You have a tumour, I say “disassociate yourself from the pain”
You suffered terrible abuse as a child, I say “disassociate yourself from your story”
Your child dies at three years old from Leukaemia I say… what do I say?
How do I explain any of it to you?
I imagine you’d just like to tell me where to poke my theory, and get on with your pain and grief without my stupid ideas…
Yet, I have spent over half a lifetime considering these questions. It still doesn’t give me licence, but maybe it would help you to hear me out.
God moves in mysterious ways got old for me very early, when I lost my father at a young age. (for both of us..) How does a young man deal with the loss of his anchor?
Senseless loss
How does one make any sense of “senseless loss?”
I took the standard route — drink until you forget how sad you are, drink until the hole that was left by your fathers passing seems to get a little smaller. It’s always there again in the morning, seeming deeper and more savage, but as the next binge draws in, the edges can be made more hazy for a short while.
As we all know, this isn’t really a great path. I was burning money, and flushing my health down the loo, whilst not solving anything.
Spiritual journey
This is where my spiritual journey began.
After a year of abject misery, my then wife pointed me in the direction of a “Spirit Medium”
This was the LAST thing I was interested in, but the pain was so deep, that I figured I had very little option left. If nothing else, it would make a funny drink story for my stupid friends.
I’ve written about this many times, so I’ll not bore you further here, with that story, You’ll be able to find it elsewhere in my blog.
Suffice to say, I had an astonishing time, with a really talented guy, who brokered a very sensible, familiar and happy conversation between my father and I. It seemed like the most normal thing, and helped me out of my nose dive.
I shed many tears that day, released the loss of my lovely dad, and simultaneously decided that there was more to death than meets the eye.
It’s an interesting stepping stone. The Catholic (in my case) and Christian church in general peddle the whole Heaven/Hell scenario. Most adults see through this story pretty early on.
When you see the corruption in the church, from the people who run the system, it doesn’t give you much faith in the general story..
Then to discover that there might be life after death..what a shock, and what a stunning turn round in my belief systems, all they’d told me were falsehoods.
The Path
That was the first foot on the path for me.
I looked into Reiki — nice enough, but not ground breaking for me.
I started to wonder if I could access the “Information” from my father myself?
I came across a statement “let no man, stand between me and my god” — it removed the last layer for me. From then on, this became a thoroughly personal journey.
I wasn’t looking for another Guru (although I found some…) I was looking for something I could do for myself.
This is one of my life patterns. I’m not particularly good at asking other people for help.
I tend to rather teach myself how to do it, rather than have somebody else do it for me.
Subsequently, I’m a master of many trades, skilled at few!
I decided to learn how to channel.
I had already had a few interesting experiences. Whilst going through a Seichiem (Like Reiki) ceremony, I’d experience my initiation (blessing) being given to me by a monk in a maroon robe and with a bald head.
I had my eyes shut, but “knew” this monk had walked into the room.
I saw the scene so vividly in my meditation, that I was 100% convinced that he was actually there. (I assumed that it was all part of the ceremony, and that when we opened our eyes, we’d all be surprised to see who had joined us!)
I was dumfounded to discover he wasn’t actually there in the room when we opened our eyes, and nobody else had had the experience! — I had no way to explain that..
I became quite successful at “calling in” information for other people, and startled quite a few people (myself included) when I would suddenly pop out a piece of information, that would floor a client. (I’d be sitting there, wondering to myself — “where did that come from” or “who said that!?”)
Science and Mao
Thus far, anything I have offered you is purely experiential, and very personal to me.
You probably don’t know me, I might be crazy, or a born liar.
I felt this strongly, so decided that what was required was to understand the scientific structure that might allow for such events.
At the same time, I was moving from studying Traditional Qigong, that had been taught for thousands of years, to a more modern structure, Medical Qigong.
This was the Scientific study of Qigong in Universities all over China.
It seems that Chairman Mao invested heavily in Western paradigm medicine, and when he couldn’t afford to roll it out over all of Chine, he went looking for a cheaper alternative.
There have been barefoot healers all throughout Chinese history.
Clearly, we knew about Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture, but knew little of the healing power of Qigong. Mao ordered that this information be collected, tested and certified.
They understood that certain exercises were good for healing cancer, but why?
These exercises were put under the microscope, tested and rejected or added to the Medical Qigong canon of work.
