How far we have spiritually grown and socially grown is “the big idea” to stay focused on. Lately a number of people have asked me how I stay so positive and I did not have a ready answer. As I write this entry in December of 2020, I realize that holding a wider view of history is my answer.
Eating too much sugary, starchy food (which viruses thrive on) weakens our immune system and is a big reason people get the flu. 70% of our food needs to be alkaline (vegetables and fruit). During flu season we also need to be taking vitamin C and D-3, zinc and colostrum every day as preventative measures. I previously discussed taking a hot sea salt and baking soda bath to prevent the flu. Several times over the years, I have stopped the flu by immediately going home and taking that bath and really scrubbing down afterward. But that’s not all.
Holidays are rife with intense feelings, good memories and sad, sometimes terrible memories that become part of the pressure cooker of the holidays. All the emotional traumas and wounds that surface around this time need to be felt, which releases them.
All those feelings build up intense pressure inside us, compromising our immune system. They increase our susceptibility to getting a flu. As soon as we become aware that we have been thinking about any negative feelings, we need to go inside and actually feel those feelings.
Feeling our feelings means experiencing them, without our brain thinking about or trying to affect them in any way. That’s how we release our feelings. The more we can experience our feelings, without any dialogue, the healthier our internal environment becomes. Our mind calms down. It’s a healing and peaceful way to experience the holidays.
One of my dear friends is certain she got Covid-19 in February of this year. She was really sick for over a week. None of her remedies helped. One of her friends brought her some yerba santa leaves (an official US pharmacopoeia remedy for coughs, pneumonia and bronchitis) and told her to make a strong tea of it. When she drank it, her symptoms immediately went away.
There are two windows of time when we typically get the flu, fall and late springtime. By then, our skin pores have become so clogged that the pores get waxy coatings that regular washing with soap and water cannot unclog. That’s when we become susceptible to the flu.
Skin is your largest organ. If you could blow up one square inch of your skin to the size of a wall in your house, you would be amazed at how intricate it is with hundreds of sweat and oil glands that are vital to ongoing health. Skin is the backup system to your liver, detoxifying your body, essentially functioning as your second liver. Because sweat has the same makeup as urine, your skin also does a lot of the same detoxifying work as your kidneys, becoming, in essence, your third kidney. Skin also functions as your third lung.
A wonderful flu prevention method was given by Edgar Cayce, America’s greatest clairvoyant years ago and is quite relevant now:
The hot salt water causes your skin to become about seven times more active than normal. The baking soda’s affect is to deep-cleanse the thousands of sweat and oil pores so that your skin can “breathe” well. *As a side-note: Baking soda is also very effectively in de-gunking any built-up grease and grime from your car’s engine or battery. That is what it does to your skin.
Several times over the years, when it felt like I was coming down with the flu, this sea salt and baking soda bath protocol stopped the flu from happening.
Remain within the profundity of your feelings, undistracted.
The world just isn’t there.
Beyond Intellect, within the mind
Nothing arises.
As the Great River flows on,
whatever meditation, sitting you do
Silently, there is virtue in it.
THIS is the path of all Buddhas,
Enlightened ones.
Excerpted from “Toward the Supreme Illumination” by Gyala Karmapa 1974
There is nothing that exists that should not be. What is, is. Remain within the profundity of your feelings and body sensations. Take a couple deep breaths. Embrace what is, then look around. At every lesson in your life the gift is there, the mystery is there and so is the teacher. Look for them and you will see.
The instant you protest what is, your brain takes control of your life. Thinking “that should not be,” or “I should not have to be doing this,” whisks you out of the moment, and right into the world of time. Your sympathetic nervous system (fight, fright, flight) takes over and there you are, back in the world of pain and suffering.
Protesting any life lesson is very much like rowing out against the incoming tide, really bending the oars to get where you are going, expending an awful lot of energy with very little to show for the efforts. Protesting life’s lessons is exclusionary thinking.
We live in an inclusive universe. All the operating systems in our world are inclusive. All of our physical sciences and laws—from physics, chemistry, astronomy, to the laws that determine how you attract friends, health, intelligence, abundance, or goodness into your life—are based upon inclusion. All of them!
Your work, your relationships and every lesson (that appears to come at you, but actually comes from within you) are meant to nurture you. Life keeps getting better when you train yourself to say yes to life, to cherish all that you are experiencing. Spiritually, your job is to find gratitude in every situation you are in.
