The collective freezer

We are living in a collective freezer and largely unaware of the frigid weather all around us.  These cold conditions have paralyzed many of us into a state of contraction, numbness and disconnection.   Side effects of frozenness are subtlety holding your breath, tensing your body, not feeling safe to be yourself, not fully sharing or expressing yourself in world, believing things might go bad or not work out and feeling like you are not going to be ok.  Frozenness is riddled with worry, doubt, insecurity, inhibition, vigilance and absence of trust in self, other or life.  Its focus is on minimizing disruption, change, and uncertainty at all costs.  It is not concerned with thriving, evolution or advancement, but instead solely with preservation of what is and attempting to keep things the same.

Clearly it is impossible to keep things the same.  The one screamingly obvious truth is that everything is constantly changing.  Yet despite the obviousness of this we attempt to control the change.  This state of inner non-acceptance of what is keeps us looking in the rearview mirror.  Trying to keep a version of ourselves, our body, or our environment that was previously known to us.  Perhaps a version of our life that we liked more or that felt safer because it was more known to us thus giving us the illusion of greater stability.  What we fail to really accept is that everything has a rhythm, a beginning, middle and an end.  This is true for everything within the physical universe.  All will come and go.  

It is through stretching yourself into greater acceptance of this fact of the ever changing nature of the universe that you will begin the unthawing process.  When you stop trying to hold things in place you begin to recognize the movement that is all around you.  The block of ice that you’ve been keeping yourself inside of starts to melt.  The frigid, rigid fear container loses its sharp harshness and with that you begin to notice your breath again.  A warmth arrives that allows the muscles to relax.  That which you withheld or kept separate or silent now begins to move inside of you and take expression.  You stop worrying so much about yourself and instead start living again or maybe living for the first time.  

The important thing to realize here is that you are in charge of the defrosting process.  In fact it is 100% solely up to you.  That doesn’t mean that support isn’t available, because it is, but the choice to end the choice for fear is yours.  You don’t have to keep picking up the same fear story, feelings and sensations.  You are bigger than and beyond any fear thought.   


Finding all the places that you hide out

The first step in ending your attachment relationship with fear is by finding all the places where you choose it.  See our choosing of fear is largely unconscious to us.  We simply imbibe it as part of the air we breathe and don’t do much to question it because it’s one of those collectively agreed upon assumptions that has been left un-investigated.  Its takes a certain slowing down of the mind  and recognition of our more subtle beingness so that we can attune and clearly see these unconscious assumption patterns that we have about life.  

As you begin this investigation process into yourself you may find that there are certain things or situations that arise which you feel that fear is the only choice.  Where you get hijacked and your nervous system responds with the fear cascade of attack, protection, disconnection and vigilance.  These are your growth edges.  Wherever it is that you feel like you have no choice but to respond in a certain way is a misinformed and disempowered perspective.  The key that I want to keep pointing to here is choice.  It is one thing to deliberately choose fear and allow that choice to create the programmed nervous system response for that choice, it is another thing entirely to not consciously choose it and be swept into that response.  If a lion is chasing you choosing fear and the subsequent neurophysiological cascade that follows may be appropriate unless you want to get eaten, however rarely are any real lions chasing us.  

So outside those incredibly rare moments in our lives when we truly need our survival mechanism to be activated the choice for pure survival/preservation and the attack, flight or freeze response is just a default mode.  This should feel like really great news to you because it means that you are in charge.  You are not victim to your nervous system, instead it responds to you.  Its only that you have not been aware of your choice, of what you’ve been choosing or even that you can/do choose.  

This is why at some point we have to turn our attention from the outside world and all the seeming external triggers and look within.  Sometimes this seems like a dark and bleak void, and perhaps even boring direction.  This is only because we haven’t spent much time paying actual attention to ourselves and therefore there is this undiscovered terrain of which we have not navigated before.  You may feel like you don’t know how or what you are doing, and when you first open that inner door you may not see much.  But as with any worthwhile endeavor persistence pays off.  Your willingness and dedication to continue to peer inside reveals an previously unknown or unconscious world to you.  You come to see and know yourself.  You see the intricacies of your psyche and illuminate their workings simply with your attention and awareness on them.  It is here that you dismantle your conditioned responses to life and reclaim your active choice.  In truth the choice has always been yours, but until you turn within and unequivocally see that fact, your mind will play tricks of denial on you and you will project your power outwards onto objects, situations and other people.  The choice beyond fear is the choice for freedom and an experience of life where you are present, available and fully alive.  


