Relaxing into Life

Posted on September 1, 2010 by mcallister

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve often noticed that laziness is another good stimulus for creativity. In other words, if something has to be done why use more energy or effort than necessary to accomplish it?

Working a summer office job in high school I can remember people commenting on something I was doing with a bit of surprise. I can’t remember the details now (except that it involved the office copier and 200 page reports), but I remember responding that the creativity had come from being lazy. Contrary to popular views, this sort of laziness promotes efficiency, something like inventing the washing machine when you are tired of doing the clothes by hand.

A few years later I started practicing Tai Chi. As one early teacher used to say, the whole point is to learn to relax. When asked how you did this he would say, “practice, practice, practice”. As in most things in life, being relaxed, rather than tense or nervous, yields better results. It is also physically easier and less tiring. One day I was playing pool with a friend of mine and I thought of my tai chi, dropped my center, relaxed into my legs, and found that my playing flowed effortlessly.

Many years later I had occasion to spend several months digging out the lower level of a house to allow new windows and doors to go in. For a number of reasons I choose to do this by hand. Working again from tai chi I focused on relaxing as much as possible and found that I could release the tension and soreness from my body this way. I also taught myself the easiest and most efficient way to work with a pick and shovel. Over the years I have learned that if you want to learn the most efficient (easiest) way to do something: focus on staying as relaxed as possible while doing it. Your being will naturally find the desired result.

Think about all great athletes, artists, or practitioners of any art. When we wish to express the mastery we see in them, we say that they made it look effortless.

In the energy work that I do the concept of effortlessness is emphasized, though it is really more an attitude or state of being. Anything can be done with, or without effort. It is both easier and usually more efficient to do it without effort. Lack of effort is not at all the same as not paying attention, it is about relaxing while you do something. Find the tension in your body or being and relax it and everything will improve.

I once had a chance to help with a rice harvest in rural Japan, some of which was done by hand. This is indeed tiring work. Harvest time is also the time of year when there are festivals in the villages, including dancing. Watching the dancing one evening I realized that the movements in the dance where the same as in the harvesting and that they also both movements seen in martial arts. Over the millenia people have found the easiest, most efficient motions of the body. This is natural at the end of a day of harvesting, or a long practice session, you have no energy for anything else.

So if you are interested in efficiency, in the optimal way to do something, it will also be the easiest and the most relaxed. Remember to factor in emotional and mental energy as well, then it can be fun as well as efficient. Learning to relax may sound like being lazy, but as long as there is presence, awareness and attention (no limp noodles), there is life and ease and grace.

(© 9/2010)

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Sunlight Reflections

Posted on August 15, 2010 by mcallister

Take a moment and remember all the places you’ve gone swimming. Remember all the swimming you’ve done out doors, in sunlight, where the water is shallow, clear, and you can see the patterns of sunlight on the bottom. It might be a beach, or a lake, or a swimming pool, but the sunlight is refracted by the surface of the water and collects into ever moving patterns of light. Ribbons of light that intersect in brighter blobs making a network that depends on the patterns of waves above.

When I was in college and studying physics I always had a sense that this was an image of how energy collects to form particles, which move and interact, always changing. I never “worked out” this metaphor in detail, but have often remembered it since. There is a field of energy that exists everywhere, and the particles are just denser places. There is light everywhere on the bottom of a pool, but it’s collected, focused by the waves into brighter ribbons and blobs, into forms and particles.

Later I studied yoga and my teacher spoke about how consciousness became denser as it came out from Source and into the physical. He spoke as if there were planes, or levels with interfaces which could reflect and refract consciousness as it emerged, helping to give it form. This is what happens at the surface of the water, the interface with the air above, and the light which was uniform is refracted and reflected and takes on form and pattern as it enters the water and shines onto the bottom.

Spirit infuses matter, as the light shines into the water. It projects into matter, but is refracted in ways that produce form. It is denser in some places, bright and noticeable, and less so in others, but never absent, only relatively less present.