Making choices based on inclusion is like rowing along with the tides. You hardly have to row to go for miles. You are in harmony with the natural laws of the universe. What you love, loves you back. What you seek, seeks you with equal intensity. Love draws you into ever more loving situations.
As you learn to awaken sooner and stay awake longer, your realities become more inclusive. As more people wake up, they create more inclusive programs and situations. Your contributions are essential. They give newly awakening people vessels into which they can pour their energies.
Your health and well-being flourish on every level.
Focusing on what you love gently moves you toward your heart’s desires. Worry creates more to worry about. Your life is always moving you toward greater health, or toward “dis-ease,” which becomes disease. Because transformation and change are the only constants in the universe, allow change to move you in the direction of what you love.
You can be grateful for all the blessings this life has for us to appreciate, or you can focus on the distressing problems of the illusory outer world. You get to choose. You always have the choice. By whatever you focus your attention on, you create similar realities in your own unique world. Then you live in it.
Throughout history, we have spent most of our lives asleep, our divisive brain in charge of our reality. Until we wake up to our heart being in charge, our brain just reacts to people or events that appear external to ourselves. It spins a constant monologue about all the things we don’t like, problems with work, politics or the people around us that we wished acted differently. The constant mental chatter gives our brain a sense of purpose—and control! The average person’s brain generates 70,000 thought forms every day, mostly protesting what is.
Our brain spins our story after story all day long, caught up in various playback loops about scenes that we wish would go differently. We face similar lessons over and over again, sometimes for years before we say yes to, and accept what is.
The problem is: The brain tends to interpret our lessons as limitations it should not have to endure. It makes up endless stories about our lessons and supposed limitations with stories like “I can’t do what I want.”
Our own spirit and soul bring us our lessons. As we wake up to our heart being in charge, our attention goes toward gratefulness for the goodness around us.
Imagine that Covid-19 is a heaven-sent pattern interrupter whose purpose is to give 4 billion people a time out. To get out of the world of time and into the present moment. During this Covid time, so many of my friends have remarked that “When I can stay in the moment, my life is so wonderful and when I get in my head, life seems so difficult.”
In January this year (2020), every time I turned on National Public Radio, (NPR) I noticed they were banging the drums of fear. Every time I turned on the radio, which was often when driving, within seconds I would hear “coronavirus.”
There was no responsible dialogue about how to stay healthy: how often we need to wash our hands and the need to throw all our clothes into the washing machine, shower and scrub up after coming home from being out and about. Instead, there was relentless talk about how contagious and deadly Covid 19 is. NPR banging the drums of fear sent the rest of the media, and the population of the whole United States into sympathetic dominance, “fight, fright, flight.”
By March all the news networks and newspapers had picked up the drumbeat. People went into panic mode, stripping the grocery store shelves bare. You couldn’t find a roll of toilet paper. Toilet paper?
Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems
We are spiritual beings, living in a body. We are not a physical body that has a spirit and soul. As a spirit, our main job is teaching our body that it is safe and loved. This is known as parasympathetic dominance. In this state, one knows that: We are safe and loved; that we have plenty of time; people love what we do; life always works out for the best; the whole universe loves us and supports us; and life is basically good. And in a healthy state of mind, when difficulties arise, the response is “This too shall pass.” Teaching this to our body is the most important thing we ever do. Period!
We also have an emergency nervous system called the “sympathetic nervous system.” It comes full-on when we are in danger. It immediately shuts down our immune system, digestive system and our sexual system, which are nonessential during times of danger. The immense power of those three systems is diverted to our muscles and sense organs so we can survive the threat. This is a great feature when we are in danger. It has saved our lives numerous times.
The problem occurs when we start living in sympathetic dominance. The most important thing we need to know about our physical body is: Our body takes everything we see, hear or say literally. If we watch the evening news about war in Syria, every cell in our body believes that when we open our front door we will see tanks and soldiers running past. We watch the news about a shooting in another city far away, and react as if our children might be shot.
What passes for news on television these days is blatant sensationalism, designed to scoop the other networks and garner the most advertising dollars. It is interesting to note that literally every drug add on TV is for the effects of living in sympathetic dominance. America has become a sick nation, and the news media’s insistence on banging the drums of fear is a large part of the problem.
Although I was not a fan of his policies, when Ronald Reagan was president, he described America as “The house on the hill, the beacon of hope for the world.” He was describing an America that was truly operating from their parasympathetic nervous system, which is our healthy nervous system.
