Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
Freedom, something most of us value and strive for but what does it mean and how much of it do any of us really have? I’ve had the belief that I live a life of freedom because I can choose what I want to do and how I want to live my life but I’ve never really felt free. In fact I’ve felt like a prisoner most of my life, a prisoner of my own mind and of my own habits. Life so often feels like a struggle, a struggle to create what is needed and what is wanted, well, a struggle to survive. Its that feeling of struggle which is like a prison. You see my mind has so many stories and they come in two flavors mainly, regrets about the past and fear of the future. The past provides the raw material for self doubt and judgement, what I could have done better, how I fucked up, what I’m afraid is going to happen again. The future provides anxiety and worry about the same old patterns playing out yet again, an obsession with the worst case scenario. The mixture of these two types of stories is incredibly toxic and sets me apart from freedom. Even though I can decide what to do with my life I don’t really know how to make a decision that will be truly and sustainably fulfilling.
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Tags: freedom, Goddess, surrender
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Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
What do you consider spiritual? When you think of the word spiritual what is it that comes to mind for you? For me it has always brought up things like meditation, magic, the idea of the Divine and the sense of something I cannot describe but I know on some level. However the whole notion of spirit and what is spiritual has dramatically shifted for me of late. I’ve come to realize that I’ve compartmentalized or limited my spirituality for most of my life creating a divergence between what is considered spiritual and everything else. The everything else was actually most of life and many aspects of my experience that are quite important to me.
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Tags: authenticity, spirit, Spirituality
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Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”
~ Desmond Tutu
I have a question for you and I have a challenge for you (and for me too). We are at a very intense key point in history as you may have noticed. I believe that right now more than ever what we individually think, feel, believe, say and do is critically important to how these intense times play out. We are living in a time of a real opportunity for lasting change and absolutely NO ONE else is going to create that change for us, its on each one of us. We cannot depend on politicians or religious leaders or anyone else. This is a time of individual action.
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Tags: challenge, new paradigm, Transformation
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Monday, July 18th, 2011
Do you believe in reincarnation/past lives? Well I started my spiritual path studying Buddhism so was exposed to reincarnation from the beginning. Since then my practices have widened to includes many other ways of connecting and working with spirit but my belief in reincarnation has never wavered. It seemed to just makes sense to me at a deep level. I never really felt the need to question it although I did study the subject in some detail. However it wasn’t till last year that it got taken to a much deeper level. I was going through a particularly rough period which included being really really broke and not even having a stable place to live. I was pretty much crashing with friends for several months with stressful times in between places. I just couldn’t get it together and this was part of a larger process of letting go of my identity and awakening into a new more expanded life which was a painful process to say the least. Toward the end of this period I was going to stay with a friend and since I didn’t have a car I took the bus which dropped me off at the bottom of the hill where their house was. I started walking up the hill (about a mile) carrying a backpack, a suitcase and a sleeping bag. It was a very hot day, in the 90s and I started to lose it. I felt like just breaking down and giving up on life, I felt worthless and powerless, like I couldn’t go on.
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Tags: power, reincarnation, warrior
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Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Lately I’ve been considering the question of morality and the role it has played in my life. Many people consider a sense of morality essential to living a healthy life and most human societies are based on some form of moral code. Usually these moral standards are derived from one of the major world religions or philosophical systems. Morality defines standards of behavior in a society and serves as a guideline in differentiating between right and wrong. We find it in the west in the form of the ten commandments and in the east in the form of the precepts of Buddhism as well as in many other forms. Its encoded into many of our legal systems and conditioned into us from an early age. There are many common elements between the standard moral codes in use today typically defining prohibitions like not killing, not stealing, not lying and not committing adultery. Many of these standards are hard to argue with because most would consider them common sense.
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Tags: guidance, intuition, morality, Spirituality
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Thursday, June 9th, 2011
The use of psychoactive substances for healing, transformation and spiritual unfoldment is a phenomena that has been with us since the dawn of man. In a way you could say a culture is reflected in its choice of substances with the west being very much an alcohol, caffeine and nicotine culture (its all about uppers and downers). These are the approved and even promoted substances but there has always been a minority who experiment with substances that society does not endorse. There is a growing movement to have marijuana more accepted as a medicine and to legalize it for recreational use while it is already the most mainstream of the unapproved substances. Its medicinal and healing properties cannot be denied anymore than one can deny its potential for abuse.
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Tags: entheogens, healing, medicine, shamanism, Spirituality
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Sunday, June 5th, 2011
I love technology, I always have. I got my first computer back in the early days of computing in 1980 (shit I’ve just dated myself) and was swept away by it from then on. It was the most basic machine compared to today, I was thrilled when I was able to program it to display “Hello World” on my small green and black monitor. I spent over 12 years since then working as a computer systems engineer and in the last few years as a freelance web designer leveraging the power of the web to help people in my community express their vision. My Macbook Pro is one of my most important material possessions. As I’ve walked my path and unfolded the practice of being a more conscious, more fully awake alive person I’ve met many like mined people who demonize technology and point to its evils including its destructive impact on the environment and society and its amplification of modern warfare. Many of them hope for or at least long for a change back to a simpler life. Some people I know even have expressed hopes that somehow our technology will be wiped out (maybe by a solar flare or something) and we’ll have to live without it. I am not one of those people.