I was lucky that a gentleman called Jerry Alan Johnson had studied extensively in China, and brought all his work back to the USA to start a school. One of his students was teaching in the UK. I trained with him.
For me lifting the lid on why certain exercises were used in certain ways was amazing.
I’d been so used to Chinese teachers just saying to me “Do what I say, don’t ask questions!”
Now I was able to level a Western analytical mind at this once esoteric practice.
Zhineng Qigong
There’s a standard story that does the rounds, “Chinese research work isn’t as good as Western research work..” this is the typical Oxbridge thinking that’s allowed China to sail past everybody in many academic fields. In Dr pang’s facility near Beijing nearly half a million people cured themselves from life threatening illnesses by using these principles and for about $15 per day
In the West, there has never been a formal study of the power of Qigong.
(Of course the fact that the Pharmaceutical companies have our Universities in a parasitic death grip is not going to help this process along either..)
Now I had the first real tool, and the most basic understanding of the principles of energy.
The next question had to be, what exactly is this energy called Qi?
After Medical Qigong, I moved to a style called Zhineng Qigong.
As mentioned above, it had an exceptional record of helping clients to recover from serious illnesses, but the more I studied, the more I realised that it was being presented as a science.
Dr Pang the founder felt, as I did, that in order for such things to be taken seriously, then they should stand up to scrutiny, present repeatable scientific results, and be safe and easy to learn.
His system had no god, or gurus, just science.
The only issue was that the structure of the Universe was being expressed in terms of Qi, which was still alien to the Western World.
It was like asking a person used to measuring in Centigrade if they knew what the temperature was in Fahrenheit.
The principle’s seemed to be parallel, but nobody had bothered to try to draw them together.
DIY
My personal quest for knowledge had now seen me teach myself to build websites, work in Radio both Dj-ing and learning to Interview. I was a self-taught IT hardware consultant. I had figured out how to edit and make TV programmes, and had started a company called PositiveTV with a friend.
PositiveTV opened some astonishing doors for me, two principal ones were, meeting Lynne McTaggart and the other Dr Jude Currivan.
Lynne published several important books about “Field theory” — whilst not being a scientist herself, she was a researcher, who accessed some of the most influential thinkers in the area, and pulled their information together into her seminal book “The Field”
In Zhineng Qigong, we talk about the Qi Field, here for the first time I was encountering cutting edge thinking from Western Science that mirrored what I was being told in Qigong theory…
Jude Currivan, has a Masters in Physics, specialising in Quantum Physics. She won the Oxford University Physics prize and was mentored by Professor Dennis Sciama. Dennis was the mentor and teacher of Stephen Hawking.
I was able to discuss on many occasions the “simple” structures of the Universe with Jude, and come to the understanding that Dr Pang’s model of “Qi, Space and Information” matched perfectly with the Western understanding of Quantum Physics.
Quantum Qigong
Namely that energy moves from being into non-being, and back.
From the Quantum understanding, “Information” can never be destroyed.
It is binary in nature, and has no energetic value. However, this information influences matter at all levels of our Universe.
Having found a parallel in the two systems, this gave me faith that Qigong was indeed a brilliant tool, and that I could now start to describe in scientific terms how qigong operated.
When you see that Qigong is indeed a tool that allows you to manipulate matter, then this begs the question what is Information?
In Zhineng, we believe that Information is equally as important in the healing story as matter.
The more I looked at it, the more I understood that this Information that pervades everything in our Universe, and is indeed likely to be the entire “container” of our Universe, this probably made it a more important candidate!
Meditation
Next came the study of Meditation from a scientific view.
What was it actually about?
I discovered that you could lull yourself back to sleep using meditation, and never actually understand what “Awareness” actually was.
The key understanding from Meditation was that you have to be able to take control of your mind, stop the wild horses running, before you’d be able to realise yourself. But sitting for hours with a mantra or an empty head, didn’t necessarily lead to awakening.
Time to take a side-loop.
As a therapy, I studied Rebirthing with the lovely Leonard Orr.
Leonard had discovered that by using a certain breathing technique, that one could re-experience birth trauma, and thus let it go. The repetitive breathing, which often lead to Tetany, (cramping sensations) and thence to a heightened awareness state, really helped the mind to stop and for the body to release trauma in a acceptable way.
Whilst at his centre in Virginia, I was given a book by him.