For the sake of our individual and collective health, we need to go inside and feel all our fears as they come up. We also need to unplug from a media that has become truly and completely sick, and focus our heart's attention on doing what we love. Then we are being the America that is a beacon of hope for the world. President Reagan’s image was and continues to be the clearest vision of who we are as Americans.
According to a hospital executive I spoke to yesterday, the coronavirus is a weak virus that attacks lung tissue. Immune challenged people are the highest risk. If an affected person sneezes on you, or you touch something that they touched, the virus can live on your skin or clothes for about 4 to 5 hours. Wearing a mask and gloves gives you added protection, and is an intelligent choice to stay healthy.
Lowering cholesterol, high blood pressure and blood sugar with medication has been compared to “mopping up the floor while the sink is overflowing.”
Medications have little to no healing effect because they only treat the results. They do not the cause. The cause is our behaviors. It’s always behaviors. Genetics may load the gun, but our behaviors pull the trigger. Several large studies show this.
The “EPIC” study of 23,000 people, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, showed that four behaviors: Not smoking, exercising three and a half hours per week, eating a healthy diet and maintaining a healthy weight prevented 93% of diabetes, 81% of heart attacks, 50% of strokes and 36% of all cancers. Imagine adding once per month chiropractic care to that study.
A 2004 study of 30,000 people in Lancet, INTERHEART study, found that changing lifestyle could prevent 90% of all heart disease.
Every action, every moment overwrites our DNA. Time adds it up for us. Transformation and change is the only constant. Changing behaviors to a healthy lifestyle makes us feel alive and healthy without medication’s side-effects. Then, if you actually need medications, they tend to work for you, and usually at lower, more tolerable dosages.
I recommend starting each day by clearing out old feelings, making room to experience all the blessings the day holds. For over 13 years, as I walk into the kitchen to make tea, my morning ritual is to check in on what I am feeling.
When we do this, the first feelings that come up are usually so subtle they are hard to define, but not up to the bottom-line level of joy or happiness. After the subtler feelings release, frustrations, irritations and about a half-hour to an hour’s worth of feelings that are all over the fear spectrum come up. Just the act of experiencing a feeling releases the feeling out of our body. When the feelings are love-based, feeling them causes our bodymind to integrate them, reminding us of how wonderful life is.
Some of us may be more evening orientated. Feeling all the feelings that come up—just before going to sleep—unencumbers our dreams of the past day’s noise, freeing up our dream world to be creative instead of reactive. Feeling all those pesky feelings every morning (or night) liberates us from our past and frees us to live our own powerful stories.
With dozens of negative feelings gone, it’s like we have taken the trash out of the house. The noise in our bodymind ceases.
When We Don’t Feel Our Feelings
Most of us don’t stop and actually feel our feelings, causing a build-up of internal emotional pressure. The pressure that builds up in our bodymind compels our brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts. The internal pressure from unfelt feelings also creates, by far, most of the pain we experience.
Because most people do not actually feel their feelings, the average person—based on many large studies of pet scans—generates 70,000 thoughts per day, almost all of them about the past or the future. The unresolved feelings that get triggered all during the day cause our brain to create hallucinations, one right after another.
We may be having a beautiful moment with our loved ones when an unresolved feeling gets triggered. If we don’t feel that feeling, the brain takes us back to the earliest time we didn’t handle that feeling well, often early childhood. The feelings and coping skills of that unresolved time get superimposed over what should have been a beautiful moment with our oved ones.
If that earlier time was when you were six-years old and felt so inadequate and self-conscious about not fitting in, all your coping skills revert to an inadequate six-year old who didn’t fit in. This gets overlaid over the beautiful day you were experiencing, and you are not really here. You are actually in a hallucination from your unresolved past.
We all hallucinate dozens of times every day and are mostly not aware of it. If we don’t feel the feeling that got triggered, we turn what would have been a beautiful experience into one of our old stories. Our old stories are rarely as wonderful as the present moment. All those stories are our baggage.
When we start off the morning—or end the evening—by feeling all the built-up feelings, we prime the pump to feel our feelings all during the day. When we commit to the third habit of feeling all our feelings, we often go for long periods without a single thought. We float along in the childlike joy, living in the present moment. Peace of mind and the blessings our spirit would like to bestow on us naturally float up into our awareness.
