The Message of Auto Immunity
Understand the psycho-emotional and spiritual roots of violence against the self.
Understand the psycho-emotional and spiritual roots of violence against the self.
This was a great conversation with Dr Christine Shaffner at Sophia Health Institute for the Beyond Biological Medicine Speaker Series. The complete series is filled with insightful talks all of which you can get here: https://beyondbiologicalmedicine.com/
Keynote at the American Center for The Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences 2021 Conference, (aciste.org)
A talk I gave at the beginning of the pandemic with Dr Christine Schaffner, co founder of Sophia Health Institute, during which I discuss the Military Industrial Distraction Machine and the Archetypal symbols of Plague, Washing Hands, Home and Crown.
A Lament, on the Renaissance Painting The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese
As a species we are still psychologically and emotionally illiterate. We are still woefully uninformed in the inner workings of our psyche. More importantly than that, the vast majority have no idea that this is even a problem, let alone that we can do something about it. On the contrary, the general consensus is simply that the world is broken and that we need to fix it, as opposed to the deeper truth, which is that we are broken, and that our world is simply a reflection of that.
The time is ripe for us to collectively establish a standard model of consciousness that we can offer our children in school and at home. A simple, yet comprehensive training able to lay the foundation for a lifetime of greater internal peace, external clarity, and civic responsibility that is as important as reading, writing and arithmetic.
There is no “Definitive Guide to Optimum Health.”
No “Key to Finding Your Soul Mate.”
No “3 Simple Things That You Can Do To Go From Living In a Porta-Potty On Top Of a Garbage Dump To Millionaire in Under 6 Months.”
And there is certainly no “Secret To Success.”
Because if ANY OF THIS were true …
EVEN SLIGHTLY TRUE …
Then a tsunami of HEALING, and SUCCESS and WEALTH and SOUL-PARTNERSHIPS would have already been generated by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in verifiably repeatable ways.
And most of all, we would have heard about it by now.
But we haven’t.
Because it’s not true.
And deep down we know it.
But most of us still don’t want to hear this.
We still want it to sound easy, and simple, and that all our dreams are always and forever attainable.
And they are.
But they’re also not.
And admitting that … literally taking a deep breath and surrendering into that painful truth of life, is actually … liberating.
Because when we accept the truth of how much luck, and genetics, and environment and culture, and timing and a whole host of others factors that we have ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL OVER play into every success and failure that we’ve ever had – it stops us from feeling like losers when our goals don’t work out, or for feeling like total ego-maniacs when they do.
Crying?
We don’t cry here.
Crying is taboo.
Because if we cry, we’re weak. And if we’re weak, then we’re likely to die. And if we’re likely to die then no one will ever want to be associated with us because even being in proximity to us will threaten their survival too.
And so if we cry we will be ostracized, isolated, and left for dead.
And so we don’t cry.
Instead we repress, we anesthetize, we push down the emotions like an ostrich with its head in the sand hoping that because we ignore the pain and grief and sadness within us it will never have any effect over us. Like an oncoming train we magically assume that ignoring it will prevent it from ever hurting us.
Do not be fooled. Your unprocessed emotions do not disappear when you ignore them. On the contrary they will continue to act out in spite of you in an on-going attempt to heal the part of you that has been wounded. Ignore your emotions and you will only have two options. Either to continue repressing them in increasingly damaging ways with alcohol, drugs, food, work, sex, or any other emotionally distracting activity, or to simply allow them to be triggered like a volcano erupting over and over again when you least expect it. Either way make no mistake, your emotions are stronger than you. While they can be occasionally stifled, they can never be silenced.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Welcome to being human. Evolution’s most recent creation. You have been designed to exert maximum devastation. Your thoughts, emotions, words and actions are the most advanced delivery systems that have ever been seen in cosmic production. But they have been installed with a single significant safety precaution. Your every shot fired travels equally in the opposite direction.
That’s right, you are a carpet bomb that cannot escape your own napalm, America and the VietCong, Hiroshima and the Atom Bomb. Black, white, rich, poor, Christianity, Judaism, Atheism and Islam. Now look at the violence in the world and tell me if you see haters, hatred or simply a pain within … your self.
Look closer.
What is it?
Be honest.
You are a weapon of mass destruction. Your will is all that stands between you and a hair trigger. How often do you pull back the hammer and think that when it cracks you will not be its benefactor? Every day your lovers, friends, family members, and fellow travelers have shots fired at them at random. How many hit their mark? How much damage is collateral?
Yet when the time comes to disarm ourselves the pattern is always the same …
I wake up and meditate. All is well. Life is good.
Then I turn on the news and everything’s a complete disaster. Religious zealots are killing people en masse, peaceful protesters are being trampled by riot police, America is facing off with the Orange Clown, North Korea is being run by a B-movie Bond villain, and Israel is seeking unconscious revenge on the Nazis by persecuting the Palestinians.