I asked about the Tibetan book of the Dead, he said “Don’t worry about that, read Michael Newton — Journey of Souls,” and thrust it into my hands.
Michael Newton
In short, Michael Newton regressed thousands of clients through Hypnotherapy, to a time after they die, and before they are reborn!
It’s astonishing. Whatever the experience these people are having, they ALL have astonishingly similar stories. Stories that fit very well with the Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) that we hear of from time to time.
Each person, under Hypnotherapy, tells of a Rainbow of light along which they travel, back to a “school of souls” where they work out what they could have done better in their last life, and set intentions for their next life.
He presents about 40 cases, from his files of thousands, all of which tell a similar story of life, about before we are REBORN!
We are led to understand that the challenges of this life are set by us, and for us, before we come to this life.
Using this idea, we understand that we might choose to be a child who dies young, or that we might choose to be abused, in order to surmount these challenges, to move ourselves forward on the developmental scale..
More often than not, we fail in part. We are recycled through our “school,” with our own little soul group of friends who we’re are always with through-out time, and try again.
Let me repeat — you decide what happens to you in your next life…
Having read this book in Virginia, I offered one last Rebirthing session to a troubled young man who worked at the centre, before I set off back home to the UK.
Right there before me, his breathing session took him into a Soul regression, just like Michael Newton’s! I had just appropriated all the tools from his book to help guide this young guy to an amazing resolution! The Universe moves in strange ways!!
Our Responsibility
It’s a really thorny subject, trying to ask people to take responsibility for their own problems.
Seen from a Universal perspective, it makes total sense. Seen from the child-like state most Adults stay in all their lives, it just seems offensive and unkind.
So, I introduce another system here.
Most Adults never make it past the level of about twelve years old, emotionally speaking.
Most adults are still using strategies that they developed as a child to navigate the adult world.
Take a brief glance into a debate in the UK Parliament to see what I mean! Grown men bullying and shouting at each other in mocking tones..Very grown up indeed!
Emotions
My studies forced me to ask the question “How do my emotions work?”
My teacher Lu describes it this way.
When you are born, you are at your most “pure”
As we go through childhood, we are given second-hand information by our Parents, then by school, religion and nationality. Later in life we are given further information by work, lovers and friends.
We also cloud this “Pure soul” with information we tell ourselves.
There’s the old joke “If your best friend said the same things to you, as you say to yourself, you’d never hang out with them again!”
This is the bracket of thoughts such as “I’m terrible at learning, working, relationships etc..”
The last aspect of self is Ego. Given this build up of information about “who we are” — we are sure to be challenged from time to time. The Ego is there as your defence system. It protects the ideas that you’ve been given.
Say you were white, and brought up in the deep south of the USA in the 1940’s
You might believe in White Supremacy.
If you then travelled to the mixed culture of post-war New York, you’d find plenty of triggers for your ego, as every idea you held to be true was challenged repeatedly. Your Ego would repeatedly be triggered to step in and defend what you believed.
The Ego
So, the ego is a guard dog. It stays quiet most of the time in a civilised man, but still lurks in the background.
In Chinese Medicine theory, each organ is associated with a set of emotions.
As an example The Liver and Gall-bladder are a pair.
We used to say that a person was very “Liverish” or “had the ‘Gall’ to do something…”
The idea was that Anger is seated in the Liver.
The liver is the “Commander of the Blood” in Chinese Medicine, so when you get angry you “see red” and your face becomes flushed red with blood..a liver reaction.
We see the emotion tied to the function.
I was fascinated to look at how people function. Their complex emotions swilling round their lives, and how easy it was to see that their emotions for the main part were the seat of their chronic illnesses.
We see that an abusive marriage, leads to an “over-flow” of chemicals from the Kidneys, and the overtaxed system eventually collapses, creating a cancerous system.
We understand that unresolved childhood trauma, leads to worrying as an adult, and that over-worrying stimulates the Spleen, leading to digestive issues and cancer in the bowel.
(These are MASSIVE oversimplifications of a lifetime of unresolved trauma, but they are examples from my client files, of real people.)
What can we do?
How do we clear these types of problems?
From my perspective, there’s a three-pronged approach.
The first is to clean up one’s diet, and supplement well. (If you want to heal, you have to have all the right tools and conditions there to let the body fix itself.)