When the water becomes still the patterns fade, the light is everywhere the same, until a breeze comes or a swimmer moves, and waves are formed and the pattern of light and dark reappears. Perhaps this it how the mind works, creating patterns, dramas, and dreams; by refracting the light of spirit into brighter and less bright, light and shadow we may call it. When the thoughts and emotions still and the surface calms, spirit can shine evenly into us. The forms disappear, and we may miss the variety, the beauty of the patterns, but the stillness allows peace and an un-refracted experience of the divine.

In your mind’s eye, or the next time you go swimming under the sun, notice these patterns and let your being remember how spirit infuses you as the sunlight does the water. Notice what images or metaphors arise for you.

(© 8/2010)

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Deeper Affirmations

Posted on August 1, 2010 by mcallister

Several weeks ago I was having one of those days where mental focus and clarity about my current spiritual journey was less than optimal. Being reworked by Spirit again, leaving me to trust in my higher Self which knows this business better than I. Fortunately a good friend of mine was available to take a look at things for me and in the course of having a conversation with my higher Self and was told to remind me to make use of affirmations.

My fuzzy mind reacted with an attitude; been there done that, not likely to help. This is in spite of having made use of affirmations, or self-hypnotic suggestions for many years. When I first read about affirmations they were discussed as a way to reprogram the mind. Repeating a well constructed affirmation would stir up counter programing and belief, all the reasons something wasn’t possible. Eventually this mental back talk would be cleared out and the new positive belief installed.

When I trained as a hypnotherapist, self-hypnotic suggestions took this a step further. By dropping into a trance state first, conscious mental filtering is by-passed and the suggestions enter directly into the subconscious. This is a process I teach most of my clients and have used extensively and effectively myself.

In spite of the mental brush-off I was inspired to work that week with a new affirmation. As I repeated it to myself as during the following days, I noticed something new. There was a body level response. I was feeling the affirmation. It wasn’t just a mental loop of words going over and over and fading into automatic background (not that that’s bad). I would think the words to myself and I would feel my being respond with the quality that the words represented.

It was like dropping stones in a well and hearing them splash, except I was dropping them into myself and feeling the echo. This was pretty cool. As a ceremonialist I recognized this as a form of invocation. The words were invoking a state. Rather than somehow reprograming myself to be something new, I was calling forth something that was already there. This is what my higher Self had been after. It wanted me to use affirmations to remind myself of what I already was. Calling forth qualities that my higher/deeper Self already knew and could bring forward into the receptive space I created by “listening”.

I have been shown over and over in my work that we are already everything we need to be. We are souls that are fully capable and realized. Just not fully conscious. But the places that need to heal have the wisdom for that healing, the Self we want to be is already existing, even if we are not fully aware of it. We are deep, reaching all the way to Source. If we call down into ourselves another part of us will answer.

So when you next work with affirmations, try them with this in mind. Say the words; then pause; listen/feel for the echo from your Self. Create a space to feel them in your being and know that they are already true. Calling your Self into awareness you will be everything you can be.

(© 8/2010)

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Finding Love within Yourself

Posted on July 15, 2010 by mcallister

I had a teacher who spoke of the difference between being in love with someone and simply being in love.

The egotistical love of self is a emotional/mental affair in which we are focused on the beauty of our personality. As with most egotistical functions it is usually driven by fear and self-doubt, and is not really a true self satisfaction, or a true love.

The great teachers have been aiming at something else, which is why there is no real danger of confusing the Love they advocate with an active ego. Our deep nature, our true Self, is Love. Simple as that. We have the ability to reach inside and find it, to call it forth, to feel ecstatic love welling up inside and overflowing into the world.

In the body it may feel similar to the love that we experience with another human being, and we often believe we need someone else to call it forth. Thus the need to love and be loved.

But when we can feel into our own being and accept what is there, including the fear, the doubt, the anger, and the sorrow, space opens over time, the temple is cleaned, and we open to love. When this happens it is the most powerful embrace you have ever felt, an acceptance of yourself as you would your dearest lover.

Perhaps it is easier to consider this an embrace of the divine, an ecstasy from God, or Goddess, rather than an embrace of self, but this is mental chatter. We are at our root divine, and the divine can come through us as much as it comes through nature, or a lover.

