Inner Surfing

My trip to the TLC (Transformational Leadership Council), a motley group of seminar leaders and various other transformative types, was magical from the beginning. I have had many psychic, astrological and other woo woo readings saying that now is the time, Kate, opportunities are going to come to you now, in all areas––like love and work... Well, love is certainly showing up everyday in its myriad forms. This opportunity was about both love and work.

The way I got to this members-only council of 49 folks meeting in Cabo San Lucas was beyond magical. I was lying in my Mosh Pit (a furry power spot in front of my fireplace) one afternoon. A client had just cancelled, and I had decided to do some spiritual sadhana, so I was relaxing with the Victoria's Secret catalog. Someone I didn't know came to the door and knocked. Long story short, she turned out to be the adorable Marci Shimoff, editor of the Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul books. Not knowing why she was there, I offered her some homemade chicken soup, which made her laugh hysterically.
"You don't know who I am, do you?" she said.
"Well, no..." I answered, wondering if she might be my fairy godmother. Turned out that she had previously interviewed me for her new book on Happiness, which will consist of stories of people who found happiness through––ahem––unconventional pathways (like being picked to the soul-bones on a meathook). The result of our meeting was that she invited me to the Cabo conference and got me in as a presenter, which was a big deal. Thanks Marci.

The moral of this and most stories in my life these days is that I am manifesting through surrender. The Victoria's Secret catalog may be an esoteric key, also.

At the 5-day Cabo Conference I gave my Zero Point Field slideshow and experiential presentation on soulwave and dynamic intelligence. The wave got itself across and has set new waves and adventures in motion: Many people have been contacting me, wanting to continue the work after just a few minutes' taste of the wave. Jack Canfield, the organizer and founder of TLC, really seemed to "get" the significance of soulwave. The folks at Centerpointe (Bill Harris' Holosynch tape business) are inviting us up to Portland to give a training in March (see schedule on www.soulwave.org).

The white-haired dude on the whale-watching boat with me, Steve and Alice (who are Taoist geniuses) is Jack Canfield. He created the Chicken Soup for the Soul series (against all odds) and a recent book, The Success Principles. I found him to be quite angelic - nothing like the alpha male one would expect from a success guru. He carries a strong, fatherly authority like a powerful man, yet he is virtually ego-less in his openness to people and new ideas (mine about the wave, for example, which he mentioned in his talk which came after mine). He radiates a humility and kindness that make him adored by everyone, although he barely seems to notice it. We sat on the plane together and discussed our strange former lives and soulwave and books.



The guy with the gourd is Fred Johnson from Florida, a new friend. He is a scorchin' drummer/musician, and also a mind-bending improviser. He sang a song at the beginning and end of each session which somehow summed up what we had just done or were about to do - kind of like the Wayne Brady of the consciousness set. (Don't know Wayne? Watch Whose Line Is It Anyway!). Fred was also really down with soulwave, and he and I are looking for some fun projects to collaborate on. Keep an eye out for him in a training sometime soon!



The goddesses in the water are me and my roommates and buds practicing our synchronized swimming moves, but apart from this very early morning exercise, which really did begin in orange light like the dawn pic at the top, we were in sessions all day and evening. Very intense, very profound. Lots of wonderful people who have become new friends and potential colleagues.

I loved it because I got to hang out with people who have been doing the kind of thing I've been doing for decades. It's like a sort of training leaders' guild. I had all kinds of conversations I have been wanting to have forever, but I only know a few people who successfully do what I do. I came away more determined than ever to keep surrendering to the miraculous unfoldment of my life's work as it is being pulled forth from the strange attractor in my future...

In other words, I was NOT inspired to come home and push! Nonetheless, abundant opportunities have emerged from this fabulous experience. A win/win. Thank you, Life.

Meanwhile life has moved on, and we will soon post pics of the very blissful new Soulwave One grads from last weekend. Our man Dave filmed the whole thing, and we are hoping to get a DVD and CDs out of it.

Most are going on to Soulwave Two at Harbin next month, February 24-March 3. I'll be there. Will you? Be there or be linear! (We're doing a one day make-up for people who want to do the Meltdown at Harbin but couldn't make the last Soulwave One.
Check with Sarah at 415-847-3529 right away to be included).