Insisting on Non-wrongness

Insisting on Non-wrongness 

Moving past regret, remorse, doubt and judgment




Choosing what you’ve chosen 

Beyond the personal







Your life is not your own

Your life is not your own

Existence beyond being a body

Basic RGBTruly your life has never been your own.  What the heck does that mean?  If your life isn’t yours than whose is it?  That is a great beginning question to ask yourself.  We make a lot of assumptions about who/what we are with very little investigation as to if those assumptions are true.  One of the primary assumptions that pretty much most everyone makes is that they are a separate person.  It is hard to fathom otherwise.  If you aren’t the you that you’ve thought that you are then who are you exactly?  What would it even be like to know yourself other than the you that you think you are?

Let’s start at the beginning.  Not just the beginning of your memory or of this physical body, but of who/what you were before your were born.  Did you exist or does your existence only begin once you have a body, and even beyond that when you are aware that you have a body?  When you where a baby, prior to your physical memory or knowingness that you had a body or existed, did you not yet exist?  Simply because we don’t have a physical memory of our existence or an awareness that we exist does not mean that we do not exist.  Nothing proves this more than when we are infants, not yet knowing that we have a body or that we exist, and yet we clearly un-doubtingly exist.  

Existence has nothing to do with whether or not we have a body or know we have a body.  That being the case we must entertain that our life as we know our life to be may very well be made up of a bunch of untrue assumptions that we’ve simply learned that we are rather than the truth of who we are.  If this idea that you are not your body is true, and you exist without a body and even without the awareness that you exist, that poses a whole world of new questions to ask yourself about what is and what you are. 

Asking these questions opens up the doors to a new knowingness of yourself, but you must earnestly seek to find.  For without the hunger to discover more, more will not be discovered.  That impulse inside of you must be sparked alive in order to provide the energy needed to guide your path and attract the ever expanding awareness of who and what you are to you.   

The Grand Orchestrator 

Coming to know your true self

Bright Flower of Life With Stars On WhiteI like to use the analogy of the body, meaning this body that you have which currently houses your being, as one cell in a much larger body.  Just like this human body is made up of trillions of cells that are specialized to perform certain functions, there is a larger body which all humans, and really everything in creation, make up together.  As humans we often are not aware that this larger body, of which we are inseparably a part of, exists.  Yet simply because we are not aware of it doesn’t mean that it does not exist.  It just means that we haven’t become aware of it yet.  

For simplicity sake recognize that every human, animal, plant and mineral form on this earth is really just one body (not multiple bodies) and that every individuated expression, meaning each and every form of this one body, has its own specialized function depending on its blueprint.  At the level of the human body cell we call this blueprint DNA.  DNA is that encoded information which tells an individual cell in the body how to function.  Going to the next level up, which is the mind (i.e. what most of us identify as who we are) organizes the entire human organism so that there is harmonization of all of the cells and systems of the body working together rather than individual cells just doing their own thing.   In this way you can think of the mind as blueprint/DNA for the entire human body as a unit.  Then at the next level beyond that, that of the larger one body of which all is a part of, the blueprint is the soul.  The soul writes the instructions for all of creation.  You can think of the soul as the DNA for the collective creation body.  Even the soul, which knows oneness and inseparability, has something that informs it, which is the grand orchestrator.  You can call this source, God, Love or whatever name fits your fancy.  It is the ultimate intelligence from which all of creation or all of the universe is born and that which informs and organizes all of it.  

This brings us back to the beginning and this notion that your life is not your own.  Your life is 100% completely divinely orchestrated.  Not because your body or mind is in charge, but because something beyond what you may currently know is in charge.  When life appears to not be going your way or things occur that you don’t like, it is because you are seeing from a very limited perspective.  Its the perspective of being a separate human being, which you have never been.  That which is viewing the circumstances is the separate body-mind which is not yet aware of its larger body self.