When you feel this you know that it is completely different from selfish ego love, for another or for yourself. There is no possessiveness, in fact the more you share it the more it grows. There is no underlying doubt or fear, though there is room for these in this temple and accepting them they are transformed. Love of Self is a state of being that encompasses the whole body, the whole being, and the ego mind is relaxed and lulled to sleep, though other aspects of mind may open and be crystal clear.

Experiencing yourself as Love is a joy that impels you to raise your voice and sing, that calls for you to lose your small self rather than celebrate it, knowing that it is not needed really, that you can do and relate from a different place. It is never selfish in the way we mean that term, as there is no small self involved. It is however, the Self,

If you are not sure of the difference, invoke the Love that is your Self. Ask with all your heart for it to come to you, and it will. Ask it to teach you and it will. Slowly perhaps, or swiftly, radiantly. With patience and perseverance this Love will deepen and grow, until there is no room for ego love; fear, doubt, loneliness or selfishness. Sing loud and call yourself home.
Blessings and enjoy.

(© 7/2010)

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The Web of Sunlight

Posted on July 1, 2010 by mcallister

The Colorado foothills are especially beautiful this year. Green and lush from the heavy spring rains they are spotted with the color of wild flowers. The day before the Solstice I was assisting a ceremony in the foothills above Boulder, surrounded by fields and pines vibrant and alive under a blue afternoon sky accentuated with the puffy piles of white that are summer afternoon clouds in over the mountains. The birds were signing and calling, a buck wandered across the opposite hillside. Waiting by a path that was the entrance to the ceremonial site I was smudging the participants as they arrived, letting the smoke clear their space, helping them to ground and release whatever didn’t serve them, to be open to the celebration that they had come for.

Between greetings, I let my mind drift, opening my heart to the magnificent manifestation of Spirit and Life around me. I find that at times like these I often notice pattern and detail as much a grand scope. Focused on the grass and flowers near the path I heard a buzzing sound over my shoulder. Looking around I noticed a bee had landed on a flower near my feet. This little guy was busy appreciating the flower in a different way, collecting the sweet nectar that he would return to his hive to contribute to the making of the honey there. Perhaps it was the Solar theme of the Solstice, but in my open state a knowing welled up, taking the form of thought, but coming from a more intuitive level. I was looking at a small step in a chain of solar energy flowing through the world.

The chain expanded out from the bee and the flower to the sun shining its light, received by the leaves of this flower, converted into energy which was used to grow and generate the flower, with its yellow daisy petals, and the nectar that the bee was collecting. In the other direction the nectar would become honey, stored solar energy, to feed young bees, bears, or humans. These bees, bears, or humans having enjoyed the honey would convert its sweetness into movement, or muscle, or store it for the future.

Looking up and out from the bee and its flower I knew that the landscape around me was filled with similar flows, a web of moving, transforming energy, connecting all the visible pieces in ways often invisible to our usual sight. Awareness that the Sun we were about to celebrate is the source of all the energy that flows through this world came through me. The Sun that powers the vast and varied creativity of life on planet Earth. This energy changes into so many forms, is passed back and forth, from plant to animal to plant or human. It lifts the rain that powers the rivers. It falls on the Earth differently at different latitudes and helps to generate the winds. It raises the clouds and creates the lightening. It is stored by the plants, those essential gatherers on the front line of Earthly life, and is passed along as vegetables, grain, fruit, or falls with the leaves and nourishes more plants. In the seas and the swamps it was stored millions of years ago and became coal, or oil, or gas.

This world is literally a web of flowing, transforming, solar energy. I invite you to make some time to go outside, to feel into the clouds, the trees, the bees and the flowers, to open to an appreciation for the rich flow of sunlight in all its forms. Looking with your intuition and feeling from your soul, become aware of the life force flowing everywhere. Appreciate how you are held and supported in this web, and how precious and necessary it is for your life. Find the joy in being consciously alive, and give yourself permission to notice this level of life in the world around you, inside yourself.

Eat some honey, appreciate some amber, be blessed by the Sun in all its forms. Step into the sacred embodied in the world and in yourself.

(© 7/2010)

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