More soon. New stuff at www.soulwave.org (see testimonials).

There is a story, which may be apocryphal (a myth), that when they uncover the black box after planes crash, the last thing the pilots often say before dying is "MOMMY!"

My lovely cat, Morgana, is walking all over the keys here as I type (trying to get into a "catroom?"), but she can't see this picture of feline motherhood. Funny!

Being "under the weather" recently has brought up feelings of wanting to be held like this kitten (if you know me you know that such feelings aren't exactly deeply buried inside me). Fortunately I've had lovely people to cuddle me. But there is this feeling of being truly held that I've been looking for my whole life. The other night I was lying in front of my fire, feeling the lack of this feeling. Then I realized I was in the middle of it! I was being held right then and there! I don't mean a mental realization. It was an actual wave or more like an ocean that I suddenly accessed. It was there all along. Duh!

I know this sounds like what I've been saying for years, like most of my current realizations. I even have an article about this love that surrounds us on my website ("What's Love Got To Do With It?"). But I just got it much more deeply.

Sometimes I realize something is true, but continue to live mostly in the old conditioned reality. Can you relate? Then as I begin to shift my center of gravity into the unconditioned reality, I am amazed. I run around or call around or e-mail around - or if there's a teaching gig happening, I preach away to the students - about this amazement that something I always "knew" to be true is now clearly, actually, really true.

I have just calculated that I can realize something is true and only be at a 4.65% realization thereof. And then there is the exciting journey in which the other 95.35% seeps into me, or I into it.

Right now my experience of being ill (sorry, but there's no spiritually correct other way to say it when it's just pneumonia and antibiotics, but I basically feel it's a healing purge) is quite different from previous such experiences. The presence of The Presence is so much more tangible. I have called it motherwave and now, more often, soulwave, in my work. These words refer to a manner in which it can be reliably accessed, but there are really no words for it.

Life is my Mother. She is everywhere, nourishing and nurturing me. In fact, I had a dream that I drove past a church with this sign:



Bye for now. I'll write again when I return from Mexico, bathed in the vibes of 49 transformational leaders,

Oh yes, and if you live around Sebastopol in Northern Cal., I'm doing my intro slideshow and experiential talk on Soulwave Zero and the Zero Point Field on Tuesday (1/10). See website for details; perhaps I'll see you there?

love Katie



Mother is Everywhere

Happy New Year

I spent New Year’s Eve in extraordinary company, having a 6-hour conversation with a small group of completely divine, awake souls, only 2 of whom I had known before. Today, New Year’s Day, I’m collapsed with apparent pneumonia taking antibiotics, lightwave body and all! Been basically down-and-out and coughing since I came back a month ago from my two recent sudden trips to England to be with my aging parents.

This is giving me lots of time to meditate. But, what do I mean by “meditate”? In my twenties, as you may know, I was a sort of monk. I lived under monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for six years. Then I married someone within the spiritual group and we continued the spiritual lifestyle (minus poverty and chastity) for another six years, more or less in full-time service except that I got ill in the later years (which was probably related to the spiritual override of this lifestyle).

Part of our spiritual orders were to meditate twice, morning and evening, for at least an hour. I did it, although I would often fall asleep trying. For twelve years, I did it. And also, our teacher had certain “commandments” which we had to follow, and one of them was: “Constantly meditate and remember Holy Name.” Remember Holy Name meant to follow the inner breath. I did that, too. Day in, day out, as I traveled the world (he sent me to Spain and South America and eventually here, to the US of A) I would continually return my attention to the inner flow of my breath.

On one level, this practice caused me to pass through doorway after doorway, entering the realms of purer and purer awareness to which the breath is the doorway. The fact that the breath is a doorway to the Divine is not new news to most of you, I bet. It is taught in every spiritual path, in some form or another. If it is news to you, that’s great: this doorway is right inside you! The breath is a phenomenon that spans the spectrum from the physical dimension all the way to pure spirit (as you may know, spiritus is latin for breath). Thus breath is a doorway, an escape hatch. Try it right now. In my book (it’s coming, it’s coming) I delve into all this in detail.