While I was still a student at Palmer Chiropractic College my next-door neighbor was one of those quite men whose inner stillness radiated a peaceful calmness. After he graduated and set up practice in Los Vegas, he came back to visit at Homecoming.
As we were talking, he said the government was setting off nuclear detonations every four or five months out in the desert about forty miles from town. He explained that the assault everyone experienced, mostly subconscious, after each detonation would misalign one of their collarbones by putting it out of phase to all seven chakras. He explained that he had to balance the collarbone to all seven chakras before every visit and repeat that procedure every visit for three weeks after every detonation.
Chakras are our most subtle organs. We have seven main chakras, which represent our values, principles and beliefs. They are ruled by our endocrine glands, which bridge spirit and matter. Endocrine glands, like the thyroid and adrenals, are biological receptors that translate higher-frequency information into a language the nervous system can understand, bringing both sensory and extrasensory impressions into our awareness.
The more loving, truthful and decisive we are, the faster the chakras spin and the more rainbow-like their color hues become. Many people can discern them. The darker our thoughts and feelings, the murkier and slower our chakras spin.
Scroll down to the bottom of this article to read about each individual chakra in detail:
What a collarbone going out of phase causes:
A collarbone going out of phase/alignment will cause that shoulder to be painful and have limited ranges of motion. Whichever chakra gets pressured up will cause the area around it to be painful or symptomatic. If it's in the throat chakra, the neck feels "out." If it's in the crown chakra at the top of the head, it can feel like a headache coming on or whole head pressure. If it’s the third eye, in the forehead, the brain can feel overworked or the eyes light-sensitive.
Over the years, sometimes a patient would need their collarbone balanced when things got too stressful for them, but generally not that often. I wrote this article because now it seems everyone is under assault, coming in with one of their collarbones out of alignment, out of phase to one or more of their chakras on every visit. Their most immediate symptoms are usually neck/shoulder pain and restricted motion on the side of the inflamed collarbone.
Learning to use your Imagination
We have seven senses, not just the five we were taught in school. As our heart takes charge of our consciousness, our senses also include imagination and intuition. The brain in incapable of imagination or intuition. The brain’s awareness is limited to only two dimensions, physical and mental. Its speed-limit of 24-frames per second is too slow to be aware of intuitive feelings or inflammation. The higher aspects of our bodymind operate at a minimum of a hundred frames per second and beyond. The heart has full awareness at this level, but not the brain.
To sense the inflamed collarbone and chakras, we need to get out of our head and into our heart, like we do to sense feelings. This is where we connect with our imagination.
An out of phase collarbone or pressured up chakras put out a lot of pressure and heat. Everyone can observe this pressure. But everyone senses in their own unique way. The big idea is learning to trust what you are experiencing.
When the collarbone goes out of phase with the chakras, it puts out a lot of pressure. It’s not subtle. You can perceive it, but only if you trust your imagination. Don’t let your brain talk you out of what you perceive. Einstein was often quoted as saying, “Imagination is more powerful than intelligence.”
Your imagination is not as conditioned by society as your thought processes tend to be. It is yours alone and it is real. Trusting what you imagine you are experiencing is the key that opens this powerful sense to you. Until then, it is dormant.
When you are checking in on your collarbone and chakras, let your fingers keep moving. If you hold your fingers still, they lose their sense of perception within a couple seconds. So, keep your hand moving. The pressure from the involved collarbone goes upward and forward at a 45-degree angle.
Still in your imagination, does the collarbone that is acting up feel hotter or colder than the other more normal collarbone. Whatever you experience is the truth for you.
The Remedy
To find the contact point on the inflamed collarbone, run your fingers along the top of the collarbone that's inflamed; on the top corner, just before the edge goes down to the breastplate, that is your contact point. That point is the is the command point for that whole side of the body. Be gentle.
Hold that point as gently as if you were pushing on your eyeball. At the same time, put the fingers of your other hand on the chakra that is pressured up. Your chakras are like big energy flowers that are about two inches in diameter, so you don’t have to be totally precise to be fully effective.
While you are balancing your collarbone, imagine an emotional volcano blowing out of that chakra. That visualization keeps your brain fully occupied. No thinking. The process works much better when you breathe out strong and sit or stand erect.
With your brain fully occupied with the visualization, you should be able to release all the pressure within about 40 seconds.