So I turn it off and make breakfast with my wife. The morning sun shines through the kitchen window onto our toes. We admire the color of fresh chard. I marvel at the fact that I can make an organic hemp milk, matcha latte and chase it with wild Alaskan fish oils, bee pollen and adaptogenic herbs, even though I wonder about the DHA containing mercury, the water carrying aluminum, and the adaptogens being contaminated with Round Up. We sit down, and lovingly stare into each others eyes for a long, long time. It doesn’t feel cheesy at all.
There is not a galaxy in the universe that is spiritual. Not a solar system that is Christian or Hindu, no shooting star that is Buddhist or planet that is Sufi or Jewish. Never in the history of the world has an apple ever fallen from a tree … an atheist. The death of spirituality is the death of the finger pointing at the moon and the birth of the moon. Because we no longer need to point to it. We have landed on it.
The death of spirituality is the moment that the territory becomes the map, the moment that magic becomes merely undiscovered science, or bullshit. When faith becomes the patience required for successful practice and karma: blow back; its operationalization, merely an individual’s most developed self-preservation instinct. It is the moment that enlightenment becomes your Free Will Index, and ‘God’ is re-born as the global collective conscience.
Inhale, bring your palms together, and begin by dedicating this practice to all the great yogis and yoginis who are turning in their graves or laughing into their loin-cloths because of the Diet-Pepsi-maxification that Western culture has unleashed all over their sacred path of transcendence.
Take a moment to honor the great Patanjali who an entirely new wave of young mat-slingers often confuse with a sweet dessert that follows your dhal and rice course. Give reverence to the Rig Veda that is absolutely not the great-grandfather of the Lord Vader. Exhale and release any judgment around the effectiveness of hip-hop yoga, wine and yoga, or products like Water Mat Yoga to accelerate your union with “the god head.” If Western yoga culture is going through its adolescence, then it needs our support, wisdom, and compassion as it navigates through the madness of the modern-day mass media marketplace.
Sun salutation, raise your arms to the sky, and primal scream for every time that a teenybopper’s cellphone with a Taylor Swift ring tone has started playing “Shake It Off ” during your Corpse Pose, causing your subtle body to crash into your physical like the meteor that ended the dinosaurs.
In an age where authoritarian power is being questioned from the classroom to the boardroom, the emerging research is conclusive — humility is a dramatically more powerful and effective way of leading.
Scientific inquiry into the power and effectiveness of humility in the workplace has shown that it offers a significant “competitive advantage” to leaders.
According to a study from the University of Washington Foster School of Business, humble people tend to make the most effective leaders (that’s right, the most) and are more likely to be high performers in both individual and team settings, according to associate professor Michael Johnson.
Unsurprisingly, researchers found that employees who rated their managers as humble reported feeling more engaged and less likely to quit. They also reported being more committed to a leader’s vision, and more trusting and receptive to their ideas.
Dying to life is easy.
It just requires you to bleed yourself dry of everything you’ve ever wanted.
The first cut is the hardest.
You won’t want to.
Your mind will tell you not to.
But only because it’s designed to protect you from the deepest part of you that wants nothing more than to free you.
Revolution is coming. Can you hear its whisper? Like thunder approaching in the distance. Like an orgasm rising up your legs and overcoming your senses, calling for your surrender, and if not in this life time then in the next one.
1. Love your body.
You let your legs walk you, your lungs breathe you, your heart beat you without ever saying thank you. The result is that you do not love you, hear you, are completely out of touch with you. So when illness comes it will surprise you. Not because your body hides it to spite you, but because you have trained yourself to be deaf when it cries out to you.
2. Honor and respect women.
You think you respect women but you don’t. Because you have not yet been broken by one yet. And you think you honor women but you don’t. Because you have yet to see one break more courageously than you ever could. And you will.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our Tuesday night Non-Dualists Anonymous meeting. For those of you here for the first time – refreshments are at the back of the room. Bathrooms are on the left.
As many of you know this year-long program is for individuals chronically at one with everything, and as a result, feel as if they may have lost touch with the creative friction that comes from buying into the dualistic illusion. Many of you here tonight will have already spent months, perhaps even years attempting to find a way to “have dinner with someone else” to no avail. We here at NDA want you to know that there is still hope.
Here’s to the fathers who were not enough, to the ones who were never there, to the ones who got it “wrong.” Here’s to the fathers that no one talks about, to the ones that we wished we’d never had to the ones that hurt us. You were the perfect fathers. Not because you did […]
Dear life,
I know that you are going to bring me pain, I know that you are going to bring me suffering, I know that you may even take my life, or the lives of those who are close to me, but I want you to know that I am ready, as much as I am able to be, and that I too will be bringing you something …
For all the tears that you bring I will cry every last one and then some. For all the grief that you bring I will mourn, and wail, and howl harder and deeper than I have ever done, out of gratitude for yet another love that has come, and pierced my heart and gone.
Food gives us life, and then one day we realize that it also offers us an escape. When we suffer we eat, and when we eat, we fall asleep awake. The result is that fine dining in the modern world isn’t simply a competition to create the most delectable dish, but to design the most […]
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