This is one in a series of posts with brief notes on healing, awakening, and personal things. These are more spontaneous and less comprehensive than the regular articles. Some may be made into a regular article in time.
GRUMPINESS EARLY IN A CFS/ME CRASH
I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME), and one of the early signals of being in a crash is that I get a bit grumpy.
Usually, I crash if I am in some level of activity, and haven’t had water, food, or rest/sleep recently enough.
This seems common among people with CFS/ME and there is probably a biological/physiological component.
At the same time, I assume there is a psychological component as well. When I explore this for myself, I find anger there.
Some of the anger is probably directed towards the crashing itself and is rooted in fear. It’s unloved and unexamined fear taking the form of anger.
It may also be that crashing makes it difficult to manage the unloved and unexamined anger (always rooted in fear) in my system, so it comes up in those situations.
I have explored the contraction the grumpiness is/comes from, and it took a while but my relationship to it shifted. I see it more as an object now and can relate to it more intentionally.
There is more exploring to do, and we’ll see how this plays out in daily life in the future.
HAVING FUN IS THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
For me, having fun is the recipe for success.
– Janja Garnbret
This applies to many areas of life, including healing and awakening. When we have fun, we stay interested and motivated, and we approach whatever we are doing in a more playful and creative way and find new and interesting ways of doing it.
The healing and awakening process isn’t always fun, but it makes a big difference when we bring creativity, playfulness, and fun into it.
FRIDA KAHLO & RABBIT SYNCHRONICITIES
As my partner and I drove into the town of Villa de Leyva today, we talked about Frida Kahlo, and then saw a chocolate shop called Frida Cacao. We parked the car around the corner, went into the chocolate shop, saw a ceramic rabbit on top of a shelf, asked if it was for sale, and the woman said yes. It’s her lucky rabbit that she has had for years, but she is happy to let it have another life. We bought it.
After bringing it to the house, we realized the Alice in Wonderland connection, especially since we had watched the trailer for Matrix 4 a couple of days earlier. Following the rabbit has a special meaning for us these days due to a couple of upcoming classes and some other adventures we are embarking on.
So first, there was a Friday Kahlo synchronicity, which led us to the rabbit. The latter is perhaps strictly speaking not a synchronicity, since we decided to buy it and later found a connection. (And, yes, I am learning Spanish with the help of Calvin & Hobbes.)
An aside: This rabbit feels unusually alive, almost unnervingly so.
OCTOBER 5, 2021
HOW I MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT THE VACCINE
I had a chat with a Facebookacquaintance yesterday, and he brought up the topic of vaccines and turned out to be a vaccine conspiracy theorist. He repeated the same arguments as most in that camp seem to use, and they cannot be called arguments since they consisted of “dream on” and similar responses.
How do I make decisions about whether to take the vaccine or not?
The way I make decisions about anything I take into my body. I make myself reasonably informed in ordinary ways. I check the pendulum. (Which is just my fingers these days, I abandoned a physical pendulum a long time ago.) And I check in more directly with the energetics of the substance and how it relates to my body.
In the case of the mRNA covid vaccine, I got a strong “yes” on the pendulum, and when I checked with the energetics I did notice a relatively mild energetic “clash” which I resolved through channeling for perhaps 20-30 minutes. I assume an unresolved clash could have led to mild side effects, and as it was, I had none. If anything, I felt better after the vaccine which happens for some people with ME / CFS.
Why do I trust the pendulum and direct sensing of the energetics? For me, it’s one source of information that I look at in the bigger picture. I have used it daily for more than thirty years, and I honestly cannot remember a time it has been wrong so far when it comes to things I put into my body.
BIG DREAMS WITH LATIN AMERICAN CONNECTIONS
I have had several Big Dreams with Latin American connections in my life.
The first I remember was my early childhood dream of a black panther. I am in the jungle in South America, with a black panther. We have a deep and close connection and live our lives together.
Later, in my early twenties, I had two dreams. In one, I was with a romantic partner somewhere in Brazil. I saw the location on a map (North). In the other, I was in Costa Rica and worked at a small alternative and possibly residential school. I had a deep connection with the students.
Both were unusually vivid and felt like premonitions. Neither has been literally true (so far), but I am currently in Latin America with my partner and her family.
I have had similar dreams that did turn out to be true. For instance, in my teens, I had a dream of living in the Northwest of the US with a sense of community, deep nature connections, and so on. At the time, it seemed highly unlikely since I had no desire to live in the US (I have always been critical of US politics and mainstream culture), and yet it did happen more than two decades later. In the dream, I saw the location on a map, when I woke, I looked it up in an atlas, and that’s where I ended up living. (For reasons unrelated to this dream.)
WHAT-IF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
I don’t like to take anything I hear from others as the gospel truth. Either, I check it out for myself. Or I put it on the “maybe” shelf. And I aim to do the same with my own stories, including those reflecting my own experiences. Those are stories too. They are attempts at creating maps to help me orient in the world. They are not any final truth.
I also like to use what-if thought experiments.
I have a chronic illness. What if there are issues in me maintaining it? What would those be? What happens when I work on them? I don’t know if there is a connection, but it’s interesting to explore the what-if around this and see what happens.
What if there is reincarnation? If I have that idea, how does this change how I live now? Is it helpful? Or not? How can I approach it in a helpful and constructive way?
And so on. This helps me hold the ideas and stories more lightly, and still harvest anything useful in them.
OCTOBER 17, 2021
ASSUMING INFINITE KARMA
Karma can be understood in different ways.
One is that our actions somehow, mysteriously, make us experience a similar situation from the other side. We get to experience what others in the past experienced through our actions, some time in the past.
If that’s the case, I like to assume that I have infinite karma. If there are innumerable past lives, it makes sense we have created infinite karma. It puts us all in the same boat. And it shows the importance of working on how we relate to the situations in our life, whatever they may be.
I prefer to see karma more as patterns we create for ourselves. We have conditioning, which creates situations, and we get to experience those situations. Our patterns – of thought, emotions, reactivity, and so on – has consequences. So I can work on exploring and healing those patterns, and healing how I relate to life situations in general including the ones created from these patterns.
OCTOBER 22, 2021
WORKING WITH ENERGIES
Anything we experience is an energy – anger, sadness, thoughts with a charge, contractions, impulses, sexual desire, physical pain, and so on. Most of us know how to act on them, suppress them, or react to them. And there is another way: to befriend and explore them. That’s what we can do when we sit in meditation, and also what we can do through various forms of inquiry.
We can…
Notice them, and notice they happen as objects within consciousness.
Notice they happen within space, and perhaps as space.
Allow them as they are, and notice they already are allowed by life, mind, and space.
And perhaps also…
Thank them for protecting us. They are here to protect this human self, and this apparently separate self.
Allow them to get as big as they want. To take up as much space as they want. (This is a remedy for our tendency to contain or restrict them.)
Ask them what they want and need, and what lack they come from. In this noticing, they tend to be given what they really need. (Unless it’s a basic physical need like food, water, moderate temperature, and so on.)
Notice their nature, and that it’s no different from my own nature. To me, it’s all happening within and as what I am, what a thought may call awareness, consciousness, awakeness, and so on. Similarly, my nature is as capacity for the world as it appears to me, and that’s no different from any content of experience. It’s capacity for itself.
All of these energies reveal themselves as something else when we explore them intimately in this way.