Balancing the collarbone makes all the pain and discomfort release completely. When the stressful period ends, you usually go for long periods of time with your collarbones staying delightfully balanced. But during times when the stress is high, you may have to balance your collarbones to one or more of your chakras more than once a day.
Although it may be a drag to have to do this procedure every day during stressful times, living with or having your sleep interfered with by the discomfort is far worse. This procedure releases the pain and symptoms immediately.
The Seven Chakras:
May is National Posture Month. I fell in love with the magical effects of good posture in 1974 and have improved my posture every year since then. The results have been incredible. The integrity of our logic is a direct reflection of the integrity of our posture. Good posture creates a solid foundation for a great life.
While writing this article on posture, I am joyfully remembering yesterday at Alpine Meadows, skiing all the ungroomed slopes: breathing out strong, hands out in front of me, core abdominal muscles absolutely taut so my navel can only turn about 6 degrees in either direction, sitting back so the weight is on my heels, feeling my spine settle down at the end of the turn so my skis porpoise out of each landing. The magic of good form while spring skiing.
In everyday life, the pure joy of walking down a flight of stairs without having to look at our feet produces feelings of enchantment in our body. Breathing out strong from the lower abdomen draws our spirit fully into the body, turning all our subtle energy centers full on, including “bubbling wells” at the ball of our feet. That chakra—when breathing out strong activates it—gives us a field of awareness about the size of snow shoes all around our feet.
Without having to look down, we know where our feet are on the stair tread, even with thick-soled shoes. Walking down stairs with our sternum lifting up, we are free to look out over the whole area at the bottom of the stairs.
Letting yourself fully experience the fear of falling (the reason everyone looks at their feet the whole way down the stairs) is liberating. We experience the exhilaration in our bodymind that we often felt as a child doing cool new things, sometimes risky things. Remember? We get to relive all those wonderful childhood feelings when we use good posture just doing mundane things like walking out to the car.
Until we learn correct posture, our tendency when walking up hills or stairs is to lean further forward the steeper they are. By the time we get to the top of the hill or stairs the lever systems of our musculoskeletal system are seriously out of balance, some overworked, others under functioning. Every organ has a group of muscles and ligaments that make the energy that organ uses. Any disharmony to our musculoskeletal system causes similar disharmony to our consciousness. As a result, we feel discombobulated by the time we get to the top of the stairs or hill.
We have a bodymind with seven functioning dimensions. Any imbalance of the musculoskeletal system creates imbalance to the whole bodymind. The stress to our body stresses our mind. The stress then causes our brain to conjure up its worst thinking. It’s a total buzz killer. Most people hate taking the stairs or having to walk up a long hill.
90% of our brain’s functions are related to posture. 90%! When our bodymind gets stressed out by incorrect posture, the brain spins out story after story to explain to itself why it feels so bad. The brain’s stories are actually hallucinations. We could be having a beautiful day with loved ones and for some reason we go into a funky posture. Immediately our brain reloads the emotional pain from the earliest unresolved situations connected to this incorrect posture. Then it spins one story after another to explain those unresolved feelings to itself.
The brain superimposes those stories over the top of what would have otherwise been a wonderful day. At that point, we are not really here and now. We are back in that painful unresolved memory. Technically we are experiencing a hallucination. It would be totally weird if most of the people around us were not doing similar things. Pet scans show that the average person’s brain spins out approximately 70,000 thought forms every day. Incorrect posture causes the brain to generate those stories, these hallucinations.
So, what happens when you make good posture your lifelong habit? The main thing is that good posture does not have any history—no story. There is only now, the present moment. That’s when magic happens. When you are in the present moment, your past is not defining you. You are free to create your life just the way you want it. After all, you are the author of your life.
I love walking up the steep walkway from the back of my yard, breathing out strong, my sternum lifting up, feeling like it is lifting my whole body up. All my muscles are participating exquisitely, in balance, powerful, aligned. I feel my core (just below my naval) at the center of my muscular actions. It’s fun to feel the excitement when everything is in balance, working at its potential. It’s enchanting.
Here are the four simple rules that resolve 95% of what can go wrong with posture:
Breathe out strong
Your sternum is always lifting up, shoulders relaxed down and slightly forward
Once your neck and shoulders are loose and relaxed, the back of your head is always gently pushing upward and rocking forward.
Your feet are parallel
Every part of your life works better when you are living in the present moment. That’s the gift of good posture.