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Tags: communication, computers, consciousness, internet, technology
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Monday, May 30th, 2011
Are you waiting for the end of the world? The recent prediction of the rapture and end of the world this year by a fundamentalist Christian preacher got me to ask myself that very question. Oh course I didn’t take it seriously because you know they do that all the time don’t they but it also go me thinking about what is behind such predictions. Well there was no rapture but it was surprising how seriously some people took it, even selling their possessions and moving to a ‘safe’ place. It was hard for me to not just write them off as ignorant, gullible and sad but that would be nothing more than my own self important judgement however they may just represent a powerful collective pattern. A pattern that has been going on for millennia. How could I really blame them because life in mainstream society is pretty damn lousy so why wouldn’t people want to let that all go for a life of eternal bliss? I mean you work at a job which even if you like it you have to admit that if you weren’t being paid you wouldn’t be there. Well then theres money which is why most people ‘work’ and you can never seem to get enough of the stuff. But at least theres relationships and love right, bliss, uh kind of but you also get trauma, disappointment and divorce. We’ve got war, we’ve got violence, inequality, a dying environment….yada yada yada….I could fill the entire post with this, it pretty much sucks the big one. So why not have a rapture and leave this cesspool behind for an eternal life of bliss?
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Tags: 2012, new age, rapture
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Thursday, April 21st, 2011
We hear so much about compassion these days and having practiced in the Buddhist tradition for so many years I’ve been steeped in it. However my perspective on what compassion is and what it means to practice it has changed dramatically as I’ve walked my path. I think its very important to be clear on what we mean by the term compassion because after all its just a word and like many words much misused with all sorts of meanings for different people. For most of my time on the Buddhist path what I thought was compassion was really pity and my own self-importance and that’s what most of what passes for compassion out there is in my view. One of my Buddhist teachers called that idiot compassion. A good deal of people’s efforts to help others (including my own) is not really compassionate but manipulative assuming we know what someone else needs or whats best for them or helping them because the state they are in makes us uncomfortable and we really want them to be different. Suffering people remind us of our own suffering even if its just under the surface so is helping them a way to make them stop reminding us of our own pain? This made me question compassion altogether feeling that maybe its all bullshit and we can’t really be concerned with others at all without in some way manipulating them. I’ve become pretty wary of people who are out there to ‘help’ others.
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Tags: compassion, help
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Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Hey! What’s your problem? Have you ever been confronted with that? I have except now I regularly confront myself with that question. You see my life has been filled with problems. In recent years, the problems have appeared to grow bigger and bigger until they have become things that have threatened my very survival. Problems like not having a place to live, not having enough money, problems with my relationships, with what I do for work. Jesus its problems with everything, with life itself. In working with all of this in a very intense way its pushed me to realize a number of things because I’ve had to ask where all these problems are coming from. To answer that question I can project their cause externally which I have done but that has only ever lead to more problems and suffering.
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Tags: perception, perspective, problems
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Saturday, February 19th, 2011
As I sit here beginning a week long retreat I embrace the unknown within before I step deeper into the unknown on an outer level. I’m struck by how much there is to let go of in order to truly walk the path of freedom. As human beings we’re conditioned to engage life by holding onto or clinging to ‘things’ (things being anything that can be conceptualized such as relationship, career, money, beliefs, opinions, validation from others, places, community, material things). There is a great cosmic joke in this however since life is a constantly changing flow with nothing to hold onto. Thus you have the suffering of the human condition. Most people who engage some form of spiritual path are familiar with the act of letting go and have probably even put it into practice to some degree. However to walk in freedom requires a complete letting go or the act of letting go in every moment of every concept. Letting go becomes way of directly engaging existence itself and restores life to its natural flow but only when it becomes our primary focus.
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Tags: freedom, independence, individuality, individuation, warrior
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from the bow of a ship without ever having felt sorry for itself. ~D.H. Lawrence
In Buddhist terms the root of human suffering is our belief and investment in a non-existent self. We take ourselves to be solid, real and substantial even the center of our individual universe yet the reality of what we are is fluid, changing, insubstantial and interconnected with everything else. We work very hard to maintain this sense of self and suffering results because we can never fully secure this fragile illusion since it is in conflict with reality. We become obsessed with this self which requires so much work to maintain. It always seems to be threatened by something which makes the world seem incredibly cruel and dangerous leading to self pity, our poor self can never seem to get a break and even when it does it doesn’t seem to last.
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Tags: ruthlessness, self, self importance, warrior
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Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
As I dredge up deeper and deeper “stuff” to work with on my path I’ve recently gotten into a place where I’m dealing with some of my most core issues involving relationship, money and work and addiction. The last couple of months have been difficult because I’ve noticed myself bouncing back and forth between extremes with these processes. For example with my work I seem to either be in a state where I am working very hard and making money but quickly getting burned out and exhausted by the struggle or I’m in a space where I’m overcome by lack and not really able to get much work done. With relationship this has manifested as going through intense periods of dating where I’m consumed by sexual energy and romantic feelings leaving me depleted or I avoid romantic connection all together and focus on my work and my path leaving this aspect of life ignored and relegated to the unconscious.
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Tags: rebirth
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Thursday, December 30th, 2010
I recently had an intense insight into the core of my process of feeling like a worthless and undeserving human being. We had a holiday gathering where many members of our community came together to celebrate and infuse some light into the field. As the evening progressed we moved from socializing and partying into a dream circle, a place to share and get reflection on our processes which is part of what our community is based on. I was really enjoying the evening with my dear friends and had no intention of sharing or getting to anything in particular, was just flowing with the moment.
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Tags: warrior, wound
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Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
The above image of the Sun was taken yesterday by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft using its Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). NASA has several spacecraft currently monitoring the Sun’s activity from various positions and using a variety of scientific instruments. This has been going on since the mid-1990s but recently NASA spacecraft have observed some rather unusual or really astounding solar activity.
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Tags: sun, Transformation
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