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When I began meditating in the mid- seventies, my life turned a corner. I loved meditation and its many benefits. In time, it felt like I had an inner compass, though I didn’t have any idea where I was being led. I felt that my life had a purpose though it wasn’t more specific than that. It was simply a sense that I had a mission of some sort. I had an innate sense of wanting to help. Eventually, I settled on acupuncture, and for many years it felt like a very nice fit. As time went by I noticed that my clients and friends, and certainly myself, had a tendency through their repetitive negative thinking, unchallenged belief systems, unconscious limitations, and unresolved emotions to simply draw their symptoms back to them like self- inflicted wounds. I wanted to help, but felt discouraged because I realized the process of transformation, healing, and lasting change was very complex. So much more than a well placed needle with good intentions, and patient compliance was involved. While frustrating to realize this, I also found this quite fascinating. I was now like a detective following the leads for a compelling case hoping to get to the bottom of things. I decided to get some training in Gestalt psychotherapy with a brilliant couple of meditating psychotherapists. Certainly, this opened many doors for me, and gave me tools to use with my clients. We explored using the meditative state, as well as the field of energy and light that exists around us, to hold our experiences and assist us in becoming more expansive. By doing this the field was enlivened, its power enhanced, and the limitations that troubled us were dissolved into the field. It was a yogic approach that worked beautifully as long as one was committed to holding one’s state. Like exercise, if you were committed to doing it, it worked. The commitment was the key. And as powerful a tool as this was for me, I quickly learned from the clients in my practice that it wasn’t going to be the way for each of them. The question emerged for me: what keeps people from committing to their own inner state of the Self, or Soul? I pondered this question, and couldn’t get beyond the obvious answers- lack of interest, lack of understanding, lack of motivation, etc. But these weren’t the type of people who were coming to me for help for the most part. In that open accepting state of questioning, I simply began to sense something over time. Something was organizing the recalcitrant symptoms, limited thinking, repetitive unresolved emotions and their resulting states of consciousness. I had been trained to believe it was energetic patterning that could be corrected by acupuncture, or by opening charkas, or star gates, or the next modality, but what I was sensing wasn’t as neat and clear, and simple as everything I had learned in years of training, and continuing education. Correcting the flow of energy in an acupuncture pathway, or the spin of the chakra, or bringing a limiting story about one’s life into a bigger spiritual context could certainly help, but what was organizing the whole phenomena? As I hung out with this question with deep curiosity, what began to emerge for me was that there was a matrix of patterning that created a dense structure. The dense structure was locked, and around it organized a complex of symptoms - ranging from physical to emotional to mental to spiritual, as well as collective consciousness energies. There were limited beliefs about oneself, one’s circumstances, and a whole cadre of reinforcement that threatened to keep the structure in tact. |
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