For about fourteen years, I have made a habit of feeling all my feelings every morning as I have tea. As I walk into the kitchen, my ritual is to check in on what I am feeling. My morning tea is a time of meditation. After a long night of dreams, whether remembered or not, this is a time of clearing.
The first feelings that come up are usually so subtle they are hard to define, they just don’t rise to the level of joy. If I am not at least feeling joy—the lowest emotion on the love side of the love/fear equation—I am definitely feeling/releasing fear-based emotions. Then frustrations, irritations and about a half-hour to an hour’s worth of feelings that are all over the fear spectrum come up and release.
With dozens of negative feelings gone, it’s like I’ve taken all the trash out of my house. The noise and pain in my bodymind are gone. Instead of all those unpleasant feelings forcing my brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts, I go to work happy, my day full of promise.
Some of you may be more evening orientated. Reviewing your whole day—while feeling all the feelings in those moments—just before going to sleep unencumbers your dreams of the past day’s noise. This frees up your dream world to be more creative, less reactive.
Most people don’t actually feel their feelings. They only think about the feelings, which further builds emotional pressure. Most of our pain comes from built-up emotional pressure. The internal pressure that builds up in our bodymind from just one unfelt feeling forces our brain to generate thousands of toxic thoughts. And all those thoughts are past/future orientated.
When our brain is left in charge of our consciousness, its thoughts from the past drag heavy chains of guilt, shame and missed opportunities; whereas its thoughts of the future are loaded with fear, worry, anxiety and other less-than-wonderful projections.
As a result, the average person—based on large studies of pet scans—thinks 70,000 thoughts per day. Almost all of those thoughts are past/future orientated. And most of them are thematically similar to the thoughts they thought yesterday. There is a better way.
When we walk into a room full of people or any new situation, feeling all the feelings that come up frees us from our unconscious response patterns, frees us to be our authentic selves.
When we make a practice of feeling all our feelings, we often go for long periods without a single thought. We float along in the childlike joy of the moment. In those moments, peace of mind and the blessings our spirit would like to bestow on us naturally float up into our awareness.
Inflammation of the kidneys is the number one cause of low back pain. As we learned from reading about the Element of Water, the kidneys are actually our higher mind—with our brain being our lower mind. The one commonality of all human beings is: we are all creators, part of Creator. Because we are creators, there are four things that send our kidneys into distress, and that causes most of the pain we feel in our lower back and sacrum, pain that often radiates down our legs. The four things are:
Wondering what is going to happen: Imagine driving along a country road in the foothills when you come to signs that say “Curves Ahead,” “Slow to 25,” “7% Downgrade” and you throw your hands in the air yelling, “Oh my God! What’s going to happen to the car?” When you put this situation in a skit, it seems silly, even ridiculous. And yet, we do this so often. A problem unexpectantly pops up and we unconsciously say, "Now what's going to happen?" That statement, one we've all made, assumes that someone or something outside of us is creating our reality, driving our car. Remember, we are creators. That is the commonality of all humans. We each create our own unique world—consciously or unconsciously—and it freaks our kidneys out every time we assume something or someone else controls our reality. And everytime we think that way, we get low back pain. That's a downside of being a creaor.
Feeling sorry for someone (or ourselves): When we feel sorry for someone, our unconscious assumption is: they don't have what it takes to handle their problem; they're going to screw it up; and somehow we are going to be responsible. Their spirit gets the message loud and clear and they react as if they heard our thoughts. Their natural response is resentment, and we wonder why we didn't see that coming.
Making excuses for someone (or yourself). Remember, we are all creators. Each one of us has every asset and talent we will ever need to face every situation that we encounter. There are no excuses for not facing up to the lessons that come at us, lessons that our own spirit and soul has put before us. None. When we commit to something—anything—our liver starts up-taking all the energy we will ever need to make it happen. No commitment, no energy, and no future. Commitment gives us the energy to pull off anything we commit to. And nothing outside ourselves can stop something we commit to. They may be able to delay it for a while, but commitment is an unstoppable force.
Bitter disappointment: When we have been anticipating something and it fails to happen, we can feel disappointed. But if we fail to actually feel our disappointment, and let our brain rant on about how we don’t get to have what we want, how things don’t work out for us and hundreds of other scenarios, our low back can go out so bad it feels like a severe pinched nerve. Bitter disappointment can produce the worst low-back pain you will ever experience. Feeling the disappointment and challenging if what we are feeling is honest can usually resolve the pain in a short time.