The second is to assiduously practice Qigong. (A daily stretch and massage of all the organs and systems helps blood to flow well. Nutrients to be delivered efficiently, the body is able to assimilate this Universal energy Qi, and the mind can settle into a healing space.)
The Third is to properly gain control of the mind. Healing can become super-focused if the raging torrent of your mind can be stilled.
Gaining some quiet in the mind is a crucial step in the process, but it goes much further.
I often speak of Mental Hygiene. Just as it’s seen to be important to clean your house, it’s just as important to clean your mind.
My thanks go out to one of my students who put the process so clearly for me.
“When I sit in meditation, and my mind is raging, I often ‘know’ that I’ll not get to a quiet space for a while. So I sit there and ‘catch’ the ideas and comments that my mind throws up. I then ‘pigeon-hole’ them into categories — so I can see what their root cause is!”
Lovely, for me that totally did it.
Observe the voice inside. What did it say? Why did it say that? What’s the root problem that it springs from?
This Self-observation IS the path to Self-awareness.
Clear the debris
Firstly, we have to clean away the stories that our mind repeats over and over.
I used to get very angry with other road users when they didn’t meet my standards! It was actually my father’s standards they were not meeting! It was actually my Father’s reactions that were springing up in me! I could hear his voice in my head “Oh bloody hell!” he’d mutter darkly as some poor person got in his way..
The circumstances of my birth were less than optimal.
(Going by what I discovered with Michael Newton, it’s clear that I had decided to give myself this challenge, this time round!)
So many of my stories — and that’s all they were — sprung from this poisoned well of ideas.
So much “need” and so much “hurt child” — it could easily have brought me low, if I haven’t decided to dig them out and find out if they were true, when held up to the light.
That terrible thing from the past, is it still happening to you at this very moment?
That worry from the future, has it actually happened?
We use these ‘Stories’ to build our lives. They are mostly passed events or future fears, but NONE are actually happening right now.
This is the idea of living in the present.
Past is Past
It’s easy to say “I live in the present” — what this is actually modelling is a person who has become self-aware.
If you are truly Self-aware, then there is no past and no future, just you, here and now.
We often say it, but few of us actually manage it for real.
If we haven’t off-loaded the baggage from our pasts, how will we ever truly live in the present moment? The old patterns will continuously pull us back to the old worries.
We are still children in adult’s bodies.
The realisation of this as a problem, at least brings us to adulthood.
We can finally move on from being children to some level of realisation.
There’s a new catch here.
To be fair, if it were that easy to figure out, then we would have done it thousands of years ago!
You are now an Adult in this system we call life. You can start to see the true Yin and Yang of life and death. Perhaps death holds a little less sting, because you now realise that you’ll be coming back round again soon! Start to remove the fear of death, start to think in longer cycles such as a few lifetimes, and perhaps you can be a bit happier in this life?
The Onion
This is where the next layer of the Onion peels back, and we start to zoom in and out to see a bigger picture.
As we Zoom into Quantum Physics, we discover that the table in front of me is just a “standing wave of atoms” — it appears solid, but look inside, it’s just molecules. We start to drill down, and find tinier and tinier atomic units, until we reach ‘Plancks.’ The smallest (currently) calculable unit of our Universe. Interestingly Dr Pang gets to the same scale in Qigong Science with units called ‘Hun Yuan Qi’ — the smallest devisable unit of our Universe.
As we zoom out into Cosmology, we start to appreciate the enormity of our Universe.
Jude Currivan suggests that it was started not so much with a “Big bang” but more of a “Big Breath” — like the inflation of a balloon.
In layman’s terms, this “Information” layer could be seen as the skin of the balloon, with everything inside being informed by it.
All the information we have now, and will ever have is available to us in this balloon.
The fact that the “Information” of my father still existed somewhere, and that it was possible to connect and interrogate it, now makes sense.
The feeling that parents go on after death.
The idea that we are essentially “programmes” developed to play with this information, experience it, expand it, and test it, somehow now seems more likely.
The feeling that things are moving forward in an evolutionary fashion, is a function of our information gathering. Processing and storing.
In Chinese culture, they say “As above, so below” — we are mirroring the Information systems of the Universe, in our Cloud computing. It’s clumsy, but very similar. You are “your phone or tablet” and the Universe is “your cloud,” only you seem to have forgotten the password once again!
