Excerpts from Book:
From a young age, I held the belief that I was insensitive. How did I come to that conclusion? Well, my mother was very emotional about things and I was not. She was intuitive and I was unaware of anything extraordinary.
However, when I hit my thirties, I began to entertain the idea that I was not insensitive. I was defensive, locked up, and had a wide variety of barriers and walls around me. It occurred to me that perhaps I was extremely sensitive and had developed a wide variety of mechanisms to shut down my awareness and shut out the world.
I think we all have the capacity to be aware of much more than we currently are. I once thought psychic abilities were gifts that certain people have and others don’t. My own stories illustrate that it is possible to develop awareness and uncover greater knowing, regardless of what capacity we start with.
The back drop for this book is the story of my younger me. I was severely abused as a child, repressed all memories of that abuse, and created an alternate childhood story. I moved into adulthood looking outside myself for motivation and answers, being numbed out and dissociated, and fairly unaware of myself, my body, and my choices. I lived in a stress-free world, but would wake up with anxiety and frequently depressed.
Developing Awareness is a collection of stories that describe my process in cultivating awareness, including questioning the modus operandi and trusting my own knowing. These stories were written before I had awareness of what had happened to me as a child.
This book is the first volume in what I anticipate will be a five-volume set. For this tenth anniversary edition, I have added commentary to the stories to make them more meaningful and opportunities at the end of each chapter for the reader to actively reflect on the readings. This edition also includes new material: A story of how I changed my money reality to have financial freedom and ease.
My desire is to create more ease and joy for people by providing them with encouragement and tools for accessing their own inner knowing.
The journey of the spirit can be humorous, lively, and sometimes outright drudgery. I am amazed how wonderful the path has been. Many times I have wondered why anyone, including myself, would go down this road when it is difficult and frequently clouded in mist. Frankly, I started out wanting a clear view on a sunny day from a mountain peak. Instead, I often found myself in the deep, dark forest at night.
Now, I enjoy the deep, dark forest. Indeed, I have actually learned to embrace whatever life presents me. What follows are a collection of stories from my life that I hope will provide amusement, insight, and inspiration.
Not surprisingly, I learned that the answers are within only after spending years and years looking outside myself. Early on, I was taught that negativity was to be avoided. The goal was to protect myself from negative energy and strive to be good and pure. So, I sought to do this. However, I immediately ran into a problem. I could not determine what was bad and what was good. It would seem that the distinction between good and bad would be easy to make, but it was not clear to me at all.
I heard people talk about horrible events ultimately bringing them gifts. Others would claim that killing would be a good thing if it was someone like Hitler. I found that while taking care of others seemed like a good thing, it was not good if it prevented others from growing. I simply could not find clear cut rules on what was good and bad. Inherent in every “bad” thing was good and in every “good” thing was bad.
Events are too interconnected for a mere mortal to know the full ramifications of each action they take. And even if all effects could be known, how does one judge good and bad? I have now abandoned the belief that there is good and evil. I no longer accept that positive is to be sought after and negative to be avoided. The truth is that everything is a blend of both and, perhaps more accurately, neither. The world simply is as it is. There is certainly cause and effect, but in the human realms the immediate results of a given action can rarely be accurately predicted, nor counted on.
For instance, have you ever told someone something and got a completely different reaction than expected? Perhaps you forgot to factor in some unseen event that dramatically changed that person’s state of mind the morning before you approached them. Humans are indeed complex. Read More...
I sat in a chair. It was a rickety office chair on wheels. My eyes were closed. I held an amber liter-bottle filled with Siberian ginseng tincture in my hands. A woman stood next to me. We were in the back room of a doctor’s office. The woman, Phyllis Bala, worked the front office — filing, paperwork, that sort of thing. She was a portly woman; large, solid, and well-grounded. She had black hair, full features, and was of American Indian ancestry.
She was guiding me. She told me how to invoke the spirit of the plant. I said the prayer.
“En el nombre de diosa doy gracia al espiritu de esta planta, y tengo la fe con todo mi corazon de esta planta va curar los infermadades de la gente.”
I said it three times to set the space and open my heart. She then asked me to request the spirit show itself.
I asked for the spirit to reveal itself. She then asked me what it looked like.
Well, I don’t see pictures. And I don’t see visions. And I don’t hear voices. I am not psychic in any way. Read More...
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