But the thing is, all this practice of hours of sitting meditation and returning to the breath throughout the day left me in very bad shape, as I have often expressed. I spoke about it in the interview on the website, for example. Briefly, it caused me to do the famed “spiritual bypass,” overriding my physical and emotional bodies which eventually fought back, making me emotionally crazy and physically ill, demanding that I integrate them.

Since then, only an integrated spiritual path has made any sense to me. When I see people in the honeymoon of getting into meditation, believing the spiritual authorities that say it will take you all the way, all glamorized by the initial sense of trance-like tranquility that meditation can bring, thinking that it’s just a few years before they hit enlightenment, I sometimes want to scream: “I’ve been that way. Don’t go too far up without going all the way down as well, or you may get very disillusioned, shocked and disappointed later on.”

Now in Soulwave (formerly Motherwave) there is a lot of practice done with the breath. Wave Zero, in particular, the practice I teach that you can do all day, at any time, includes what I now call the “Inner Aha,” which is to flow your attention on the wave of the breath. But there is what I consider a critical difference in this practice: it's not about stilling all movement but getting back in synchrony with the wave, the dynamic movement of life's river through your body, and thoughts, and emotional body. Wave Zero is designed to be a practice that you literally cannot use to go out of integration, either into too much spiritual consciousness without physical/emotional integration, or too far into your mind, or too far into your body/emotions without access to the spacious ground of being.

As I said, I’m an integration nut. The dangers of non-integration are very real to me. I’ve been with teachers who brilliantly deconstruct one’s beliefs so you realize they just ain’t true, but have you sitting on hard chairs for a week, your body and nervous system getting more and more rigid. I’ve also had teachers who will have you moving and vibrating and undulating your body for a week, but who consider working with beliefs to be “just in the head.” In the last 2 years, going through a big passage myself, I’ve surrendered, at least temporarily, to many teachings, sometimes just looking for a sanctuary where there is some soulful energy. And after all of it I’m emerging very grateful to everyone who has loved and supported and taught me, and also more convinced than ever of the essential nature of integrating all parts of myself in any meditation practice I do or teach.

So, to get back to meditation, it took me 12 years to wake up to the fact that I HATED the sitting meditation. It was not a doorway to bliss for me. It was somewhat tranquilizing – a buffer of time and space between me and the world, or the busy life. I remember wondering during those years how people could possibly get up and go right into life before meditating, getting caught up in and identified with whatever illusory wave of thought or activity first crashed on the beach of their consciousness, whether it was other people or a phone call. But other than this buffering effect, my meditation was mostly a struggle with my mind. I lived all over the world in about 12 countries and 30 different ashrams during my journey with that group (this all ended more than 20 years ago btw), and I only met very few people who were actually, really, genuinely, getting off on that sitting meditation. Certain personality/nervous system structures may be designed for it. But less in the West than the East, due to our extreme bonding disorders from childhood.

When I emerged, all messed up, I started getting into other practices that were more lively, that involved breathing in a less rigid, suppressive way, and actual movement, and actual allowance of feelings and – God preserve us – the dreaded mind! For all those years I had bought the story that the mind was my enemy, and suddenly I discovered that this was nonsense. The only reason my mind was so tortured was that the energy in my body, including all the build-up and backlog from my wounded childhood, was completely stagnating, or rather smouldering like a volcano. Because I was so – what I would now call, in soulwave terms - “DRY,” with a static, frozen nervous system, mind, emotions, body, etc., that the only place all that energy could go was into my mind. As I have often said in class, it was as though the stuck energy was jacking up into my mind through the only open valve of my straight spine, and thus the more I meditated, the more crazy I became. I thought the pressure I felt just meant I should meditate more, and the more I meditated, the worse things got...

After I left the group and the practices, I started to experience incredible releases by involving more of myself in the process of meditation. Eventually, after years and years, I came back to seated meditation but in a completely different way, a “WET” way, through the doorway of the wave, so that although I might have looked as though I was just sitting still, meditating, I was actually riding, surfing the soulwave. The difference, although not externally apparent, is about as different as sitting with earphones on, listening to a regular, digital beat, versus listening directly to some incredible sounds of nature or spontaneous jazz. This is just an analogy; it’s not just about listening, but about what I am ACCESSING. Now I am accessing the moving experience of the soulwave. It’s something real, not a brand name. I could call it stillness or silence or the field or ground of being, and it is those things, yet those names can all invoke a sense of frozenness.