So what is your choice here?  The choice is to surrender to that which appears to be mysterious to our mind and learn to develop faith.  Faith is how you will come to know yourself beyond the mind.  Faith is the bridge from mind to soul.  Faith allows you to recognize your self beyond this person you’ve come to know yourself to be.  Faith is the end of all resistances, all insistences, all wrongness, all judgment.  Faith is the end of experiencing separateness.  Faith is the end of suffering.  Faith brings you home into the remembrance and recognition of the larger truth that you are.  When you get this you experience total freedom and not the powerless that the mind thinks it will experience because it comes to the end of thinking its charge.  Instead you become fully empowered in the truth of you.


Living Surrendered

Living Surrendered 

Distinction of acceptance & surrender




True surrendered-ness 

Working as intelligent energy






Maintaining energy richness

Maintaining energy richness 

Energy states

energy statesOur energy state is pivotal to how we engage with life and how our body functions.  When we are in an energy poor state we have little capacity to do anything other than survive. We typically can’t engage fully in our daily activities, our bodies are ill and there isn’t any energy available for growth, social interactions or contribution.  We are merely trying to make it through the next moment or day.  

Energy neutral is one step beyond energy poor.  In energy neutral we have enough energy to engage in our day to day activities and be “functional” humans, but we are often tired, don’t feel like engaging with others much and have the need to disconnect or check out in order to recover.  Our bodies are not in crisis, but there may be a few things not working as well as we would like them too.  This is the zone where most humans hang out in their energy state.  

Then there is energy rich.  When we are in an energy rich state we are alive.  We actively participate in our lives, our bodies are not just maintaining status quo, but instead are getting healthier and more vital.  We can show up for ourselves and for others.  People often describe flow states as being energy rich.  This is where life seems to unfold effortlessly and in synchronicity with everything else.  

We all have probably had tastes of each of these energy states at various times in our lives.  More often than not when we are not in an energy rich state we are trying to figure out how we can get there again.  So what are the keys to maintaining energy richness?  How do we live there rather than just visit periodically?   

Choosing your state of being 

Realizing the power of choice

47912357 - businesswoman standing in front of opened doors and making decisionEnergy state is based on your level of awareness.  Let me explain.  Most of us do not realize that we are choosing our lives.  What this means is that we have thoughts, emotions and sensations that we believe are random occurrences; that these things simply happen to us.  We are not aware that we are the chooser of such things.  What is it like to stop for a moment and entertain that the sensations you feel, the emotions you experience and the thoughts that you have are not random?  Do you believe it or does some disbelief arrive?  

It is the disbelief that we are the chooser of the things that we experience and that there is seeming randomness in what occurs to us that makes it difficult for us to maintain the energy state of our choosing.  This is because we don’t realize yet that we are choosing.  So how do we realize that we are the chooser and that life is not happening to us, but instead that we are happening to life?  

It begins, as with everything, with awareness.  So what is awareness?  Awareness is the noticing of what is present without being merged with what is.  What this means is noticing your sensations, emotions and thoughts without identifying yourself with your sensations, emotions and thoughts.  For example, say you have the thought “I am stupid”  and you believe that thought to be a true reflection of who you are, you are merged with the thought instead of realizing it is simply a thought and not you.  When you are identifying with thoughts such as these the highest level of energy you will ever experience is energy neutral.  If you are identifying yourself with certain emotions you will have energy neutral to energy poor states and if you identify yourself with your sensations, such as being your pain or a physical condition, you will experience energy poor states.  

Energy rich states result when you realize that you are not your thoughts, feelings and sensations, but simply are aware of them.  When you are aware of them you can be present with them instead of merged with them.  It can seem scary to stay and be present with some sensations, feelings and thoughts.  As you do things may arise in your awareness that you have had a tendency to push down or avoid previously such as inadequacies of self, feelings of powerlessness, shame, etc., but as you stay present instead of merged with, you begin to realize that all of those things you were afraid of are just smoke and mirrors, illusions, never actually real.  As you stay present and aware more and more, you being the chooser of all of your life experiences becomes increasingly apparent.  This is ultimately how you claim, own and live energy richness.  