When you unconsciously find yourself feeling sorry for someone, a far better tactic is to breathe out strong to interupt the unconscious pattern, then mentally go over a checklist of that person’s assets and talents. You can do this every time you find ourself feeling sorry for them. So, if you find yourself being concerned or worrying about a loved one twenty times a day, go over a checklist of their talents and assets twenty times a day.
There is no such thing as a one-way thought form. When you think something about someone, their bodymind generates a thought form in response. As you are going over a checklist of their talents and assets, they start seeing that they have options. As soon as they see their next step, the light at the end of the tunnel opens up for them. Unlike worry, this actually helps your loved one to get through the hard times.
Our kidneys are the part of our bodyming where we develop vision about our future. As soon as we start focusing on the vision of what we want to do, the pressure in the kidneys starts to dissipate. The moment we commit to what we wondered about only moments earlier, all the inflammation/heat of the kidneys and liver dissipates in about twenty seconds. Every time that happens, it feels like a miracle, but I observe this happening every day.
When a person complains that it feels like their back is broken, most of the time that’s a kidney problem. Often they are disappointed that something they firmly expected to happen fell through. Until they resolve the dissapointment, the pain will remain. Kidney pain can easlily go to an 8 or 9 on a one-to-ten pain scale. It helps to stretch the psoas muscles a few times a day and drink a lot of water until the low back pain is gone. But the main thing that helps is deeply contemplating whether their disappointment is actually valid. Usually it’s not. That’s why they have so much pain.
We always need to understand that the main purpose for our seven-dimensional bodymind is to provide our spirit and soul access to this beautiful blue green paradise world. And most of our pain comes from being out of alignment with our higher purpose. The purpose of this and all other worlds is so beings can evolve and learn to love, all beings, not just us.
There’s a big knob right at the bottom of your low back on either side of the spine. It’s called the posterior superior spine of the pelvis. Chiropractors call it the PSS. One PSS or the other is commonly the epicenter of a lot of low back pain—sometimes both. You can do every type of therapy on that area you can think of and nothing gets rid of the pain, because the problem isn’t there.
The sacro-iliac joint (SI joint) in the front of where your sacrum and pelvis articulate makes figure eight movements, with each side's figure eights moving in opposition to the other. Holding the SI joint together is a complex ligament called the iliolumbar ligament. The iliolumbar ligament keeps those figure eight movements in a nice tight orbit—not letting the joint do any weird movements. This area is your core.
When either one of these ligaments gets sprained (injured so it does not have as much strength/tonus), the pain is usually felt in the back on the opposite PSS. When most people get injured, the favor the injury by letting one foot toe out and shifting their weight to the other leg. Those type of accomodations cause the pain to switch sides. And no amount of work in the painful PSS area will resolve the pain, which can become intense and disabling. Often the pain is described as "burning pain." When I rub out the attachment site of the injured iliolumbar ligament, and realign the spine, the pain is often relieved in a single session, although it can require more treatments when the injury is extensive. The patient has to do their part in performing spinal corrective exercises multiple times daily (more often—and gentler—when the injury or instability is severe).
The patient does a “left knee lift” (in the northern hemisphere) where they keep their low back concave while they lift their left knee against resistance from their left hand on that knee. As you lift your left knee against resistance, it jacks the right side of the sacrum and pelvis back up into normal alignment and realigns the lateral deviation (scoliosis) out of the lumbar spine. This exercise also pulls the low back into its normal concave curvature The crucial part of this exercise is keeping the low back curve concave throughout the entire exercise. The left knee lift exercise is incredible. It works not only when your low back maximally injured, but also if you want to compete at the highest levels of physical activity. I do it a lot when skiing.
*It is important that you check with your chiropractor or physical therapist before starting this exercise in case there is a sprain that causes your low back to bow out to the right instead of the normal deviation to the left here in the Northern Hemisphere.
I also recommend doing gentle spinal twists, at least 15 times each direction, which breaks up the muscle tensions in the entire spine, and even into the hips and legs if you do them while standing with your feet parallel. You get much better reslults if you do the spinal twist while you are in good posture with your elbows out to the side. Each time you do the spinal twist, you eliminate a day’s worth of arthritic build-up out of your spine while also rehabilitating your inter-vertebral discs. The most important part of this exercise is to do it gently. This is especially important for all you overachievers.