Since we are in bodies, which vibrate and pulse in many dimensions with the rhythm of life, I have found that the doorway to my source is to travel with and THROUGH these pulses, waves, rhythms, not to suppress or go beyond them. For some people, transcendence may be the next step. Maybe you are feeling such desperate chaos that you just want to check out, like putting a relaxing hypnosis tape on the headphones. Okay. But that is just relaxing hypnosis, not accessing your source. You may just need a trance, like a valium, to get by for a while. And maybe you need to do that for years before you will even consider "trance-ending" –– feeling what lies within you, the accumulated individual you-ness that must be fully felt in order to be dissolved and truly transcended.

There is a phrase in Spiral Dynamics (a system that describes how we evolve through levels of memes/beliefs) that sums up this integrative process: "transcend and include." Transcending without including is just jumping-over, and in my experience, you will have to go back.

So, if traditional, sitting, “top-down” meditation really turns you on, more power to you. I know many of you, and I believe you. But I also know many of you who are very relieved when I say, “Do you really find this kind of meditation boring?” The amount of disowned attention and energy that floods back into the room when students are given permission to admit this is enough to enlighten the White House! There is an unconscious, absurd spiritual belief that we should do stuff we can’t stand in order to evolve spiritually. There may be moments when this is true – a clue may be that you really don’t have a choice. But can that really be the chosen path? Because to really get back to your self, as in Self, wouldn’t you have to fall in love with It? When there are so many other objects and energies hooking your attention, your love, how are you ever going to merge with source if it’s a struggle?

For some people – maybe the majority - a more dynamic “bottom-up” form of meditation is essential, in order not to end up frustrated, feeling like a failure, feeling increased pressure or even craziness. Yet if you just jog or do some form of exercise, you may get high yet still miss the subtlety of the doorway to an awakened consciousness that includes everything. Top-down isn’t the whole story. Bottom-up isn’t the whole story.

A lot of my life purpose seems to involve the integration of the both/and/and of all this, finding multidimensional pathways that actually work. Then traveling on those pathways myself. And then, whatever else happens. (Like having a life, and perhaps teaching, if students show up).

To sum up this blog, here are my thoughts on meditation, and on spiritual practice in general:

--If you secretly hate and avoid meditation, but feel bad because you think you “should” be doing it, you are probably not doing an integrated practice that is self-evidently moving you forward.

--For many of us, the meditation process has to be more dynamic than just sitting “watching our thoughts.” Yet that witness consciousness is part of it.

--It should be integrative – meaning that it includes body, mind, emotions, breath, spirit. Otherwise whatever part you don’t include will drag you back down to integrate it.

--It should be a mystical experience that is so enjoyable that it pulls you in. Further, deeper, more and more love. Forever.

I want to add that I think the doorway to this kind of meditation is subtle and narrow. Certain teachers can probably take you through. although that hasn't happened for me. I think Wave Zero, understood deeply, can take you through. It’s taking me through.

AND THERE'S ONE MORE THING:
I've been unexpectedly and auspiciously invited to speak at and participate in the Transformational Leadership Council, a group of - yes! - transformational leaders, coordinated by Jack Canfield and Lynne Twist and others, who are holding a conference in Cabo San Lucas to support each other on the path. It's invitation-only, and there are many hot members. It's next week, and I'll be returning from that to teach Soulwave One the last weekend of January.

I am very excited. This opportunity has emerged from pure surrender and soul destiny. I've done nothing to make it happen except be on my path, mostly on a deep invisible retreat. I will report back here with the news, inner or outer. Like, what will I talk about for my designated spot? Don't know which title they picked, or when I am on. Exciting. I love it. I always used to say that the sign that you are a motherwave trainer is that you can teach the training now (whenever that now happens to be)

Back to sleeping meditation for me. Come surf the wave at www.soulwave.org

Love to all. Happy New Year.

Tadyatha -- Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha.
[Gone, gone, gone to the other shore; safely passed to that other shore.]

Check this out for New Year Giggles: http://www.icq.com/img/friendship/static/card_16961_rs.swf