Adults
So here we are as “Adults,” finally awake from the children of the world, who all want wars, consumption and money! But what now?
We are starting to understand the ancient symbology behind the ubiquitous “OM” symbol, tattooed on every hippy’s arm, and stuck to every camper van through time!
The three “arms” of the symbol represent “Sleeping, dreaming and waking” the three states of Mankind. If you have got this far, they you have probably got to the awakening stage.
But, cryptically, there’s that line drawn between you and the “Dot” — what does that signify?
It signifies the DREAMSTATE that we are all living in. (Perhaps you could say the “Programme” in computer terms, that runs us..)
The dot represents PURE AWARNESS ,the line is the division between the dream we inhabit, and pure awareness.
Here’s the final hurdle.
Is it enough for you to be awake in the dream? Are you happy to be a dreaming adult, amongst a crowd of sleepwalking children? Why wouldn’t you be, it’s a fine place to be.
You could meditate every day, and do qigong — eat well, live well, die well, recycle well — rinse and repeat. For most, that seems like a pretty fine plan.
Let’s make a small aside here, and ask what Daoism (Taoism) is all about.
To put a massive thought system into a trite nut-shell, it’s about being in alignment with the flow of the dreamstate. If you manage to swim “with” the river of this dreamstate, then your life will be easy and happy. If you choose to swim “against” the flow of the river, you’ll bring yourself illness and trouble in your life. The game has pretty simple rules! Work a stressful sixty hour week, chase fame and fortune, smoke and drink to self-medicate.. and see where that leads you!
Lead a happy, simple healthy life and compare possible outcomes.
OK then, to the final lap.
The very fabric of the Universe is UNITY AWARNESS.
At this level, we are outside the “Programme” — The Matrix doesn’t add a helpful metaphor. In the Matrix, the machines in the world, control the people in the world. We are going beyond all programming.
My Qigong has taken me to this place on occasion, and I want to go back there again and again.
Tree-hugger
Another of my students reminded me of an experience I’d had on retreat a few years ago.
We were set a simple practice. Sit in nature, connect with nature, heal ourselves.
I sat with a tree (Oh dear — he’s a tree hugger!)
As I stilled myself, I was suddenly aware that as I breathed out, this tree was breathing in! When it breathed out, I breathed in! (It was lovely, the tree was taking my CO2 and giving me Oxygen — we were in total harmony)
I then merged with the tree, and the landscape around and felt total Unity for a little while. No time, no space, just unity.
It was a familiar feeling that I had experienced in Scotland on another of our retreats. (There’s a theme here — seems my daily life is too busy to experience this often! )
Note to self- make more space!! — Start with “stopping writing and starting to DO!”
Standing in Meditation, on retreat, surrounded by friends and students, a hole in the Universe suddenly opened below my feet! I was “looking forward” (with my eyes closed as you’d expect) suddenly in my ‘peripheral vison’ I was aware of the whole universe stretched out below me.
It was accompanied by a quiet “whooshing” sound, like somebody had opened a window on a train.
I marvelled at the wonder of it all for a while.
Eventually my unruly ego mind suddenly butted in (It hates you to go off-script!)
“Hey, you might fall out into the Universe through that hole, and never come back,” it shouted!
With that I found myself unceremoniously dumped back into the retreat hall in Scotland!
(Back to life, back to reality..whatever that may be!)
You are God!
If you wonder where this final journey of discovery starts?
The most impossible thing to understand is that “You are God” — you are total awareness, you always have been, and so am I!
There is only apparent separation between you and I, and between us and life out there, generated by our Ego’s.
Quieten the Ego, realise the true nature of self.
How? It’s using a meditative mind to contemplate the question “Who am I?”
It’s beyond Meditation and Qigong. Contemplation is the key.
If you can hold stillness long enough to see the truth, day by day, that you are NOT your stories, that you do not need a guru. Day by day you realise that this bizarre two dimensional information layer is expressing itself as this three dimensional game. (Think binary bits and bytes, making a 3D programme)
Step by step you peel away the scales over your eyes, and you start to see the Universe for the lovely game that it actually is.
Then, you can realise the awareness that is you, and everything.
Patch by patch you can join the understandings together and stitch yourself a new reality — the real truth of who you are and what this game is all about.
Discover Unity.
Discover the Truth of everything.
Discover that there is only one force, and that is Truth.
You are it and it is you.