Another patient—my friend we will call Robert—came in one day for a regular check-up. He said, “From now on I am going to live my life in radical self-love.” From my understanding of how old feelings must come to the surface to resolve, I knew that as soon as he committed to self-love, his bodymind would push all his self-loathing feelings to the surface of his awareness. After those unconscious feelings were experienced, which releases them, his wellspring of self-love would become fully accessible.
As soon as it was appropriate, I muscle tested him. I silently asked his high self if he knew that all the unconscious ways he did not currently love his self must come to the surface to be released? I got a strongly affirmative answer. When I silently asked if he wanted me to tell him what was going to happen, I received a very strong no! I asked the same question several times and his high self made it clear that he knew that his choices would evoke a strong reaction in his body, but he did not want me to tell that to him.
I figured that he might be tempted to forego the plan if he consciously knew how intense his bodily reaction would be, so I muscle tested to determine when he was going to hit the wall. I “got” that six weeks from now he was going to plunge into his healing crisis, so I scheduled him to come in then.
As soon as he came into my treatment room he blurted out, “I can’t find a single reason to love myself.” I told him about muscle-testing him six weeks earlier, and his not wanting to know the outcome beforehand.
Then I explained to him that: when a person commits to something—anything—the liver starts up taking all the energy he will need in order to complete that mission. Then the bladder system pushes all the fears to the surface to be experienced. The act of experiencing feelings that come up releases them. And all those self-loathing feelings stood in the way of Robert actually living in radical self-love, so his bodymind had to push them to the surface of his awareness for release.
Our old fears come up anytime we begin a "hero’s journey." They always do! Most people only think their feelings. They talk about them or act them out; but they don’t actually go inside and experience them. If we don’t feel the fears, the dark thoughts our brain is forced to generate build up until our fears become sixty-feet tall fire-breathing dragons. Unfelt fears effectively block our path and stop our hero’s journey just as it's getting started. If we feel the fears, they dissolve into nothingness, effectively slaying the dragons of our old myths.
I told Robert that he had already passed the point of no return. At this point the only way out was to proceed through the process he started—that he was past the worst of it. By six months from now, half the time when he checks in, he will love himself. Within a year he can honestly say, “I live my life in radical self-love.”
One of my older patients (and dear friend) came into my office one day without an appointment saying he thought he was having a heart attack. He said had to stop three times and sleep for about an hour each time from Truckee to Grass Valley, his heart hammering away in his chest, frightening him.
He’s in his eighties, looks fifty, grew up living a very healthy lifestyle, eating a vegetarian diet with no stimulants or depressants and is the epitome of health. No part of me thought he was having a heart attack, so I said "Come on in and let me check you out."
I took his blood pressure, which was 123/73. That’s what you would expect from a healthy athlete in his early twenties. Then I used my hands to scan the pressure over his organs. His spleen, and especially pancreas were very inflamed. An inflammed pancreas usually indicates eating too much sugar. When I palpated them, they were swollen. The spleen/pancreas meridian was pushing more than twice as far out past his auric field than his other meridians. His adrenal glands, which rule the three-heater meridians with their three warming spaces in his torso were also quite inflamed. That probably represented all the anxiety he was having regarding his heart hammering away in his chest.
I asked him what he just ate. His wife/best friend had recently died, which was like having half his heart yanked out by the roots, and some friends had adopted him. They invited him to have breakfast at an I-Hop restaurant, the kind of place he never goes to, where he had blueberry pancakes with lots of sugary blueberry sauce and coffee with cream and sugar. For his well-tuned system, this was as far from normal as he could go.
I said, “You damn fool. You just threw your body into such severe hypoglycemia that you did not have enough blood sugar energy to even breathe, much less drive your car. When your blood sugar levels dropped down so far that you didn’t have enough energy to even drive your vehicle, your adrenal glands pumped out so much adrenalin that it plunged your body into 'fight, fright, flight' mode. That’s what caused your heart to feel like it was hammering away in your chest. Having lost your best friend recently makes your body less able to handle such sugary excesses; and the coffee with cream and sugar took you way over the line.”
While I was balancing his central and governing meridians, I apologized for calling him a fool on top of his obvious distress. He said, “That’s all right John. I like it better when you give it to me straight.” I told him that until he got past his grief, his body would not be able to assimilate that kind of sugary food, the kind of food he never previously would have eaten.
